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Gaming PC
cerbera - 17/11/15 at 08:28 PM

I have £600 to buy a gaming pc. I don't mind putting one together or buying off the shelf. What would you suggest?
Cheers.

gremlin1234 - 17/11/15 at 08:43 PM

do you already have a screen, or is that in the £600?

cerbera - 17/11/15 at 08:49 PM

Already have monitor keyboard mouse just need a new box of tricks.

james h - 17/11/15 at 09:35 PM

They aren't hard to build in my experience (I built a desktop for my uni work last year).

Most games don't really use more than 2 CPU cores, let alone 4 (if they do, its diminishing returns) - there is an Intel Pentium K (G3258) dual core processor which seems to be popular and cheap. It can be really easily overclocked (and its supposed to be) to provide good bang for buck.

RAM isn't a massive deal either, and can be cheap anyway (especially DDR3).

I'd look to put a lot of your budget into a really good nVidia card. I've not been looking at them for a while but there are loads of reviews online.

Cheapest place (and local to me, and you?) is Scan.co.uk. They're based in Bolton near the Macron stadium, and have excellent customer service. Ask for Natalie if you go, she was really helpful. You can look at all the cases/GPUS/coolers etc. Sometimes they have an awesome driving sim there which I've spent a lot of time on!

James

Irony - 18/11/15 at 04:09 AM

In my experience home built PCs never seem to last more than 2 or 3 years. I don't believe that the off the shelf components work absolutely correctly together and wear prematurely resulting in failure. At work we buy nothing but Dell and Macs. They are used all day every day and I think we have 1 go down in ten years and that was a Dell (30 workstations). The Apple machines have never had a hardware issue in 15 years (6 machines). Pretty convincing.


If I were you I'd buy a refurbished dell from their outlet store. If you phone them you can even haggle!

matt5964 - 18/11/15 at 08:05 AM

You could get a bear bones system and start from there, I have used both the below company's and found them very helpful

http://www.novatech.co.uk/barebonebundles/

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/pc-components/upgrade-bundles/all-upgrade-bundles

mcerd1 - 18/11/15 at 12:19 PM

quote:
Originally posted by Irony
In my experience home built PCs never seem to last more than 2 or 3 years. !


My experience tells me almost the opposite !

Ignoring macs for a moment (they aren't exactly the budget option anyway...)


I've never had a home built PC last me less than 4 years, and I normally only upgrade it because I fancy something faster... and then the old machine (or its parts) go off to someone else in the family for a few more years...

My current home PC is 6 years old and after a minor refresh (GPU & SSD) and new install of windows its better than ever and still good enough to play nearly anything on very high settings
It wasn't the cheapest machine to build at the time (£1100 inc windows) but the first gen i7 on the LGA1366 was never cheap...
But since then I've built second and third gen i5's for a lot less than half that which have been just as reliable and about as powerful too

The pre built machines we have at work are mostly dell and HP, the dells always seemed to be a bit pricey for the performance you got but I do admit that they have been fairly reliable, the HP's are overpriced, unreliable heaps of scrap as far as I'm concerned



The key is to do the research - CPU and graphics card prices change all the time, so the best bang for your buck changes too.


For the rest of the machine stick to the mid spec parts from good quality reliable brands, personally I use ASUS motherboards on nearly everything.
A decent power supply helps alot too (£50 should be more than enough to get a good quality one for all but the most extreme machines)

Also having bitten the bullet and tried an SSD I can confirm that they are well worth it for your boot drive - my old machine now has a 25 second startup from power on, or practically instant from sleep and all the loading times for apps are at least 4 or 5x faster
Good 250GB ones are less than £60 now too


You may find a good deal on a barebones or pre-built machine, but I often find that the quality of the bits inside doesn't add up to the price you pay for them......



[Edited on 18/11/2015 by mcerd1]

Ivan - 18/11/15 at 04:38 PM

Whatever you decide on - a UPS in my experience goes a long way to almost doubling the life of your components - pre UPS I used to get 2 to 3 years out of my mother boards - post UPS my current one is almost 6 years old with regular power outages on the national grid and has saved me much lost work as it gives 10 minutes to back up work. All my peripherals such as screens, printers, external hard drives etc. are also wired through it.

james h - 18/11/15 at 06:05 PM

I should add, Scan also assembles gaming PCs for you:

Scan 3XS

Chris_Xtreme - 18/11/15 at 08:08 PM

One thing to bear in mind buying a dell or a hp is normally the bios etc is dell / hp ified and is pretty limited.

In the work place environment, they are the kit to go for as they keep building the same for several years and support them similarly. Ie some longevity in the business line up. In the home line up, I am going to guess probably still a bit restricted and probably more pricey then a custom build.

I have gone through self build and also bought acer pcs when I just wanted a cheap desktop not for games and then 5 yrs later I bought a self speced machine from pc specialist, mainly as my first child was on the way.

The issues I have had in the passed is that you buy a bunch of components and sometimes they don't work together, they have never been tested in that combo, then you spend time getting it sorted from whoever you bought it from.

For gaming and tweaking and the locost spirit of do it yourself, I would go for building your own. I built a rack mount pc at work a year ago and it worked straight off.

From a spec point of view, a friend who games has the same spec pc as my pc specialist one but he built it himself, both done 4+ys ago. asus motherboard, core i7 from back then and he has a decent nvidia graphics card, also from back then and pretty much all the games he plays are just fine. The best upgrade has been an ssd for the c: . you get to use some of the processer then for general stuff rather than waiting on hard disk.

I think enough from me!

Smoking Frog - 18/11/15 at 09:34 PM

By a second hand unit with a good spec CPU and motherboard and spend what's left to upgrade the graphics card (maybe PSU and memory also).

BenB - 18/11/15 at 10:48 PM

So I built an I7 asus mb unit five years ago. Still super fast even in new games. But then it was a £300/400 graphics card. As said go big on the graphics card, big on the memory, psu big enough and cpu just nothing too shit. And look at some good cooling to avoid it sounding like a hoover

Irony - 19/11/15 at 02:10 AM

May get shouted here but an 27 inch I Mac is a truly beautiful machine and I feel actually stonking value. Assuming your budget stretches that far.

Not long back I found myself with a aging 27inch imac. I decided to upgrade to a Mac pro. However having been lucky enough to use the imac for so long I didn't want to get a poorer quality screen. To my surprise a screen the same spec as a 27inch imac was upwards of £900 from other manufacturers. (yeah you can get cheap 27inch screens but not fantastic quality) Which means means that the PC bit of the imac was less than £500. That's pretty a budget machine.

Any after a bit of research I found you can use most imacs as normal monitors which is what I did. Now when I need to upgrade some ones monitor I just buy aused imacs from eBay.

Irony - 19/11/15 at 02:16 AM

Having said the above about macs last time I checked (5 years ago) they were rubbish for games. Surely a xbox1 is about the ultimate gaming PC? And it comes prebuilt...

Slimy38 - 19/11/15 at 08:47 AM

quote:
Originally posted by Irony
May get shouted here but an 27 inch I Mac is a truly beautiful machine and I feel actually stonking value. Assuming your budget stretches that far.


And completely useless for gaming!

Macs certainly are decent machines, but until games companies start writing on the Mac they're always going to be playing catchup.

mcerd1 - 19/11/15 at 10:27 AM

quote:
Originally posted by Irony
Having said the above about macs last time I checked (5 years ago) they were rubbish for games. Surely a xbox1 is about the ultimate gaming PC? And it comes prebuilt...


All consoles are always out of date by the time they are released, the only thing that helps them is the way that games are developed and optimised specifically for them, but a number of developers seem to be aiming for the PC market again to get round the limitations of the consoles....

Slimy38 - 19/11/15 at 03:22 PM

quote:
Originally posted by mcerd1
quote:
Originally posted by Irony
Having said the above about macs last time I checked (5 years ago) they were rubbish for games. Surely a xbox1 is about the ultimate gaming PC? And it comes prebuilt...


All consoles are always out of date by the time they are released, the only thing that helps them is the way that games are developed and optimised specifically for them, but a number of developers seem to be aiming for the PC market again to get round the limitations of the consoles....


They may be always out of date, but PC's are similarly out of date unless you want to endlessly plough money into them. And as you say, because developers then aim for the PC market you're actually forced to upgrade to be able to play the latest whizzbang games.

I did consider bringing my PC up to a decent spec for gaming, but I very rapidly exceeded the £270 price tag of the XBox One, so guess which way I ended up?

Davey D - 19/11/15 at 04:47 PM

quote:
Originally posted by Slimy38
....I did consider bringing my PC up to a decent spec for gaming, but I very rapidly exceeded the £270 price tag of the XBox One, so guess which way I ended up?


You went the way of the PC?

Slimy38 - 19/11/15 at 05:12 PM

quote:
Originally posted by Davey D
quote:
Originally posted by Slimy38
....I did consider bringing my PC up to a decent spec for gaming, but I very rapidly exceeded the £270 price tag of the XBox One, so guess which way I ended up?


You went the way of the PC?


Remember we're on 'locostbuilders' here, not 'Westfield owners club'... I bought the xbox...

nero1701 - 30/11/15 at 08:21 PM

I'm an avid PC gamer, I use my PC as my complete home entertainment center.

I recently (still waiting on it arriving) purchased
New PC

I have a fairly ok PC at the moment and will be scavenging my 2gb gtx 760, sound car, ssd and hdd.

Digimon - 30/11/15 at 09:40 PM

This system is good value considering its pre built, £80 over you budget tho

http://www.scan.co.uk/3xs/configurator/custom-gaming-pc-amd-3xsgamer10a

[Edited on 30/11/15 by Digimon]