He has a low spec laptop which will run the games he likes, but it’s a bit rubbish. Other child received my old Mac so trying to even up the technology war in the house 😉 Mostly he plays Sims – all versions and it takes booming ages to load, etc. The terrifyingly focussed sims forum suggests one of these http://www.ginger6.com/g6-infinity-x1-gaming-pc.html which frankly looks like it’ll have sex with the kettle and eat the dog, but he’s keen.

The lad. Not the dog.

Seems a fair chunk of cash, but expect he’ll keep it for a few years. Any thoughts on this/something else we should look at. Or just go to Curry’s and pick one…

If he just wants to play games a console is a better bet, they work, require no effort and you’ll get a decent amount of years from one before they’re obsolete.

If he’s determined to play it on PC but shows no interest in messing with stuff or building it up you can do it cheaper and easier buy an off the shelf PC from a decent brand (i5 processor ideally, older 4th Gen are cheap now) and a entry level GPU – Novatech have a SFF GTX750Ti for £80 or so, it doesn’t need its own power input etc and will run even the most current big games reasonably well. You can add more RAM or an SSD later on which will make it quicker and he’ll learn a bit about IT, home gaming like as a teenager is how most of our techies in work got started.

But if they want to be a ‘real’ PC gamer and spend their evenings worrying about FPS rates tinkering with software and hardware more than they spend actually playing buy a case, a motherboard etc and build it together. If you can build a bike you’ll piss a PC, same sort of compatibility issues, but if you get it wrong it just beeps instead of working instead of the bars coming off at 20mph.

MSI?

The spec on the storage of that machine is a little off – a spinning rust hard drive for booting is not going to get the best out of the machine – you’d ( he’d ) be far happier booting from an SSD.

Ta All. I’m reimbursing myself in the world of PCs. blimey it’s complicated for a man only running Macs for many years… looking at wha the Sims needs, I reckon he could get away with something a bit less full on. Definitely want SSD (have the 1TB SSD drive on this mac and it’s so much better than a mechanical disk) – will keep looking….

TBH, if all he plays is The Sims he doesn’t need a gaming PC, just a modern machine. An SSD will probably fix the loading issues, assuming there’s enough RAM in it. (If you’re going with that linked PC I’d swap the HDD for a 250Gb Evo.)

Spec in the OP sounds a good price. Built a budget gaming PC for T junior a few months ago, Skylake i3, GTX750Ti, 240Gb SSD, 8Gb DDR4 just under £400 (add £100 for OS). He says it is plenty good enough for him playing mainstream FP games. His only complaint is now wanting a bigger HD. Will be adding a normal 2Tb HDD, 7200rpm if he’s lucky.

An i5 and better GF Card as specced would be next level and easily play popular games. Although while the i5 has more cores which is good for multitasking, for games tests like these don’t show a significant difference. Could be GF card bottleneck? Of course CPUs and GPUs can be upgraded later with the right sockets, for that reason I would stick to Skylake. Some previous gens offer value but you have to do some research then weigh up pros and cons.

Steam machines like the Alienware ones are an alternative but a PC is more flexible for homework and general PC skills.

If you want to upgrade in the future (as he will) then make sure that the PC takes standard components.
My son’s Dell was great as bought, but the new power supply and graphics card wouldn’t fit when we tried to upgrade later

I’ve worked in IT all my life, my kids all had consoles as the last thing I want to do at home is work out why a game won’t work etc…

And none of them (they’re all +18 y/o now) has bothered to get their own gaming PC and still play consoles.

This PC is from Chillblast. Cheap desktop but they get good reviews on their gaming PCs so might be worth a look.

Can’t help you on spec though