OP: what are your computing needs? That would be a good place to start if you're serious.
where can i buy a powerful desktop?
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If you want to do really high end stuff (short of needing a supercomputer), you'll need a very powerful video card with a lot of compute, like this:
http://www.amazon.com/NVIDIA-Tesla-C2075-GDDR5-Workstation/dp/B005OCMZ7A
You also need to be a damn good programmer to know whether you'll need that much power, though.
At a minimum, get a core i7 3770K as your CPU. 4 cores, two threads per core for that one.
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Where to buy it: go to a local cpu hardware store. Putting the computer together yourself saves you ~$200 at best, and you need to waste a day putting it together, install the operating system, running all sorts of tests to make sure your components are okay, etc. I would recommend you just have a professional deal with it instead. If you're an AP and not a broke grad student, that amount of money should be trivial for this kind of purchase.
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Where to buy it: go to a local cpu hardware store. Putting the computer together yourself saves you ~$200 at best, and you need to waste a day putting it together, install the operating system, running all sorts of tests to make sure your components are okay, etc. I would recommend you just have a professional deal with it instead. If you're an AP and not a broke grad student, that amount of money should be trivial for this kind of purchase.
This. Comparative advantage bros
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I don't want to waste my time to save some money. My point is whether I can have a desktop for the purpose of computational work.
I do a lot of simulations with gauss and matlab. some times it takes a week.
So, I think I would go with 64bit windows and the most recent cpu and and large rams. right?
Thanks for all the suggestions.
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just buy a Dell desktop for computational work. They have some for hard core engineering that requires heavy computation. Get Dell Precision workstation. You can get top of line dual core processor, memory, etc. You can cut on what you do not need and budget how much you want to spend.
http://www.dell.com/us/highered/p/precision-desktops.aspx?c=us&cs=25&l=en&s=hied&~ck=mn
The problem of building your own computer is the time you spend on it and potential compatibility problems among the parts. My classmate just had his computer crash after building it only 1-2 years ago.
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I dont know if you nerds recommending CUDA are being serious but unless you want to take 3-4 months out your research career to learn how to program it properly then its a waste of time. Its not like having more processors, you have to basically rewrite everything from scratch to take advantage of it and unless youre planning a career as some kind of programmer then its probably not worth your time