nik52wrx

My son is wanting a gaming pc (desktop) for Christmas of which I know nothing about.
Can anybody recommend a machine or minimum spec I should be looking at.
I've googled and looked at alienware (dell) which appear ok or should I be looking at pc world?

Any advice welcome.

Thanks

Nik

Jamie

You can get a decent pc for £200 with all the spec for games.

Jamie

ACER Aspire X1438 Desktop PC google and you will get that very cheap.

Richy P1984

overclockers may be somewhere you want to have a look, you can get a feel for what you might want. Stay away from any pc world budget platforms - so many people have complaints about them, and the service provided by pc world in order to 'fix' problems.

If you already have a monitor / screen, speakers, keyboard and mouse, all you need is the base unit. It's much cheaper to buy that on its own.

I got my first 'build your own' computer from Mesh and it suited me fine.

magictree

iTrader: (1)

does he have a particular game that he plays all the time or is it a general gaming pc for all types of games?

if its online games he plays like 'world of warcraft' or similar then you should probably look for a pc with plenty of 'ram' (random access memory) maybe 6GB (gigabite) a decent sized harddrive probably 500 GB to 1TB (terabite) as those games take up lots of space and need good amounts of ram to run smoothly.

if its just a general gaming pc then the least you should be looking for is 4GB ram with a 500GB harddrive. Il try not to bore you with too much computer speak but other things like a decent graphics card (radeon brands are good for cheap money) and a half decent proccessor no less the say an intel pentium 5.

I had one built this year, cost me £850 but that was for a top end pc. you could get a good general gaming pc for probably £250 -£400. suprisingly getting one built costs a lot less then the ones from pc world, they rip you off majorly.

I used pc specialist online to build mine and their service was incredible to be honest, they even text me to let me know it was on the way.

EddScott

A budget would help. Can you build the machine or are you after off the shelf?

With most games these days being for consoles first the need for bleeding edge PC components is not what it was - the days of buying that £500 graphics card just to move the shader one click forward are mostly over, mostly.

I would say £200 isn't going to cut it. Last machine I built was with the below spec

Xenon AMD Bulldozer FX-4 4100 3.60GHz Bundle - Quad Core (CPU, Motherboard and 4GB RAM)
Iiyama ProLite E2407HDS 24" Widescreen LCD Monitor - Black
Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 500GB SATA 6Gb/s 16MB Cache - OEM (ST500DM002)
Corsair Builder Series CX 500W V2 '80 Plus' Power Supply (CMPSU-500CXUKV2)
Fractal Design Core 1000 Midi Tower Case - Black
Microsoft Wireless Desktop 800 (2LF-00021)
LG GH24NS90 24x DVD±RW SATA ReWriter (Black) - OEM

That lot was £510 from overclockers. You could always add a graphics card but I wouldn't pay more than £150 for one. You got software to add to that too.

Midlife......

iTrader: (2)

Bought one for the lad a few months ago, could have had it built but went for a "Chillblast".....Seems to do the job

http://www.chillblast.com/

Shaun

LSherratt

iTrader: (1)

iMac

DYK

nik52wrx

Not knowing what a decent pc for gaming would cost i had a figure of up to £1500 in mind, obviously if it can be done cheaper than that then great.
Games wise he plays all the current big titles, call of duty etc.
He already has a big monitor and an all singing all dancing keyboard so its just the base unit he needs.

I've not heard of overclockers, do they do off the shelf pc's or just custom built?
Are they internet only, if so are they reliable?

Thanks.

Nik.

ricknight16

Get one custom built. You could make it better spec than an alienware for half the price. Amazon is a good place to go for the parts.

Midlife......

iTrader: (2)

Got the impression the Chillblast base unit was about £650....

As an aside our local PC shop runs a "course" for building gaming PC's...the upside is that it's cheaper than ready built and you get the fun of building it. The downside is that they supply the parts which are a few quid dearer than off t'internet..

Shaun

stiscooby

If you can, build it yourself, you will get more PC for your £'s.

Don't get anything from the likes of PC world, Currys etc!

For parts use places on-line such as:

Scan.co.uk
Ebuyer.co.uk

You may also want to consider the size of the monitor he currently has, if it's quite big you will need to turn up the resolution to make it "look nice" but this will have an impact on game performance if the graphics card isn't up to much then in turn the game will stutter etc and you will then be forced to lower the resolution which will make the performance better but the picture will look worse.

You will probably want something with at least an Intel i5 processor (i7 even better if you can spend more), 8Gb RAM (for what it costs) and a 1TB hard disk (won't make any difference to performance but will give enough storage space for a while).

Graphics card you want something like a Nvidia with 1Gb RAM - something around the £100-£150 mark should give you something with reasonable performance.

Oh, and when buying the operating system, make sure you get the x64bit version so you can make use of all your RAM. x32bit versions will only go as far as 4Gb RAM

Woody69

iTrader: (6)

Listen to this guy!!

I used www.aria.co.uk to build my gaming computer, I bought it just for Battlefield 3 and was really impressed with their products.

i5 chip 3.3GHz chip
MSI Z68 Socket 1155 Mobo
Radeon HD 6870 Graphics
OCZ 750 watt Power Supply
Artic cooler freezer 13 for the chip
8 GB Corsair Vengance Ram
500 GB Seagate Barracuda Hard drive (sata 3)

Loads of other little bits all in for £700

TonyBurns

iTrader: (3)

£1500 quid will get you a monster Intel i5/i7 system and a very good graphics card, SSD drive and a good 16gb of memory, but shop nearer to the time (november) for xmas as the tech changes on a monthly basis

Tony

Luminous

iTrader: (3)

I'd not spend £1500 on a gaming machine. I think you would be better off spending £800, and then in two years spend another £800. That should give you a better result than £1500 today.

Woody69's spec is a good starting point. Remember a good monitor is a must if you are going to be spending a lot of time playing games.

(and if you want you can drop me a PM as I will be making a few gaming machines for xmas for my customers)

_Meridian_

iTrader: (1)

Under no circumstances whatsoever. If you buy what they call a "Gaming PC" you will pay several hundred pounds too much (and that assumes that you aren't stupid enough to pay for the extended warranty) for a machine that thinks "games" means the original Doom, and struggles on anything more advanced. Expect a mid-range machine, with a bottom-end graphics card and a PSU that won't take any upgrades. Best bet is build your own, or get a geek friend to build one. Failing that, people like Scan or Overclockers sell ready-made rigs. Alienware are good, but overpriced. Dell don't make a proper gaming machine (that's what Alienware are for now Dell own them).

TonyBurns

iTrader: (3)

This sort of setup will be good for a few years its not worth buying mid range stuff as its outdated in a few months, my top end stuff 18 months ago is now mid to top end, if I would have gone mid it would now be bottom end and due replacing.

A rough build (no monitor/keyboard/mouse or OS) but a damned fine machine (go for an aftermarket CPU cooler if you want to overclock or go for a bundle) will quite easily push you towards £1500.

SSD drive 240gb, £120 (A must for your OS these days)

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/240gb...83000-iops-max

1TB HDD £77

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/1tb-w...64mb-cache-8ms

Z77 asus mobo ivybridge ready £150 (preferable over the Z68 due to the issues the Z68 suffered being the first UEFI chipset).

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/asus-...dvi-i-hdmi-atx

CPU I7 3770k £252

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/intel...ache-35x-ratio

PSU 1000w modular psu £153

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/intel...ache-35x-ratio

16GB memory ddr3 £150

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/16gb-...s-9-10-9-27-xm

GPU ATI 7970 £348

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/3gb-s...mi-2-x-mini-dp

Case HafX v2 £130

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/coole...w-o-psu-new-ve

£1380.

Jamie

You would be a mug to pay that much money for a pc.

LSherratt

iTrader: (1)

I am still using my same good old PC from 2007. 5 years old and I haven't had any problems with it at all. Bought online for £800 and it's a HP-Pavilion

-Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU 6600 @ 2.40GHz
-RAM 2GB
-Hard disc 4GB
-32bit Windows 7
ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series (which I bought seperatly in 2009 I think and cost about £300 odd.

I try to look after it though and I would say that it's only just beginning to feel a bit sluggish when loading certain things. I don't game on it, but I used to play Doom3 and Crysis

If you want to play games, buy a consol Although I suppose a serious PC gamer is much more hardcore

TonyBurns

iTrader: (3)

Not really, paying £800 quid means in 1 year you're paying £800 quid to upgrade it, may as well just do the job properly to start with, its false economy to go buying mid range stuff for gaming PC's and upgrade later, you need a good case with excellent airflow (the HAF X has this and has a slot for another top mounted fan), fit a decent ammount of memory, use an SSD drive (Sata 3 6GB) as you want the pc to boot up as quickly as possible and gain the most from accessing information, the 1TB drive is storage, a decent graphics card and CPU are a must on a gaming PC, same with a decent mother board, and you need a GOOD PSU to cope with power, they say on average a PSU will lose about 5% per year of its output, its a 92%+ PSU so thats 920w/1000, and a loss of 46w per year of use (hours dependent).
You dont go close to the edge on machines like this, you ensure its going to last, only a fool would skimp and pay again the next year for upgrades.

Tony

EddScott

My PC is 2 yearfs old and only Crysis 2 has to be backed off and even then only a couple of clicks. Metro 2033 is a test of PC power and my Nvdia 460 handles it perfectly. It was 180 pounds. The SSD was the only big ticket item. Its only got an i5 and 8gb ram.

Games these days are limited by consoles and there isnt one game now or in the next 3 years that will need a spending over a grand to run it.

Nimbus

Quick question. If you were to have an SSD for the OS and a normal HDD for storage, would you install the games on the SSD or HDD, considering you don't have as much space on the SSD?

andys

If you want to build yourself a couple of good guides here:-

Rob_Impreza99

iTrader: (3)

You don't need an i7 processor for a gaming desktop, its massive overkill, an i5 3570k is plenty powerful enough and lightening fast for most everyday things.

If your going to build it yourself or get someone to build it for you then concentrate on a good graphics card, motherboard, memory, SSD and decent air flow, a good case and upgraded fans will give you that.

If you go down the intel route and buy something like an i5 you should upgrade the stock cooler that comes with it, if you do upgrade the cooler you need to make sure that you buy the right height RAM as a lot of coolers won't allow you to have RAM like the corsair vengeance with the tall cooling fins, ive got the lower profile corsair vengeance in mine with a cooler master 612s cpu cooler.

bigsinky

**** me can I come and live with you. I will even call you daddy

EddScott

My Steam account is on my HDD (Steam being all my games). I have the odd game on my SSD (for some reason I always put STALKER on my SSD, probably my all time favorite game). I'm not too clear if having the game on the SSD is of a huge benefit.


In all honesty, putting a PC together isn't that hard as the bits can only fit one way. Installing Windows is fairly painless these days. You would be unlucky to have a component throw a wobbly these days but when it does thats when experience can help.

Tidgy

can i come and live in your world, is petrol 30p a L?

no way will you get a machine capable of playing modern games to a reasonable level for £200.

£1500 is a reasonable budget, if your asking questions like this i wouldn;t bother trying to build it yourself.

Your right in the realms of alienware machine which while not being best value for money (self build def is better) they are pretty good systems for average gamer and £1500 should get you right up the spec.

Plus your lad will think its seriously cool cos the cases are funky and alienware is bragging rights lol

Rob_Impreza99

iTrader: (3)

Register at overclockers forums

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/

Put a thread in the hardware section asking can someone spec you a build and include your budget in the title, explain what the pc will be used for and you will get plenty of people posting you a build including all the parts you need and the cost, its a very good and helpful forum.

You don't need to buy everything from overclockers, sometimes they will be the cheapest but ive found amazon to be cheaper on quite a few things as well as Dabs.

TonyBurns

iTrader: (3)

I found scan to be cheaper than pretty much everyone else including overclockers for virtually all parts, though an i5 or i7 set up are the best, i7 for overclocking as its a more capable chip (higher multiplier and clock speed out of the box), overclockers is a good forum.
Always best to look at the bundles though, you can save a few quid just by doing that