Thanks MartinC. Yes, that was my conclusion too, in line with Pantu's original suggestion. As you say, if I omit Nvidia now I can always go there later -- for the moment, fascinated by these things though I am, I can't help feeling it makes much more sense for one of my own dubious chess abilities to spend just a fraction of the GPU cost on a book on rook endgames or something like that and think of improving my actual chess knowledge!!

Thanks Cathexis. Yes, I'm in Durham, England. I'm firmly a PC not a Mac person and indeed after a tower. (The complex editing work I do can be tricky on a laptop and a smaller screen.) At the moment the option that's winning with me is the i5 version (sacrificing Nvidia) of the Dell I mentioned, but obviously that could change.

Maybe the least expensive if you have Thunderbolt 3 on your existing laptop or desktop is an external GPU.  This will set you back $300 to $500 on the enclosure and then $300 plus for a mid to high end GPU depending on what you buy.  Similar to the sentiment below, if you find  either the case or GPU used from a gamer in the process of upgrading you can save quite a bit.  Perhaps you could get the case and card for under $500 if you got lucky.

It sounds like you got a great deal from Dell. Gaming specialists PC makers sometimes provide better pricing for new machines with GPUs built in.  They sell both webdirect and via mass retailers like Amazon, Walmart and Best Buy in the US.  Some of these are IBuyPower and CyberPowerPc.  If you are pretty tech savvy, you might get slightly cheaper by doing your own build with parts bought separately . . . youtube gives you lots of ideas for this.  Unfortunately, GPUs seem to be in short supply at the moment allegedly because of Bitcoin mining demand.

One source of GPU benchmarks is PassMark.  AMD Radeon midrange GPUs sometimes offer better value as measured by PassMark vs Nvidia.  I had heard that Lc0 works best with Nvidia GPUs so I didn't look into Radeon/AMD but maybe things have changed.

Michael Ayton wrote on 02/25/21 at 17:26:49:

Refurb is like the choice between buying a new or used car. Buying new and keeping it until it dies is a fairly economical way to go. Buying used is a reasonable option if you don't have enough cash to buy new. It carries more risk but people do it all the time. It's my view buying used is better than buying new provided you know enough about computers (or cars) to be able to know the difference between a deal and a piece of rubbish. And of course know how to fix the inevitable issue with the used equipment. I like to either (a) wait until I can pay cash for new, because it's a very safe and conservative way to do it, and I have perfect choice over which one to get; or (b) opportunistically buy used from a friend, because then I have perfect information about any issues.

An anecdote from the 1970s. There was a regular police auction for lost/abandoned bicycles. Typically they would go for $10, sometimes less, but on one occasion there were two men (possibly tipped off somehow?) who got into a bidding war. I don't remember the final bid, but I remember buying a not terribly expensive new bike in the late 1970s for $250, and I remember the winning bid was more than my new bike... It was an Italian custom frame (once upon a time I knew the name, but details are lost in the mists of time) and was worth $500 or more at that time. People clapped after the final bid. One thing about a performance bicycle is the frame should fit the rider perfectly. It's unlikely to have fit both men equally well, so at least one of them must have had other options for the bicycle.

Thanks again Pantu, including for the SSD point -- noted! I think my best option is as you suggest and to give all things Leela a miss for the moment -- after all I can always get a card later on if I change my mind. And as AOC says, who knows where things will be x years down the line anyway ...

Many thanks, AOC, Pantu! It's good to know the basic advice is that any sensible choice will give me good engine performance, from SF anyway. I'm not minded to spend hundreds of extra quids on a GPU, but there do seem to be some inexpensive (Dell?) deals out there that come with Nvidia. Q: should we go so far as to say that without GPU it's not even worth running Lc0, or is that an exaggeration?

I uploaded SF13 into Nibbler (or was it BanksiaGui? -- I forget) over lunch and was surprised to see it invited me to install a net (with just one mouseclick), so I guess it does come with one!

I guess another option I have is refurbs -- I see there are currently some 'renewed' Dell PCs on Amazon for prices like GBP 230!

Pantu, are you sure you still need the GPU today? I thought the point of the latest developments in Stockfish was equivalent performance but using the CPU and not the GPU. Or perhaps it is merely comparable performance, I didn't investigate closely.

But it all changes fast. It's hard to imagine Michael Ayton's next PC will be suitable for the strongest engine of 11 years in the future.