The Alienware you posted seems good, although you could probably turn most of those specs down if you wanted to save money at the expense of only having amazing gaming performance instead of insane gaming performance.
The way I’d approach this is:
You need enough memory to never run out and no more than that. Memory speed doesn’t matter in any practical way. This is an easy choice since 16 GB is slightly too low for a lot of things and 32 GB is usually more than you need. Presumably you can open the resource monitor on your current computer and have a decent idea of how much memory you need. Don’t bother future-proofing this since memory usage seems to have plateaued for a while.
Gaming performance is going to almost entirely determined by your GPU, but the entire RTX series is so ridiculously overpowered that the 3060 Ti is good enough for most purposes, including some single-monitor 4K gaming. Any GPU that has good gaming performance will be ridiculously overpowered for displaying browser tabs on three monitors.
One additional consideration is that you should get an Nvidia graphics card since you’re likely to want to run accelerated machine learning code. A consideration for higher-end cards is that some of them have more memory, which increases the size of models you can accelerate.
Within the range of CPU options where a pre-built will have 32+ GB of memory and an RTX card, it probably doesn’t matter which one you pick. I’d just get the cheapest i7 or Ryzen that they offer since they’re all going to be overkill. I don’t recommend the Lenovo option you posted since it has a Threadripper, which is really good CPU for a use-case that you don’t have (saturating 20+ threads). You’d be better served with a similar-price CPU with better single-threaded performance. (It’s possible that loading massive spreadsheets could use a bunch of threads, but I doubt that Google Sheets actually does)
The power supply just needs to provide enough power for your CPU + graphics card + a little breathing room. Note that the RTX 3070 + i7-12700KF only use about 500 W together so a 750 W power supply is plenty.
So I think the base model I’d recommend to you is this XPS tower:
… and then turn up the memory / GPU if that doesn’t seem good enough. The Alienware you posted is similar and would be worth it if you want liquid cooling and don’t mind being forced to upgrade to at least an RTX 3070.
You might also consider getting an older desktop with an RTX card, since an older CPU and memory really wouldn’t affect the performance much.
Major brand prebuilts have a bad reputation (I’ve never bought one so I don’t know), so if you wanted something close to what you’d get by building it yourself, here’s a similar configuration from iBuyPower:
Note that this wouldn’t ship until 7⁄22 so I’m not sure if that’s even an option. You can pay $50 more to have it supposedly ship around 7⁄15.
Due to some deals they have going on, you might as well get a slightly nicer CPU than I’d bother with on the Dell, and I suspect this PC would be quieter than the Dell version.
This version cuts a few things you could upgrade if you wanted to:
Make it a little quieter by picking one of the 360mm processor cooling fan options (bigger fans don’t need to spin as fast so they’re quieter) ($133 more)
Make it a little easier to upgrade memory in the future by picking the 2-stick RAM configuration ($100 more)
Upgrade to a Corsair power supply to have a vague feeling of better reliability ($56 more)
Increase memory or pick a different video card if you want to
Oh, and I’m not really sure how to handle quietness in pre-builts, although all RTX cards should have decent settings to spin down when they’re not doing anything, and you can probably replace the case fans with quieter ones (or have a friend do it) if they bother you. Even really nice case fans are super cheap: https://www.amazon.com/quiet-BL066-SILENTWINGS-1450RPM-50-5CFM/dp/B01JMEDDYY/
The Alienware you posted seems good, although you could probably turn most of those specs down if you wanted to save money at the expense of only having amazing gaming performance instead of insane gaming performance.
The way I’d approach this is:
You need enough memory to never run out and no more than that. Memory speed doesn’t matter in any practical way. This is an easy choice since 16 GB is slightly too low for a lot of things and 32 GB is usually more than you need. Presumably you can open the resource monitor on your current computer and have a decent idea of how much memory you need. Don’t bother future-proofing this since memory usage seems to have plateaued for a while.
Gaming performance is going to almost entirely determined by your GPU, but the entire RTX series is so ridiculously overpowered that the 3060 Ti is good enough for most purposes, including some single-monitor 4K gaming. Any GPU that has good gaming performance will be ridiculously overpowered for displaying browser tabs on three monitors.
One additional consideration is that you should get an Nvidia graphics card since you’re likely to want to run accelerated machine learning code. A consideration for higher-end cards is that some of them have more memory, which increases the size of models you can accelerate.
Within the range of CPU options where a pre-built will have 32+ GB of memory and an RTX card, it probably doesn’t matter which one you pick. I’d just get the cheapest i7 or Ryzen that they offer since they’re all going to be overkill. I don’t recommend the Lenovo option you posted since it has a Threadripper, which is really good CPU for a use-case that you don’t have (saturating 20+ threads). You’d be better served with a similar-price CPU with better single-threaded performance. (It’s possible that loading massive spreadsheets could use a bunch of threads, but I doubt that Google Sheets actually does)
The power supply just needs to provide enough power for your CPU + graphics card + a little breathing room. Note that the RTX 3070 + i7-12700KF only use about 500 W together so a 750 W power supply is plenty.
So I think the base model I’d recommend to you is this XPS tower:
https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/desktop-computers/xps-desktop/spd/xps-8950-desktop/xd8950adl10h?view=configurations&configurationid=1a2e2625-a3b7-401a-8db7-c093f562219b
… and then turn up the memory / GPU if that doesn’t seem good enough. The Alienware you posted is similar and would be worth it if you want liquid cooling and don’t mind being forced to upgrade to at least an RTX 3070.
You might also consider getting an older desktop with an RTX card, since an older CPU and memory really wouldn’t affect the performance much.
Major brand prebuilts have a bad reputation (I’ve never bought one so I don’t know), so if you wanted something close to what you’d get by building it yourself, here’s a similar configuration from iBuyPower:
https://www.ibuypower.com/store/intel-z690-plus-ultra-pc-daily-deal?wid=1765335
Note that this wouldn’t ship until 7⁄22 so I’m not sure if that’s even an option. You can pay $50 more to have it supposedly ship around 7⁄15.
Due to some deals they have going on, you might as well get a slightly nicer CPU than I’d bother with on the Dell, and I suspect this PC would be quieter than the Dell version.
This version cuts a few things you could upgrade if you wanted to:
Make it a little quieter by picking one of the 360mm processor cooling fan options (bigger fans don’t need to spin as fast so they’re quieter) ($133 more)
Make it a little easier to upgrade memory in the future by picking the 2-stick RAM configuration ($100 more)
Upgrade to a Corsair power supply to have a vague feeling of better reliability ($56 more)
Increase memory or pick a different video card if you want to
Oh, and I’m not really sure how to handle quietness in pre-builts, although all RTX cards should have decent settings to spin down when they’re not doing anything, and you can probably replace the case fans with quieter ones (or have a friend do it) if they bother you. Even really nice case fans are super cheap: https://www.amazon.com/quiet-BL066-SILENTWINGS-1450RPM-50-5CFM/dp/B01JMEDDYY/
FYI you have to specifically enable multithreading for excel/libreoffice.
You’d be surprised how resource intensive displaying a webpage can be, esp if that webpage is more like 12 trading charts.
Agreed with getting high single thread performance vs the threadripper (fwiw I have a 3995wx, so I’ve tested it as a desktop)
Higher memory incase you want to run VM’s.