Hey there, long time no speak.

We're looking into buying a gaming PC, nothing crazy, budget >$1000 before tax (not including monitor or OS). Unfortunately, I've been out of gaming for about a year now, and PC gaming for about 8 years.... basically, I know absolutely nothing about what's good, what's a ripoff, etc.

We're basically looking for a custom-built PC, we don't want to assemble it ourselves, and we are mostly interested in playing games on it like The Sims, Cities Skylines, Planet Coaster, and probably that new Jurassic World game that is coming out soon.

We tried looking at iBUYPOWER, but some of the hardware didn't seem to rate well on userbenchmark. Honestly, I'm quite lost.

Last time I bought a GPU, it was an nVidia 8800gt, and it the shit.

Wait a week or two for intel's next gen cpu to come out and then think about buying something.

Usually the go to build would be either a Ryzen 1600 or next gen intel i5 8600k + 1070 should be less than $1000 usd I believe. If you want something cheaper, keep the cpus the same but go with a 1060.

Although I think the gpus are still over priced from the mining craze so... You aren't gonna get a good deal unless you look hard for it.

Edit. Sorry, intel's next gen cpus are launching in october apperently, nvm about a week to two weeks. Still, well worth the wait cause the i5 will be 6 cores instead of 4 with the current gen.

It's usually a lot cheaper to pick the parts yourself and then let it be assembled for you. There are some PC builder shops that do this. The last time I did this the parts were normal market price and the additional assembly cost 10€. I would advise not to buy prebuilt unless you don't care a lot about price/performance and just want an easy package.

Considering the games you want to play it's probably not necessary to look at price/performance too much. Do you have a shop you would like to buy from?

A GTX 1060 6GB or an RX 580 8GB exceed the recommended specs of the games you've listed, so that's the min. you should look for on a PC if you want it to last a few years.

As for the CPU, it depends on what else are you going to do with it, but a fast quad core from Intel (I'd point to an i5-6500/7500 as the least you should get) will be enough. Ryzen is a good alternative, but only if you're going to overclock or you find a store that sells PCs with overclocked parts. If you find one, an R5 1600X should be the sweet spot.

Beyond that, the absolute minimum of RAM you need is 8GB, but you should really try to get 16GB.

You shouldn't have major problems finding a PC with all that for less than $1,000. Heck, if I can find a PC with all that plus a 120GB SSD here in Spain for less than 1,000 € WITH taxes, you should be able to find it for a lot less.

Just post your findings and we will choose the best for you.

This is a bad time to buy a video card. The Geforce 1060s that were 200 euro a few months ago, now are 300 euro.

Personally i would pick ryzen and anything Nvidia.
Wanted a AMD fury once, they went quickly.

for 1000$ you can still get a pretty sick PC:

Decide on a CPU:

1) (cpu) Ryzen 1500x  (4 cores, 8 threads, 3.5ghz w/ 3.7ghz boost @ 65watt tpd) ~180$

^best bang for buck cpu atm, like getting a i5 7600k, but cheaper, more threads and lower tpd.

2) (MB) MSI B350M Gaming PRO AM4 ~69$

3) (ram) CORSAIR Vengeance LPX 16GB (2 x 8GB) 288-Pin DDR4 SDRAM DDR4 3200 ~160$

4) (Hdd) Western Digital WD Green WD20EARX 2TB 64MB Cache 7200rpm SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" ~75$

5) (bluray drive) any thats cheap ~30$

6) (psu) any up to you how much you want to spend (I like the Fully Modular ones) ~60$  (for a good one)

7 (case) any up to you design wise ~40-50$.

= ~ 604$ 

Now you add in a GPU:

Id recommend a 1060, its abit slower than a RX580, but not much, and its usually a good bit cheaper.

Dont get the 3GB versions, splurge for a 6GB one.

that should put you just abit over 880$

Ryzen 1500x + GTX1060 + 16GB DDR4 3200 & 7200 RPM sata 6 drive,

should be able to play any current game out there in 1080-1440p.

Yeah for the 1000$ range on PC, the sweet spot is something like a Ryzen 1500x + GTX1060.

I completely agree with Random Matt.

We can happily wait a couple more months, we've been umming and erring about this for a while now. Although, if we do wait until October, will we be then be recommended to wait a bit more time for something else on the horizon?

I think this is what the company in my post, iBUYPOWER does, it's not a local store, but an online one. This was how I used to get all my computers in the past... but that was in the UK, and almost a decade ago, so I have no idea about which companies are trustworthy or whatnot now.

Honestly, the only reason I looked at iBUYPOWER, was because they were recommended by Best Buy.

Is this because of the mining thing that Cap't Yuri was talking about, or some kind of FX thing?

This was part of my question. Does anybody have any recommendations of companies that I can buy custom built PCs from (I should have probably mentioned, in the USA).

Don't get a Bluray drive, put the $30 towards a Ryzen R5 1600 instead.
Two extra cores over the 1500x and at no extra total system cost.

All of PC gaming is digital anyway.