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Gaming PC.

jevy47

pfm Member
Looking for advice regarding a gaming pc and monitor (or possibly 2) for my son for Christmas, as I have little idea what to look for.

Up to £1K max.

Any advice what to look for would be gratefully received.

Davey.
 
I've just bought a MSI B450 Tomahawk Max motherboard (the newly realeased MAX verson because it supports the Ryzen 3000 processors straight out of the box), a Ryzen 5 3600 (Of the reviews i've seen it's only the supplied heatsink/fan that's different between the 3600 and the more expensive 3600x), an Arctic Freezer esports duo heatsink/fan (much better than the one supplied with the 3600x, let alone the 3600), Arctic F12 PWM case fans (5 pack Amazon),16gb Corsair Vengeance DDR4 LPX 3600mhz C18 Ram, Crucial MX500 500gb SSD for the OS and games, Seasonic Prime 80 plus Gold 650w PSU (for the 12 year warranty - Very important because if the PSU fails it can destroy the motherboard) and i'm planning on buying a Sapphire Radion RX 590 Nitro+ (because it's supposed to be the best RX590).

Windows 10 can be downloaded from the Microsoft website and product keys are only a few quid off ebay.
 
AMD have caught up to the point where you won't go wrong with either them or Intel, so go with the cheapest. The hard part will be deciding on a GPU, ideally you could do with knowing what sort of games they play and at what resolution it will be at.
 
I bought a Chillblast a few years back. They pretty much build them to the spec you want.
Excellent machine - was lightning fast for its time and several years later it's still working well and very easy to add extra hard drives etc.
 
Looking for advice regarding a gaming pc and monitor (or possibly 2) for my son for Christmas, as I have little idea what to look for.

Up to £1K max.

Any advice what to look for would be gratefully received.

Davey.

How about having a go at building one together? I just happen to have some parts that I was about to ebay. i5 8400 processor and a nice Asus strix H370i motherboard if you're interested, plus some fast rgb Corsair memory. You'd need a cooler, a case, a power supply, a graphics card, an SSD and a Windows install - plus your keyboard, mouse and monitor(s). There's tons of guides in YouTube land - I recommend Paul's hardware https://www.youtube.com/user/paulshardware/playlists where he's done some full-detail 'how to' builds. Your budget sets the limitations here.
 
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There is not enough information provided to be able to give any meaningful advice. You'll see laptops from around £500 incorrectly described as a 'gaming computer' whilst there are real gamers out there with 2 to 4 QFHD screens and about £5K+ of kit. Then there is the other direction towards VR...........

Without a clear set of requirements its not possible to give any real recommendation. For example the motherboard is key to the rest of the system and they cost from peanuts to several hundred quid and yes you do get what you pay for. Its interesting to see complaints about how for example a given SSD only performs at half or a quarter of rated speed thus it must be a copy or duff whilst in reality they are installing a 4 channel device into an old single or modern dual channel motherboard. Of course if you had a 4 channel system you would get the rated performance.

What type of gamer is he and does he have ambitions to move onwards?

This link may give an idea https://www.scan.co.uk/shops/3xs/choose-a-pc-by-game



Cheers,

DV
 
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Few important bits, I self-build and recently made someone a gaming PC for around £750 in parts.

Go for at least a 6 core CPU, which means AMD Ryzen. Don’t go for Intel if looking under a grand (or at all on desktop ;) ). Ryzen 3600 the sweet spot, the 2600 is incredible VFM at the moment too. If you want to stream, video encode, and game, you need cores. More games are being heavier on multi-core use these days too...

Go for at least 4GB GDDR5 VRAM (memory) on the graphics card. AMD RX580 good price / performance ratio.

16GB DDR4 system RAM (memory), no more needed.

Any old SSD (hard drive) is good enough, if streaming and recording then a 2nd 2TB HDD a good call.
 
There are so many options when doing a self bulld it's mind boggling. I wonder if a cheap motherboard and CPU combo with the bulk of the money spent on a good graphics card would be the best way to go? Something like the Corsair Vengeance DDR4 3000mhz. Or is that a bad idea?

As for graphics cards, one thing that bothers me is the heat a lot of them produce. It must reduce the life of the card, so i've changed my mind on the RX 590 and decided to spend a bit more on the MSI GeForce GTX 1660 Ti GAMING X. I read somewhere that it plays everything at max settings (1080p) with high fps - (World of Tanks looks far better at max settings).
 
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Thanks very much for your advice gents, it's very much appreciated.

Looking at this -
AMD Ryzen 5 3600, Nvidia GTX 1660Ti 6GB, 16GB RAM, 240GB SSD, 1TB HDD, 400W 80+ PSU, Wifi, Windows 10,

What do you think ???

Just over £800, so £200 ish for a monitor.
Any ideas on monitors ?

Sorry for being a pain but I know nowt about gaming pc's.
 
Thanks very much for your advice gents, it's very much appreciated.

Looking at this -
AMD Ryzen 5 3600, Nvidia GTX 1660Ti 6GB, 16GB RAM, 240GB SSD, 1TB HDD, 400W 80+ PSU, Wifi, Windows 10,

What do you think ???

Just over £800, so £200 ish for a monitor.
Any ideas on monitors ?

Sorry for being a pain but I know nowt about gaming pc's.

Very good - that's in the right ballpark. Is there any chance you can get a bigger SSD though, even 512 GB would do the trick. It's quite difficult to upsize afterwards if you're not at all confident.

I'm not up to speed on gaming monitors I'm afraid, you want to be looking for 24 to 27 inch, 1920x1080, 1ms refresh, 144 Hz refresh.

Something like this
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07HS7B1DC/?tag=pinkfishmedia-21
 
This site contains affiliate links for which pink fish media may be compensated.
Thanks very much for your advice gents, it's very much appreciated.

Looking at this -
AMD Ryzen 5 3600, Nvidia GTX 1660Ti 6GB, 16GB RAM, 240GB SSD, 1TB HDD, 400W 80+ PSU, Wifi, Windows 10,

What do you think ???

Should be fine as long as the psu isn't a generic one and has enough guts to power the system. A cheap psu is false economy.
 
The SSD will be fine, but once steam/epic is installed just be sure to pick the 1tb hdd for storage. You can also tell windows to install software to that drive if its a concern.

I would get no more than a 1080 screen for the graphics care to do its thing. The RTX 2060 seems to be edging the 1660ti but with the inevitable price creep of another 50 quid.
 
I always over-spec the power supply.

That's good advice. The 1660Ti is less than 150W loaded and the Ryzen, 65W (or 100 pushed) so 400 W ought to cover it - it doesn't give anything in the way of headroom for future upgrades but everything's a compromise at the price point
 
My son says he wants to run his pc with 2 monitors (he'll get the second one in January for his birthday)

Would the above pc accommodate 2 monitors ?
 


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