Thetownend.com

So, looking for a gaming PC for my eldest. He plays a few Steam games on our current (crap) PC, and CoD, FIFA, Skyrim on his Xbox. It's his birthday coming up and we want to get him a decent-ish gaming PC. What do I need to be looking at in terms of spec/costs etc, am I better going pre-built or custom, who's good to buy from, what are the bits I really can't afford to skimp on vs where can I cut some corners (e.g. I assume a decent CPU/gfx card are more important than branded memory for example) ? I appreciate most of the answers are all going to be "Well, it depends what you can afford" but just looking for some parameters to play with really and probably some recommendations for decent system builders or off the shelf.

It is a bit of a 'how long is a piece of string' question without a budget.

I spent 550 quid (maybe 700 quid in the UK) on mine 3 years ago and asides from a recent kurfuffle which I'm sure you're aware of, it's been as good as gold and I'm a keen gamer. I can still play games on full whack. I did buy mine with future upgrades in mind and I've not had the need to make one yet.

As a gamer I would advise that expensive keyboards and headphones/speakers make little to no difference. Although spending a little more on a mouse with dpi setting can be handy.

That might help you a bit with budget (or not), JJ is the man when it comes to specs.

Do you already have a monitor? What resolution?

Yeah sorry, part of the point of the thread is to get an idea of what sort of ballpark I need to be looking at tbh.

That's the kind of range I'd assumed tbh, roughly 5-700 quid. Although clearly I'd be happy to be told I don't need to spend that much :)

It does, cheers!

Nope, well not one that's not in use. So would be buying one for this, again open to advice on that. Insofar as I'd had any thoughts on it, I'd assumed I'd be looking at something around 24" 1920x1080. Again though, happy to be advised on this. The monitor may be an area where I have to make compromises, on overall size rather than resolution

5-700 quid on a birthday present for your son, you will be telling us you have got a nanny next.... 😉 ;-)

Is it cheaper/easier to buy one that's pre built or custom? I know absolutely nothing about pc's so thinking about pre built but have no idea what's any good

For anyone thinking about going for custom built, then these are very good.

https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/

I always build PC's to a budget, you say how much you can afford and I build the best to that price point, you can build medium gaming PC tower alone for £350 but I would normally suggest £650 to £700 to be future proof.

If you need to chat over anything Paul PM me on here or FB any time.

tbf, I have told him he'll have to wait for the golden unicorn statue :)

I just know from building my own PCs for my own use/work that sometimes it can be wasted economy to try to save too much money upfront - if you know you're planning on upgrading to XYZ CPU, you're going to need a motherboard that will take it. So don't buy the "will do for now" CPU/mobo if you're going to need to replace both if/when you upgrade. Oh and then also find your memory doesn't fit the new mobo either etc etc. I'd rather spend money up front to get something half decent and relatively future proof than spend the next two years constantly ripping the thing apart to get it to where I want it to be and ending up spending twice as much.

There will also probably be one of those "This is for birthday and Christmas" provisos around it.

I looked at those and that was what drove my price range estimate up! I concluded that I was perhaps being a little unrealistic in my initial range but still gobsmacked how much some of them come out at.

I ended up feeling a bit like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxQqWSnsHoA

Cheers mate, will take you up on that

You can get a basic gaming rig for about £450.

PSU:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B009RMP44O/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o07_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

RAM: (buy 2 of these if you're feeling flush

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00J8E9316/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o08_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

MB:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00D7SDTCI/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Solid State Drive: (you will need another form of storage as this is quite small. Will do for the OS and a few games)

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00E3W19MO/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

CPU:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B009O7YUF6/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Then all you need is a cheap case and a GPU. The GTX950 is good value at about £120

Cheers jayo. Do I really need the SSD out of the box? Or would a standard HD do for now? Or a hybrid? Just the SSD is taking up nigh on 200 quid in that lot, seems a lot (and yes I would like low calorie salad cream, thanks)

Yes get an SSD not a £200 one but go for a 250gb or 512gb they make a massive difference, also go for the best graphics card you can afford in the budget.

http://www.ebuyer.com/581256-kingston-ssdnow-v300-480gb-sata3-2-5inch-ssd-sv300s37a-480g

Thats a cheaper option and almost as good for the cost of £95.

Or go for a 240gb at just £50 with a HDD for music storage etc.

http://www.ebuyer.com/447256-kingston-240gb-v300-ssdnow-2-5inch-ssd-sv300s37a-240g

An ordinary hard drive is the bottleneck in performance these days. An SSD makes every much quicker.

But go with JJs cheaper suggestions

Another vote for SSD.

I run with a 128Gb boot drive and there's plenty of space for my Steam games.

Data like photos and films gets stored on an HDD and NAS.

cheers fellas, really appreciate all the help/advice on this. Starting to get a better picture of what I need now. Also found a couple of sites that claim to give an idea of what kind of kit will be needed for the new CoD game this year, which seems a reasonable benchmark