Black Friday deals (pre-built desktops)

[cptwhite_uk]

You can pick up Win 10 / 11 digital licenses for less than £5 online, I've never had a problem using them, after ~ 100 builds. I would be getting a pre-built without OS install if needed to save on cost.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

You can pick up Win 10 / 11 digital licenses for less than £5 online, I've never had a problem using them, after ~ 100 builds. I would be getting a pre-built without OS install if needed to save on cost.

Any chance you could tell who you use please?

[MrJim]

Any chance you could tell who you use please?

Sorry to but-in, but I've used codes from Electronics First in the past, without issues. The codes probably won't be transferrable between builds, but at £5, that's not really much of an issue:

https://www.electronicfirst.com/?query=windows

[Saracen999]

.... I would be getting a pre-built without OS install if needed to save on cost.

From what I understand of it, there's two possible issues with doing that.

First, they're technically (in legal terms) a bit iffy. Not in the sense of getting you in trouble (extremely unlikely, IMHO) but more in terms of it's not that MS couldn't do anything about it but that so far, they haven't bothered.

If so, well, they didn't bother turning off the very time-limited "free" upgrade from W7/W8 .... until they very recently did. It went on for years longer than they said it would but, eventually, they closed that route. Will they ever choose to clamp down on those licences? I have no idea why they haven't but presumaly, they haven't wanted to. If so, then that might change. Or might not.

The second reason has a caveat. The reason is that buying a bare system and installing yourself takes time, and especially takes time ensuring that all the correct drivers and/or utilities are installed. Buy a good pre-built with Windows pre-installed and it's all done for you. The caveat should be clear by now - that reason relies entirely on that "good" builder having done a good job of optimising drivers and further, keeping their image files up to date. The cynic in me says, good luck with the latter bit.

It certainly saves money going that route, but at the cost of possible hassle getting all tHat right for yourself. If the cost of buying pre-done isn't off-putting, you can save the time and hassle of doing it yourself .... and the minor risk that MS decide to clamp down.

At £5, or even £20, it's a pretty good saving. My trouble is that as I get older, the money means less and less and my laziness factor grows, annually.

HOWEVER ... and for me it's a whopper - there is one EXTREMELY good reason, however you get the licence for it, for doing the Windows build myself. If I buy a system, hardware pre-built but with no OS, then that builder can't install the collossal pile of steaming ..... excrement, that they so often do, all to try to get you to take up subscription offers. No, I don't want MS Orifice, whether in 365 form or not, and no, I don't want MacAfee or other such "security" products. No, I don't want a useless collection of MS utilities for XBox and so on. All I want from an OS is what's supposed to be in the <bleep>ing OS. Leave all the garbage out, manufacturers and Asus, with your laptops, I most emphaticaly mean you. Lovely laptop, apart from that steaming great pile of useless tosh you pre-installed. it took me ages to get rid of most of it and a couple of things (like parts of 365) seemingly CAN'T be uninstalled without bollixing up other things, like Firefox.

So, while buying a pre-installed Windows can save time sorting out driver installs, it can also waste a lot more getting rid of the uninvited guests in the OS and that, for me, is the real win.

And yes, I'm still fuming about it, Asus (and probably everybody else). It's like buying a house and finding the builders helpfully pre-installed squatters for you.

[cptwhite_uk]

I've literally never had a license key rejected. Not in 10 years of buying cheap keys.

They want you in their eco-system -they're pivotting towards a services company and frankly I don't think they even care if you use Windows 10 / 11 without activating these days, it'll work perfectly fine without even a desktop watermark most of the time ...I have to remember to check if it's licensed in the control panel half the time!

So for me, £3 to £4 spent to activate it is a no brainer, but there's no way I'd be dropping £100ish on a full license.

[cptwhite_uk]

Any chance you could tell who you use please?

I've used all of these suppliers without issue:

Windows 10 Pro:

https://www.hrkgame.com/en/games/pro...ional-standard

https://www.gamers-outlet.net/en/buy...al-cd-key-html

https://www.electronicfirst.com/gift...hoCwbIQAvD_BwE

Windows 11 Pro:

https://www.hrkgame.com/en/games/pro...ssional-retail

https://www.gamers-outlet.net/en/buy...osoft-global-1

https://www.electronicfirst.com/wind...nal-retail-key

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Sorry to but-in, but I've used codes from Electronics First in the past, without issues. The codes probably won't be transferrable between builds, but at £5, that's not really much of an issue:

https://www.electronicfirst.com/?query=windows

I've used all of these suppliers without issue:

Windows 10 Pro:

https://www.hrkgame.com/en/games/pro...ional-standard

https://www.gamers-outlet.net/en/buy...al-cd-key-html

https://www.electronicfirst.com/gift...hoCwbIQAvD_BwE

Windows 11 Pro:

https://www.hrkgame.com/en/games/pro...ssional-retail

https://www.gamers-outlet.net/en/buy...osoft-global-1

https://www.electronicfirst.com/wind...nal-retail-key

Thanks!

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Also,WRT to the dGPUs the OP is considering. I would seriously not go with an 8GB VRAM dGPU unless it was under £250. My RTX3060TI FE has been a great performer but it is starting to hit VRAM limitations,and UE5 looks like it might really like VRAM too.

VR is apparently still better on Nvidia cards AFAIK. Also if you do intend to play Starfield,even though the recent patch has improved performance a lot on Nvidia cards,AMD dGPUs run the game better. Also if you intend to mod the game later on,once the Creation Kit for Starfield is released and custom texture packs are out,8GB will be an issue. ATM,even with Fallout 4 I have to be careful what texture packs I can use at qHD with the 8GB framebuffer of the RTX3060TI.

[James#C]

Those PCs all look much the same in performance terms.

I would edge towards the 7500F based machine in case I wanted to do a mid-life upgrade as the Socket AM5 should be around for some years and DDR5 memory is becoming mainline so should be easy to upgrade.

The PC Specialist machine should feel just as quick as the Scan ones, and £100 cheaper isn't to be sniffed at. If you are into VR, then I don't know if AMD have fixed their drivers but when I bought my 3060Ti Nvidia were a clear win there.

The Cyberpower one has an outdated 11th gen i9. Paired with an older 3060 GPU which is about 15% slower than the cheaper machines, I would expect that machine to feel 15% slower when gaming.

Thank you for the feedback, seems like the DDR5 is a typo, DDR4 is listed everywhere else. so those 2 Scan systems are the same except for the motherboard + CPU (AMD A620 + Ryzen 5 7500F vs Intel H610 + i5 13400F), presumably if you were doing a mid-life upgrade you could upgrade the motherboard also. So basically there's not much other than personal choice in terms of performace?

[James#C]

Also,WRT to the dGPUs the OP is considering. I would seriously not go with an 8GB VRAM dGPU unless it was under £250. My RTX3060TI FE has been a great performer but it is starting to hit VRAM limitations,and UE5 looks like it might really like VRAM too.

VR is apparently still better on Nvidia cards AFAIK. Also if you do intend to play Starfield,even though the recent patch has improved performance a lot on Nvidia cards,AMD dGPUs run the game better. Also if you intend to mod the game later on,once the Creation Kit for Starfield is released and custom texture packs are out,8GB will be an issue. ATM,even with Fallout 4 I have to be careful what texture packs I can use at qHD with the 8GB framebuffer of the RTX3060TI.

Thanks, Understood on the GPU memory. But stepping up to 16BG pretty much doubles the cost of the card from what i can see? Not sure there will ever be modding.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Thanks, Understood on the GPU memory. But stepping up to 16BG pretty much doubles the cost of the card from what i can see? Not sure there will ever be modding.

How about one of these systems:
https://www.awd-it.co.uk/awd-it-lanc...gaming-pc.html
https://www.awd-it.co.uk/awd-it-m100...gaming-pc.html

You can upgrade to a Ryzen 7 5800X3D for another £150.

An older 8 core Ryzen 7 5700X but either an RX7800XT or RTX4070 is included. Or if you want a newer generation CPU:
https://www.awd-it.co.uk/awd-it-3000...or-gaming.html

You can also adjust the specifications on this PC too.

[Saracen999]

I've literally never had a license key rejected. Not in 10 years of buying cheap keys....

I don't doubt it. They didn't block the free upgrade route for years either, until very recently.

They could invalidate such licences any time, if they're outside the valid usage but, as I said, they don't appear to want to. We can only guess as to why. But it could change at any time. I see no sign of it coming, but they didn't signal the end of the free upgrades until they made the announcemen it was ending shortly.

...

They want you in their eco-system -they're pivotting towards a services company ....

That's how I read it too .... but we could be wrong (about them not caring, I'm pretty sure we're not wrong about the pivot). But we are guessing about why they haven't stopped it.

....

So for me, £3 to £4 spent to activate it is a no brainer, but there's no way I'd be dropping £100ish on a full license.

Again, agreed. At that sort of price, or even at higher, it's still a good punt to take. The worst that could happen is they ccamp down and then everyone will have to either find another work-around, stump up the money or stop using Windows.

My point was simply that those licences are of dubious legal validity and could get blocked. I rather doubt they will. But if they do, we have a decision to make. If I ever need another windows licence, I'd almost certainly go that route. In years past, definitely not. I wouldn't have risked suddenly finding my machine needing a re-install and re-setup when facing deadlines or time pressure for work. It was worth the licence fee to avoid the risk. Now, being retired, no such pressures so no need ro avoid risking the time, hassle or inconvenience.

[DanceswithUnix]

Thank you for the feedback, seems like the DDR5 is a typo, DDR4 is listed everywhere else. so those 2 Scan systems are the same except for the motherboard + CPU (AMD A620 + Ryzen 5 7500F vs Intel H610 + i5 13400F), presumably if you were doing a mid-life upgrade you could upgrade the motherboard also. So basically there's not much other than personal choice in terms of performace?

The 7500F can only take DDR5 ram, so I'm guessing where it says DDR4 is the typo

Motherboard upgrades are a bit of a pain, as they tend to require not only unplugging everything but also you get the triple hit of having to upgrade ram, cpu and motherboard all at the same time. Then Windows will go nuts as plug and play sees everything has changed, and then will probably demand re-activation. On a pre-built machine, motherboard replacement is a gray area for Windows OEM licencing as motherboard upgrade isn't allowed though replacement for repair is.

Thanks, Understood on the GPU memory. But stepping up to 16BG pretty much doubles the cost of the card from what i can see? Not sure there will ever be modding.

The AMD 7700XT and 7800XT are 12GB and 16GB respectively, and at around £500 add about £200 over a 4060.

Which is an interesting point, you haven't said what your existing PC spec is. If it's a desktop with an in any way recent i5, then you might be able to just bung in a Black Friday GPU upgrade and be done.

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/sapph...spr-00764.html

My point was simply that those licences are of dubious legal validity and could get blocked. I rather doubt they will. But if they do, we have a decision to make. If I ever need another windows licence, I'd almost certainly go that route. In years past, definitely not. I wouldn't have risked suddenly finding my machine needing a re-install and re-setup when facing deadlines or time pressure for work. It was worth the licence fee to avoid the risk. Now, being retired, no such pressures so no need ro avoid risking the time, hassle or inconvenience.

Sounds like Microsoft have been invalidating perfectly valid licences recently as part of the fallout of their Windows 7 digital upgrade switch off thing:

https://www.techradar.com/computing/...-11-and-10-pcs

Though with the £5 licences listed above, I won't stress that much.

[Rob_B]

The 6700XT (from the Scan build) is 12GB and the same price as your original 4060 in the build.

[Saracen999]

....

Sounds like Microsoft have been invalidating perfectly valid licences recently as part of the fallout of their Windows 7 digital upgrade switch off thing:

https://www.techradar.com/computing/...-11-and-10-pcs

Though with the £5 licences listed above, I won't stress that much.

That sounds more like cockup than conspiracy, though. But yeah, on the not stressing.