What's a good setup? Help me decide what to save up for!

[kalmarjan]

Hello all...

Right now I'm using a potato laptop Acer E1-522 to power my world domination plans. So far it hasn't come to fruition.

After watching Dave's twitch stream yesterday, I was blown away by what his setup was. Completely incredible!

So, here's the thing: I live in Canada (so that mean for some reason electronics require promises of your soul in exchange for a decent price point, or you pay through the yang...) and I am looking for a more permanent setup. A desktop.

I plan to save 1500$ for the rig, and I'm looking to maybe game with it too. I'm not adverse to building my own rig either. I'm guessing I have no choice but to go with Windows 10, and I also want to be able to stream.

I have a 40 inch TV I could use, but it's also from 2009. It does have a PC monitor connection, but that's nothing like HDMI.

What I'd eventually like is to have a main monitor like a 40 inch, and secondary monitors. Aside from that, I'm not sure what I need...

So, does anyone have any ideas?

[Nylanfs]

FG itself isn't all that resource intensive (because it was largely designed 14 years ago), so any system you can get that has been built or designed in the last 5 year will be adequate.

Alternately here's a gaming build that will do what you want.

Intel i7 3770k water cooled with a corsair closed loop system & 2x corsair SP120 fans in a push / pull configuration.
Asus Maximus V Extreme motherboard. (With over clock dongle and wifi).
EVGA 980ti SC with Backplate.
16 GB Corsair Vengeance 1600 MHz ram. (2 x 8GB sticks) board has room for more memory.
250 GB OCZ Revodrive 3 PCie SSD
Corsair AX 850 watt PSU.
Housed on a Thermaltake level 10 GT case.
Windows 10 pro with the system.

[kalmarjan]

FG itself isn't all that resource intensive (because it was largely designed 14 years ago), so any system you can get that has been built or designed in the last 5 year will be adequate.

Alternately here's a gaming build that will do what you want.

Intel i7 3770k water cooled with a corsair closed loop system & 2x corsair SP120 fans in a push / pull configuration.
Asus Maximus V Extreme motherboard. (With over clock dongle and wifi).
EVGA 980ti SC with Backplate.
16 GB Corsair Vengeance 1600 MHz ram. (2 x 8GB sticks) board has room for more memory.
250 GB OCZ Revodrive 3 PCie SSD
Corsair AX 850 watt PSU.
Housed on a Thermaltake level 10 GT case.
Windows 10 pro with the system.

Looks pretty sweet. I shall have a look at Newegg.ca to see what kind of cost I'm looking at.

[LordEntrails]

One thing to note, a 40" TV is not the same thing as a 40" monitor. It doesn't have the same resolution (a HDTV is what, 1280x720? whereas a monitor is at least 1920x1080?).

[Trenloe]

The main things you'll want are:

64-bit Windows operating system with 8GB of RAM. FG might take up to just short of 4GB of RAM if stretched, so 8GB total should give you enough for the OS and a couple of other apps without having to swap memory to disk.
Two full HD (1080p) widescreen monitors. I use two Dell 24 inch monitors that have a little more pixels in the height (1200 as opposed to 1080 of full HD) - that extra actually makes a difference for me. Some examples of these 1920x1200 monitors here: https://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&page=1&rh=n%3A1292115011%2Cp_n_feature_keywords_two_brows e-bin%3A6570748011 The monitors will probably be the biggest cost of your solution.
A half decent 3D graphics card - FG uses DirectX 9 (very old) for the 3D dice. Any half decent 3D graphics card from the last 5 years will do fine.
Wired LAN connection. Most (all?) PCs should have this. Even if you get wireless on the PC as well, I'd recommend running FG (especially as the GM) on a wired network connection if at all possible.

[kalmarjan]

One thing to note, a 40" TV is not the same thing as a 40" monitor. It doesn't have the same resolution (a HDTV is what, 1280x720? whereas a monitor is at least 1920x1080?).

Yeah pretty sure the resolution on the TV is 1920x1080, and it can double as a monitor (it even has the PC VGA input on the back, and a mode where you can switch it to PC resolution.)

[damned]

HD is pretty much anything over 1024px in the horizontal direction. For TVs HD usually refers to 1366x768 which is also the most common (lower cost) laptop screen size or 720p which is 1280 x 720. Full HD is 1080p or 1920x1080. TVs come in a smaller selection of sizes than laptop screens do so terms are sometime a little more broadly used....

[thedougalbug]

If I may chime in on the TV vs Monitor conversation...

You'll want HD monitors for sure, a TV will do silly things with your aspect ratios and resolution, and a monitor (depending of course which one you buy) will generally fare better especially when having a dual screen setup,

Hope this helps!