I was playing on a pre-built iBuyPower from Best Buy and it was working totally fine. But just the other day, I powered it on and there’s nothing displayed on the monitor. I checked the HDMI cable and the monitor, and both work with other computers, so the problem is the iBuyPower itself. I have no idea what’s wrong with it – it just won’t recognize anything connected to the HDMI port.
No one at Best Buy Geek Squad could help. They tried connecting other monitors and other cables, but it won’t show a display. Anyway, I have to buy a new PC now. I don’t know much about computers and don’t have the time/skill to learn how to make one.
Can anyone recommend a pre-built PC that can handle Shadowlands? I hear it will be more demanding than WoW has ever been. Ideally under $900.
It is:
iBUYPOWER - Intel Core i7-9700F - 16GB Memory - NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER - 1TB HDD + 480GB SSD.
The folks at Geek Squad could not figure it out and said they’d have to send it back to the manufacturer, who is very hard to get a hold of on the phone. So now I have around $900 of credit at the store to use to buy the computer. I suppose if someone figured out the problem I could tell them at the store, but they seemed to think the video card somehow just failed one day. Not sure how that is possible!
Right. This happened just today, so I think if someone solved the problem I could go back to them and just get the old one back, which they have in the back room there.
I’m doing research online right now. I suspect the only possible answer to what happened is that somehow a pin got disconnected somewhere in the CPU when I rearranged furniture in the room where it was. Nothing else has changed – it’s always worked just fine. (I don’t have a good idea of what it means to have a pin disconnected, but I can’t fathom what else could have happened between one day when I boot up the computer and everything is fine; and the next day when it seems to run – the power is on, lights blinking, fans whirring – but no display.
But anyway, yes we’re looking at Bestbuy credit, for something that (a) can handle Shadowlands and (b) is not above $900 because with the tax added that will be really up against my budget.
It’s store credit for a refund - the $949 build is a cyberpowerpc sold by best buy and has a Ryzen 5 3600, 16gb ram, and a 5600XT which is faster than an RTX 2060.
Thank you, I can look into that. One option I am considering is wondering if builds like that will go on sale around the same time Shadowlands comes out?
I can hold off on WoW (I have an old laptop for my other computer needs) for another month or so until SL is released, and maybe prices for roughly the same computer builds will be slightly cheaper then? Or do gaming builds of this kind not really go on sale for holiday discounts, and etc?
Hard to say, best buy may have sales but they generally are near black friday/Xmas, not really related to new tech. Also they may not get new tech immediately like the other outlets. I have seen decent gaming pcs on relatively good sales for the holidays, but theres no way to know, especially with this year’s circumstances with covid
So you may be looking at waiting for a few months after SL launches before you get a sale system that isn’t terrible.
It sounds like the video card went bad to me. I’m surprised they didn’t swap a different one in real quick to test it out. Replacing your video card would be a lot cheaper for them than replacing the whole computer.
That is suspicious. I was especially dissatisfied with iBuyPower’s customer service. Half the time their listed number gives a busy signal (you can’t even leave a message, let alone stay on hold) and the other half you’re on hold for 30 min just to get to a machine. And they have not answered emails I sent them literally weeks ago.
If I had the time and more courage, I’d just learn to build this thing myself! For now I might look into normal, non-gaming desktop options too, on the theory that a decent one can also handle WoW and even the SL expansion.
It’s easier to just send it back then fix it especially when you have 15 PCs to fix with a “virus” from their users clicking on every browser add on extension.
Yeah, I was surprised at how non-chalant the Geek Squad folks were. They just tried hooking in a bunch of different cables and shrugged their shoulders when it didn’t work. I don’t even know if they really opened up and explored the inside of the machine that much. I still suspect the only thing that happened was a pin came loose and had to be snapped back into place somewhere inside the machine.
I like this idea of buying a regular desktop and upgrading it. To be clear, the item I’d need to upgrade would be the graphics card, which sounds simple enough. But, for Shadowlands, would I also need to upgrade memory, storage, cooling, and/or CPU/motherboard? Let’s say the base desktop is something in the range of $600, so that I don’t go over my $900 budget.
The nice thing about getting a regular PC is you have a working PC out of the gate. You just add a GPU that gets all it’s power from the Mobo and you have an instant gaming PC at medium settings for most people. You then can make upgrades at your convenience like a SSD, PSU, RAM, better video card. The problem is you are basically replacing the entire PC (and in some cases that is exactly what the user does) so in the long run it’s also the most expensive route. A lot of people were doing this around 2005-2007 when both AMD and Intel had relatively affordable CPUs, RAM was cheap, video cards were more affordable, and windows xp was easy to run.