So I've been lurking on http://www.reddit.com/r/SuggestALaptop/ for a while now, because I really want to replace my own 7+ yo college laptop (and it was a hand me down, so its even older).

The biggest lesson from there is to focus not on specs but what your usage requirements are. Specifically, how mobile do you need this to be? You never mention this explicitly in your post, so I'll ask it here. Why not a desktop? If you are very concerned about processor and graphics, you already know that those are somewhat crippled on mobile. If you have a tech savvy friend, and can drive to a micro center, you can build your own AAA gaming desktop from scratch even on a tight budget.

If it has to be a laptop, do you expect to carry it around with you everywhere, on the go? Or is it going to remain in one place most of the time? If it's the former, the thinkpad X series is very nice, you can even have a separate docking cradle peripheral you can leave at home. If it's the latter, thinkpad T series is a solid choice - that was my college laptop that lasted a long time. It was hell carrying it all over campus though, but somehow it survived.

I'm supposed to be moving. :) However, it is the easiest move ever - next door. Not to the next apartment complex, but actually the apartment next door. So nice…

To sum up the thoughts I have regarding many of your posts so far: A major consideration is ease. I am, in my heart, lazy. Except I work 40 hours a week minimum, with lots of busy times leading to lots of overtime at an accounting firm. My main hobby is extremely time consuming - mountain climbing. It's really "peakbagging" and I tend to travel all over the western US most weekends during the summer camping and climbing.

So I don't think I even want to learn about some of this stuff. Fascinating as it may be. Can I buy something off the shelf, upgrade the GPU, and call it a day? If I can avoid learning about overclocking and running dual graphics cards and premium cooling systems and cases, that would be ideal. As long as I could run CP2077 - whatever specs it may require - I'll be a pretty happy guy.

*The only reason I listed that 745 was because it was the offered upgrade option from the 720. I saw the 4gb and thought it might be decent. Once everything is said and done, I will go for the 760 for sure, or the 770 if I can. No further need to sell me on this. :) I have spent some time in here, for my basic education. Not to the end, but in a ways. Perfect, Licurg, thanks. The computer that I have been talking about included the monitor and came in under US$1400. I have more than a little bit of wiggle room above $1500 and could come close to hitting $2k if it came down to sacrificing playing experience in a majorly noticeable way.

If I wind up going with a pre-built Dell or similar - and I'm open to other things - should their monitor be skipped? Buying a super-nice 27" on its own seems like it could take a huge chunk out of the budget. I don't need top of the line. In fact, I'm such a not-a/v kind of guy, I probably wouldn't even notice a difference between great and just fine. But there are probably ways to make big mistakes in this arena.

Very helpful post. (Along with all the others!)

I wasn't prepared for a Windows 7 dissenter. :) The only thing I will *need* this machine for is gaming. I'm not a computer power-user by any stretch of the imagination. No Adobe CS stuff or anything like that. A lot of people have mentioned compatibility issues inside the GOG catalog, of which I own much both old and new.

The Dell motherboard comment makes me curious as well...

From reading parts of Licurg's post, seems like a 120gb SSD for the OS is the way to go and something that is definitely noticeable. I will certainly consider this.

I don't currently have a monitor. The old CRT from the desktop I last used in 2008 is gone. That 27" on top of the Dell machine seemed affordable, so I hadn't been looking at alternate sources. I'm pretty sure a 27 single monitor will suit my purposes.

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OK, I have to put this aside for a bit. I'll be back later. Continue the move - plus I don't have internet set up next door yet and need to start downloading my Insomnia haul before I lock the doors on this place tomorrow night. :) Thanks to everyone!

I have also recently bought a new PC for myself and as this was the first time I have actually participated in the decision which PC to buy I can somewhat understand you position. I also bought a pre-made PC but asked for an GPU upgrade.

I found that the site www.tomshardware.com helped me a lot while trying to determine what I need and what I don't need in my PC. Mostly I visited it for these two lists:

Gaming CPU Hierarchy Chart (groups CPUs with similar overall gaming performance levels into tiers)
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-cpu-review-overclock,3106-5.html

Graphics Card Performance Hierarchy Chart (groups graphics cards with similar overall performance levels into tiers)
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-graphics-card-review,3107-7.html

The comparison is not only written in an easy to understand way but there are also other texts that explain what are currently the best gaming CPUs/GPUs for your money. You can find links to these texts just bellow the titles in a form of a list.

Also I have found that there are a lot of people asking "is this a good gaming pc" or "which graphic card is better" or something similar on their forums.

As you will see on those charts you don't need an i7 to run games on maximum, an i5 is enough. Of course if you can get everything else good enough and also have i7 it won't hurt either but it isn't necessary.

That graphic card I couldn't find anywhere, Google constantly gives the card for laptops 745M. By it's number I would assume the equivalent card NVIDIA card would be GeForce GTX 650 (maybe even 650 Ti), and based on your wishes you will need something stronger more in line with GTX 760. On the charts I have given you above, look for graphic cards close to this card or in the same tier. You don't need 4 GB of graphic card memory, 2 GB will be enough.

As for RAM , yes, I do believe 12 GB will hold for a while.

If you are going to be playing games predominately from GOG I would also suggest you go for Windows 8 as I was under the impression that all their games are compatible with it (somebody correct me if I am wrong).
I have heard that Windows 8 is better optimised then his predecessors and any new features (metro, etc) you don't like can be very easily bypassed with little tinkering (basic, nice tutorials for beginners on the web) or free programs made to make the situation even simpler (something like Classic Shell, etc).

Edit: I'm in.

Edit 2: This seems like a good offer: https://www.digitalstormonline.com/configurator.asp?id=927501

Intel Core i5 4570 3.20 GHz (Quad Core)
8GB DDR3 1600MHz Digital Storm Certified Performance Series
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770 2GB
120 GB SSD & 1 TB normal
Windows 8.1

Price: $1,259

If you also want a monitor, scroll down to ACCESSORIES and choose one the offered monitors (Display category) . There is a 27'' monitor for $299 (all together $1,558) but I would suggest Asus 24'' 248 Series (the second in the list) because of the better response time and just generally better specifications. That monitor costs $229 so it all together costs $1,488.

Edit 3: That store also has some good reviews on the web.

In the maze that is the PC power supply market, OCZ owns PC Power and Cooling, and Silencer models have been built at various times by Seasonic, Super Flower, Sparkle Power (actually FSP), and Sirtec. All are reputable, and most are excellent.

Buy the Mac and use Bootcamp.

This a totally serious answer.

Cheers.

Here you go, then. That's right at two grand and is an excellent setup for gaming. You have watercooling, mirrored hard drives for speed and durability (someone's going to cry about how it's magnetic - screw 'em. Mirrored magnetics are fast enough that you'd only see the difference on system boot, which shouldn't matter at all), an efficient 750W power supply (enough power for everything in your system plus one more video card if you decide to go SLI), GTX 770 4GB graphics, blu-ray player and a second optical drive so you can put the wear and tear on the cheap one, a good sound card (which actually makes a difference if you have good speakers), the 27" monitor you said you'd require, and a new core i5 to crunch all your numbers. This is a good, solid system. It's probably not the best out there, but I'm also lazy and only built you one as an example.

As an aside - a good graphics card like the 770 will *easily* handle 4k resolution when the prices drop a little and you upgrade, so you won't have to worry about buying a new video card as well when you get the prettier display.

This is my advice too. Macs can run Windows. You only need to partition your mac hard drive, and use part of it to run Windows. That way you can keep your Mac..

In terms of processor an i5 will give better value for money, especially if you overclock it. If you do decide to overclock then get a better heatsink, otherwise the default is good enough. RAM - 8 gigs is probably enough (I currently use 4), although higher RAM is becoming more common. Graphics - avoid anything that does not use GDDR5 RAM, Tom's Hardware does a monthly graphics card recommendation article you may want to check out. Be sure to include a good quality SSD and power supply too.

GOG games that are compatible with Windows 7 will probably have been made compatible with Windows 8 too. While I prefer Windows 7, once you tell 8 to boot to the desktop and install a third-party start menu it is not that different to what we are used to.

The Xbox 360 gamepad is the standard controller for PCs, I have a Logitech F510, which I find a little small for my (large) hands, and to be honest it has not seen much use, I just prefer mouse and keyboard. Speaking of mice, I use and recommend the Logitech G700s, it really has enhanced my gaming experience.

Another vote for keeping it mac. Well I was going to suggest putting together a hackintosh, which has become very easy, and then you get the best of both worlds. Cheaper price than off-the-shelf Apple, better specs, and a dual-boot machine.

But then you mentioned not building one, and in that case I suppose this isn't helpful, but consider it... you will find it a bit of a shock moving to Windows after using macs for so long. Heck there's got to be sites selling pre-built hackintoshes. Give it a thought! It's my next computer.

E: Oh in for The Last Express I suppose!

Unfortunately, I couldn't find good ghosting examples on Youtube to show you.
If you like FPS, I think that 5ms latency or less is mandatory.
I'm not expert, however, and I only tried Samsung.

I made a couple of minor changes to the giveaway, hopefully for the slightly better. See Edit 2 in OP.

It surprises me to see so many "keep a mac" posts. :) To tell the truth, I'm still overwhelming likely to go with a PC. One person mentioned Boot Camp. Are there advantages - related to gaming - over Parallels? As far as building a hackintosh - probably beyond the scope of my desires for this project.

While I use a Mac at home (a big fan of the OS experience), I do use a PC at work so I have recent experience on Windows. (Typing this on Win 7 right now.)

Above and beyond the call of duty, OneFiercePuppy. :)

Have other people here used http://www.cyberpowerpc.com/? I assume they are reputable. Do they test the machines they build? For instance, I saw in some post, probably in the Licurg topic, about someone worrying if enough thermal paste was applied. Something like that could be a big deal if the builder doesn’t also test.

Can I ask about your hard drive set up in the machine you built for me? I’m totally uneducated, but have never heard anything good about RAID drives. Is there an advantage to this over running the OS from a SSD, working alongside a 2TB 7200rpm drive? And if the advantage is modest, can I ignore your advice? :)

Edit: typo

GPU virtualization is the big problem with virtual machine environments like Parallels, when you compare them against dual-boot environments like BootCamp.

Games that are demanding of the GPU don't like talking to the GPU through a virtualization layer. Even one that is supposedly direct-to-silicon, like Parallels Extreme: it isn't direct enough, no matter how much it's claimed to be. It slows them down, hard, and some game features just won't work properly.

Parallels, VirtualBox, or VMware are great when what you need is a secondary Windows desktop to run ordinary applications. For gaming, they suck hind teat. If you want Windows games on a Mac, BootCamp is the way to go.

As for SSD, I like running Unix-like OS (Linux, any BSD, Mac OS) from SSD. They're well behaved in their use of scratch space. Windows is NOT. Windows scribbles all over its system disk and wastes a big chunk of it for pagefile. It's expensive, and the difference in performance is not such as I would pay SSD prices for it.

RAID NEEDS RAID-CAPABLE DRIVES! Consumer drives, even good ones like WD Black, do not have the firmware needed for stable RAID operation. You will eventually lose a drive because the firmware didn't respond when the RAID controller needed it to. If you are RAID 0, you lose the whole volume; if you are RAID 1, you have to stop and rebuild it.

(The only difference between WD Black and WD Enterprise drives is the firmware and the warranty. Mechanically, they're the same. In performance and reliability, they're the same. But the Black will eventually screw up in a RAID.)

Let's try to keep it short and, hopefully, simple

An SSD has the advantage of speed. SDD have no mechanical part, thus do not suffer from latency issues. But they remain expensive.

A raid configuration allows you to improve your transfer rate (RAID 0), to improve redundancy (RAID1) or to maximise volume (RAID5). RAID 0 will be slower than SSDs... but will offer a much better $/GB ratio.

To put some flesh on the principles : A Raid 0 will provide you 15ms access times and 180 M/S transfer rates, an SSD 4ms & 250 M/S. But the SSD will only affect what is stored on it, usually your OS and some key programmes, while the RAID 0, with its far larger size, will benefit a much larger part, if not the whole setup

My config : SSD + 2x 1TB HDD (non raid) + network storage in RAID 1 (4TB)

Of course you can ignore my advice. It's just advice, and I'm a network nerd, not a desktop support nerd, so I get hardware stuff wrong all the time.

Yeah, you have no idea if I'm a shill for cyberpower. They're not terribly well known, but here are a couple links to other people (responding to me :( this isn't helping my case) who say they've had good experiences from them. They're not top of the line, and I'll never say they are, but I've bought five computers now from them and not had a problem yet (I don't consider normal wear and tear "a problem" - I have replaced fans, upgraded hard drives and RAM, and swapped out optical drives. Normal stuff.)

@cjrgreen: We didn’t really work in the Windows or gaming environments at all at the Mac repair shop, but my experiences there flavored how I had been approaching this. For instance:

We often advised people to wait to upgrade their Macs if there was a release due in the next few months. However the Mac upgrades usually included improvements across several different areas. For a CPU only, and I get the issues you have with the current release, I might not wait. But then again… Waffling so hard on so many issues discussed by so many posters here. :)

We often advised people to run Parallels. But we also weren’t dealing with gamers. Makes a lot of sense...

My understanding of RAID without further research is limited to a customer losing EVERYTHING on all her connected drives with no hopes of clean-room professional recovery – because of the RAID. Of course I back everything up on multiple externals, but that was just harsh.

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OK, off for an evening of no internet. I might just like this a lot! Now we’ll see if I can continue training for an attempt on Mt. Rainier in a month and a half or if I blow that off and try to clear a P&C game out of my massive backlog. Cheers all!