My son wants one instead of an xbox 1, i have no idea what I’m looking for really.

Is there anything at a decent price

Help!

Ha ha you’re doomed!

I’ve tried a half-dozen times in work to build one and every time I’ve been told I’m wrong (I’m an IT consultant).
Personally I’d find out if he’s a Intel or AMD fan for the CPU and NVidia or AMD for the graphics card and get yourself to Novatech and use one of their configuration tools to find one for budget.

Half the fun of PC gaming is building and cocking about, sorry I mean optimising it so my standard answer of buying a decent built i5 based mini-tower from a major brand and doubling the RAM to 8GB (they invariably come with 4GB) and installing the best GPU you can afford that doesn’t need its own power-supply is ‘wrong’ and you need a hugely over-sized case, 1.21 gigs watt power supply and a fan the size of a T5 to house your i5, 8GB and a graphics card or it’s wrong.

What’s your budget, now is a good time to start pc gaming with the range of affordable but great performing graphics card that are available. Do you need a full build including operating system, monitor and keyboard & mouse.

Aye, basically start with budget. And the decide on screen size as that’s the biggest impact on performance. The main trouble with PC gaming is also the main strength, you can build a perfectly good gaming PC that’ll match an xbox for a pretty small amount of money… Or you can build a monster for thousands of quid.

He wants an alienware they start at £500.

I suspect that its just a trendy brand.

I also suspect its way more hassle than a console just to play games. Or am i missing something…

Is £500 too cheap for a gaming pc??

Got any links??

Watch this

[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WQxr59KRto[/video]

Parts can be had for less than £500, get son to build and use video as guide. PC in the video will play 720/1080 on medium/high settings very capably.

Forget alienware, £500 will get peasant spec.

ps. parts in vid are coming in at £432 right now! http://tinyurl.com/nltrpve (replace 270x gfx with 370 if needed as 270 EOL )

or can be had built at £485 http://tinyurl.com/pmomgw4

How old is he?

I can’t envisage a situation where as a kid I’d want a gaming PC over an Xbox One and not have very exacting requirements as to what I desired. Have you asked him?

If you want to build up a pc (yes you do, it’s easy!) check out this blog http://www.logicalincrements.com/ It gives a pretty easy method of working out what parts you need.

FWIW I always associate alienware as being nice stuff but being ultimately very overpriced.

Kids are really getting in DayZ, and Ark evolved, minecraft, sims etc stuff thats better on the PC than the xbox.

Which is a point.

Do you want a “gaming PC” or “a PC that’ll play games”?

Do you have a budget?

flip – Member
He wants an alienware they start at £500.

I suspect that its just a trendy brand.

You’re sort of right, it is just an expensive branding exercise. Dell in disguise.

But in fact, in real gaming PC enthusiast circles, it’s the opposite of trendy. Alienware and owners of them are looked down upon by the ‘PC master race’ 😉

Alienware…trendy (as seen on Big Bang Theory), but ultimately you’re paying a hefty premium for the brand.

You’re better off going to somewhere like scan.co.uk and speccing a 3XS system. You can buy a PC or a bundle (motherboard, CPU and RAM) and source a graphics card, case and PSU elsewhere.

I went down the Scan route and started out with an I5 3570K (the K means that the CPU clock speed can be adjusted) on a Z77 motherboard. Nearly three years later and one Nvidia 780 card later, I’ve still got a gaming PC that will run anything on high settings at a decent framerate.

The standard for motherboards and CPU architecture has just been updated, so you may get some good deals on Z97 motherboards and a Haswell refresh CPU of reasonable quality. Pair this with 8GB of DDR3 RAM, a couple of TB of storage and an Nvidia 960 card and you’ll have a system that’ll comfortably outperform an XBOX One or PS4.

As with bikes, half the fun is in building it. £500 is plenty to build a good quality machine; it’s the other stuff that’ll run the budget over, such as mouse, keyboard, screen, operating system…. if you have anything to recycle, then you’ll save muchos monies.

As for the OS, you could install SteamOS (it’s free) provided you’re building a dedicated gaming machine.

Please don’t get an alienware, they are a complete waste of money and you could build something much better for the same price. If he wants fancy lights, get some light up fans and one of these
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/10-5M-SMD-5050-3528-RGB-150-300-600-LED-Strip-Adapter-IR-Remote-Waterproof-Kit-/151224383150?var=&hash=item2335acf6ae

Don’t skimp on the motherboard,cpu and PSU. My i7 950 is now 5 years old and going strong! Needs a GPU and RAM refresh though. A SSD is an absolute must.

fr0sty125 – Member

A SSD is an absolute must.

It’s really not. A very nice luxury though. Basically they’re dropper posts for PCs.

If you’re building from scratch, skimp means different things. I reckon the place you can most easily save money right now is the processor- the pentium G3258 is £45 and very, very good. Stick it on a cheap Z97 board with a £20 aircooler block and overclock it to ****. Add 8gb of decent ram- little point in skimping here. Rocksolid core, you need to spend a lot on graphics before that’ll bottleneck you in most games. And hugely upgradable, it’s a great way to stagger the cost as the rest of it will easily support a processor or ram upgrade.

(I have practiced what I preach here, I decided to go with the G3258 in order to spend more on the graphics card. So far I’ve no doubt it was a good bet)

Really just here to agree with the others. Forget Alienware.

8Gb of RAM
AMD over Intel for performance for the money
Any gigabyte motherboard – don’t worry about a particular chipset
best GPU you can afford
one SSD for installing the OS
one mechanical drive for everything else (including games)
stock cooling is fine (maybe not what a teenage boy wants to hear)
put a couple of LED strips inside – blue is my preference to match the keyboard and mouse 🙂
The PSU will need attention. Quality over quantity ie. 500w from a good brand is far superior to 1000w from a shitty no-name.

Get the monitor etc 2nd hand. The case too but avoid big brands like Dell which use proprietary sizes and fittings

Head over to overclock.net and start a thread. People will very happily spec a great PC for you.

Watching and tagged as Slack jr is also keen to spec and build himself a gaming PC. Lots of useful looking info above, thank you fellas.

Over lunch, I had a quick look. My £500 would go on;

Gigabyte 970A-DS3P AMD 970 Motherboard – £53

AMD Athlon X4 860K Quad-Core 3.7GHz – £55

8GB (2x 4GB) RAM – £35

Corsair 600w, bronze cert PSU. Modular. – £58

Horrific (to me) gamer’s case. Bet your son would like it. – £38

EVGA GeForce GTX 750 Ti Superclocked 2Gb GPU – £100 – I’d shop around and try to get a GTX960 for approx £150

2Tb Seagate HDD – £57

Kingston 120Gb (which is plenty) SSD – £38

That’s £434 for RAM, CPU, GPU, PSU, HDD, SSD and case.

The remaining £70 could get keyboard, mouse and monitor. Monitors esp can be had for bargains second hand.

I was lazy and only looked on Amazon. The components are all good ‘uns though and certainly with money spent in the right ratios.

I’m feeling lazy this time….. If you look through my forum history you’ll find we’ve done this several times in the last few months.

Have a look at the ArsTechnica and the TomsHardware system guides, they’re example builds from PC enthusiast sites to various budgets and give you an idea why to go for.

Looking at the other answers I’d say they’re close to right, though I’d also suggest a secondhand PC as an option, or a starting point… Just about any quality machine with an i5 from the last couple of years and stick a AMD 7970 or something of similar performance (graphics card hierarchy charts on tomshardware are useful to compare)

Oh, if it’s really for gaming, at that price ditch the SSD and spend the money on a bigger graphics card (“GPU”)

First i would ask why he wants PC over a console at £500 the pc wont be much better than a console if at all.
For me my PC offers me gaming at higher res and framerate than any console can achieve, 144hz at 2560×1440.

If your not fussed about either, then the AMD APUs are very good value that way you don’t need a graphics card straight away but in the future can add one and run it in crossfire.

If you’re looking for something a bit easier but without such a big premium as Alienware, I have game developer friends who swear by http://www.pcspecialist.co.uk. One had his water cooling die and told me their warranty support is very good too.

Encourage him down the console route if you can, way easier and cheaper. If you do go down the gaming route then if he wants to play FPSs and MMOs then £500 isn’t enough, I’d say you’re looking more at £1000 without a monitor (but inc. everything else) for a decent mid-range gaming PC.

I’d also get one pre-built as IMO you don’t save enough self-building to justify the potential hassle of dealing with multiple suppliers fobbing you off if something isn’t working (but it’s not 100% obvious what the culprit is). It’s not uncommon for PC components to be DoA. Only reason to self-build is if you get enjoyment from it IMO.

I also suspect its way more hassle than a console just to play games. Or am i missing something…

Yes, it is.

But, they are far more adaptive and do perform a better job (although there can be a price for that).

I’ve avoided it with my sons, I spend all my working day with computers and the last thing I want is to work on them on a night/weekend. Consoles work and work well plus listening to my colleagues discuss +£250 graphics cards makes me happy that I ‘resisted’.

We buy Chillblast PC’s at work; they’re well built and seem to be a reasonable brand – unsure of price vs performance etc.

+1 for pcspecialist

b r – Member
We buy Chillblast PC’s at work; they’re well built and seem to be a reasonable brand – unsure of price vs performance etc.

I’ll second that; we used Chiliblast PCs to run games at a festival last year, and they were flawless.

First i would ask why he wants PC over a console at £500 the pc wont be much better than a console if at all

rofl

We started with PC Specialist but it’s gone way way beyond that 😯

I did it in two stages for my Son.
I started with the highest spec value system from Scan e.g. Scan V15i. for his Birthday in July. It runs games on reasonably high settings, graphics wise.
For Christmas I upgraded his Power Supply and bought an AMD R280x Graphics Card. Plus a load of case fans. It now runs everything at the highest settings.
It’s now coming up to two years old and it’s still playing new games on Ultra settings.

Get him set up with a Steam Account, and check the Humblebundle website for some fantastic offers on older games.

Oh, that reminds me. If you’re building right now, on a budget and looking to run Win 10, I would definitely go for an AMD GPU, as they’re getting a biiiig boost from Win 10.

http://arstechnica.co.uk/gaming/2015/08/directx-12-tested-an-early-win-for-amd-and-disappointment-for-nvidia/

I still think a SSD is a must it matters a lot for loading maps, quicker you load the quicker you can work out what you are doing.

1.21 gigawatts . Great Scott!

Food for thought

http://arstechnica.co.uk/gaming/2015/08/review-nvidias-gtx-950-is-a-highly-capable-good-value-gpu-for-1080p-gaming/

Be careful that whatever you buy is upgradeable in the future. Some big brands don’t always use standard parts e.g. ATX-sized

We’ve just gone through this with a new graphics card that needs a new power supply (PSU). The ATX standard PSU won’t fit and needs a new case, etc. Cut our losses, returned the parts and bought a new ATX-sized PC

I’ve dabbled with gaming PC’s the last couple of years and built a couple of different configurations.

Recently broke down and sold my old system and replaced it with something a lot smaller and less powerful that still manages to play the games I enjoy playing.

I’ve ended up with a i5 processor, nVidia graphics card (gtx 670), 16GB RAM and a small form factor case and so far I’ve spent just over £300. The graphics card is the weak point in the build but its an easily upgradeable part. Some of the bits I already had lying around and the rest I got as either second hand from eBay or I managed to find as “B Grade” stock from online retailers.

I went with a mini itx build as it takes up less space but can still use standard components, its just a bit more of a squeeze when building 😀

If building one yourself you should be able to get a decent spec for £500. Or if you want to buy off the shelf then take a look at places like Overclockers UK and see if they have any offers running on their systems (usually every Wednesday).