My number two son is looking to replace his old(ish) Alienware laptop with a new gaming desktop. He is leaning toward another Alienware (although desktop this time rather than notebook). Does anyone have any recommendations that aren't in the super-ultimate-deluxe-megabucks category? His reason for going to a desktop system is for the ability to replace components as they become obsolete (primarily video cards). Some newer games will not run on the older video hardware on the noteboook.

I'll share my son just replaced his 5 year old laptop with another gamer laptop. Here's the old and the new.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0034NGZWM ( ASUS Republic of Gamers G51JX-X3 later upped to 8GB RAM, SSD )
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01578ZKPO ( ASUS ROG GL552VW-DH71 15-Inch Gaming Laptop, Discrete GPU GeForce GTX 960M 2GB VRAM, 16GB DDR4, 1TB ) and for 120 bucks we swapped out the 1TB HDD for a 512GB SSD.

Actually the old laptop could game quite well even after this many years. But he wanted to play a bleeding edge title called Metal Gear Solid 5. He says it's great now.

OK, desktop. my nod is DIY on that. How about the PC Master Race builds? They change over time so here's their link.
https://www.reddit.com/r/PCMasterRace/wiki/builds

u can build a pc (desktop) for about 500 bucks to compete with a ps4 or do even better. but if ur willing to pay the price, u can get parts for the pc like a nvidia titan gpu that will run the games at 4k. also the haswell-e intel i7 is really good. theres a model that clocks at 4.4ghz (not overclocked).
also the price to build will vary depending on where u live. theres also a slightly cheaper video card like radeon r9 series or nvidia 750ti.

@fallout4player. That's news to me. The last article I read had 3 Titans to eek out about 30 frames a second on a 4K display. Has something changed?

That said, here's the link I like for the usual 1080 game PC: https://www.reddit.com/r/PCMasterRace/wiki/builds

Thanks for the suggestion. FYI - even though the link above shows as broken and I can't click on it, if I copy the link address and paste it into my browser it takes me to the referenced page.

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