Son is looking at getting a gaming PC, he has given me his 2 choices

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=FS-322-OE&groupid=43&catid=2385&subcat=1270

System Specification
– Case: BitFenix Merc Alpha – Black
– Power Supply: PC Power & Cooling 400W PSU
– CPU: Intel Core i7 2700K 3.50GHz CPU
– Motherboard: Intel H61 DDR3 Motherboard
– Cooler: Intel Stock CPU Cooler
– RAM: TeamGroup Elite 8GB DDR3 1600MHz
– Hard Drive: 500GB HDD
– Graphics Card: Onboard Intel Graphics (DX11 Graphics Option available)
– Sound: 7.1 Channel Sound (On-Board)
– Optical Drive: OcUK 24x DVD+/-RW SATA Drive

with W7 and GTX 650 graphics card. @ £635.99

or

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=FS-247-OE

System Specification
– Case: Antec 300 Gaming Case – Black (default choice, options avalable)
– Power Supply: Corsair TX 650w PSU
– CPU: Intel Core i5 3570K 3.40GHz @ 4.40GHz Ivybridge CPU
– Motherboard: Asus P8Z77-V LX Intel Z77 (Socket 1155) DDR3 Motherboard
– Cooler: Alpenfohn K2 Mount Doom CPU Cooler
– RAM: 8GB DDR3 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit
– Hard Drive: 500GB HDD
– Graphics Card: ATI Radeon HD 5450 SILENT 512MB (default choice, options available)
– Sound: Realtek 7.1 Channel Sound (On-Board)

with W7 and Sapphire 7850 graphics card. @ £770.00

Any thoughts on either of those? apart from the price difference

Ta

The second one has a better GPU the 7850. The first one has a really good CPU and a cheap graphics card – not really the way to go on a gaming PC.
You will get at better deal at scan.co.uk – look at the Scan value systems and you can customise them too.The two things you want to focus on are graphics and then CPU, everything else is just extras really that have little impact

Yep… TBH even fairly entry level CPUs are up to the job. I’m not up to date with GPUs but in general, for gaming it’s the key component.

That said, I’m yet to see any real lack in my old GTX560 when gaming on a 24 inch screen.

bruce – what games does he want to play ?

surely that would dictate somewhat to what he needs.

bruce – what games does he want to play

pfft that would involve him speaking to me.
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I suspect that it may involve pron 🙄

I’ll have a look at scan.

To make a gaming PC worth buying ATM you should really have at least a nvidia 660ti or AMD 7950 in it, both are midrange cards that perform very well and will last a year or two. The cards you have spec’d in your post are just not up to it if you are looking for as bit of longevity. Another thing to take into consideration is what resolution the monitor the PC is going to be running through can deal with as there is no point in buying a decent card if the monitor can’t show it off to its full potential.

The difference in the CPU’s is that i7 does hyperthreading.

Games don’t use this really. If the pc was for video rendering, then I7 is the chip. If for gaming, save cash and get the I5 3570k.

Overclockers, Chillblast, Yoyotech will all build you a decent pc. I got mine from Yoyotech, and it was beautifully put together, overclocked, with great cable management inside, which can be extra costs on other companies sites, so a fractionally more expnsive pc ended up actually cheaper, and being Central London, meant I could collect and use the same day.

Ditto on the card advice, the 6xx series Nvidia’s are the “present” technology. I bought my pc with a 670, which still 6m later is the “card to have” balancing cost vs performance, ie a few % slower than the top of range 680, but only 2/3 of the cost. Since I bought mine in june, 660’s have been released.

Shouldn’t he be going the console route? Cheaper and more future-proof, although I’m a PC gamer it’s because I can’t get used to the console controllers mostly. PC gaming is an afterthought for a lot of publishers these days and it’s not going to get any better.

TBH it’s quite hard to justify a cutting edge processor these days, even for home video editing and crunching my antique Q6600 is still perfectly capable.

One thing that gets overlooked a wee bit is cooling, and therefore noise… A mate of mine bought a Yoyotech gaming machine which is very powerful but sounds like a motorbike. If you’re gaming or doing any media stuff, quiet is good. Hard to judge a machine without seeing it run though (on paper you’d think mine’d be noisy, it’s full of fans, but they’re all quiet fans, run at 7V, and relying on numbers to do the job most built PCs would stick in one or 2 high volume fans going flat out to do)

you can pretty much ignore all of the above, most of which isn’t relevant anyway. Your lad won’t care how loud it is. He wants his games to run fast and smooth between 45 and 80 frames a second. To do that, both of those models probably will, it needs a very good processor, a decent graphics card and a lot of cooling.

How loud it is means jack all when you’re playing a game with the volume up or even better – using headphones.

bruce – what games does he want to play

Probably BF3, SKYRIM CALL OF DUTY, ARMA, FORZA, TDU2? That sort of stuff all runs on decent spec pc’s like you listed. But you need a good pc to run them at a decent frame rate.

I used to be a right computer gaming geek overcolocking them and all that lark.

Basically any newish I5 processor, 8gb of decent RAM and a 7200rpm hard drive and 600-800w PSU is all you need. Then spend the money on a decent graphics card, preferably one with an aftermarket/uprated cooler. The newer chips are made on a smaller process so will generate a lot less heat for a given power/performance. I would recommend a Nvidia 570,580,660,670 or ATI HD7870,7850,7950. Check here for a breakdown of best cards for the money at different price levels.
After that, just get a well-ventilated case (bigger fans are generally quieter for the amount of cooling.

EDIT : Oh and a word on monitors, the graphics card you need will depend on the resolution you’re playing at. Below 1080p you should concentrate on the chip’s speed wheras at 1080p and above the memory becomes a bit more important (e.g. 2gb and ddr5 memory).

nukeproofriding – Member

How loud it is means jack all when you’re playing a game with the volume up or even better – using headphones.

Really don’t agree with that at all, well, apart from the headphones anyway. Even noisy games have quiet bits, the atmospherics of stuff like Skyrim, BF3 etc depend a lot on the quiet/loud.

Have a chat with ChillBlast because they do some cracking builds. Good people too – honest and without the salesy BS.

I know a fair few hardcore gamers and they all use headphones, really doesn’t matter how loud it is to them, but cooling is extremely important to them.

Half decent processor (i5), decent amount of RAM(8gb+) very cheap too, another family member could buy it as a prestent, at least 500gb drive and a good graphics card (£200ish) is what you need. I would go for option 2, but would build my own.

Have you thought of building it yourself?

Have you thought of building it yourself?

Best bit of advice so far – I’ll add to it a little.

I recently built my own gaming pc with a smaller budget than yours, and it runs amazingly well.

You don’t need any electronics experience to build one, it really is common sense and a careful approach.

Go to Maplins (they really are very good stores and their prices are phenomenal for a high street retailer). Their employees will literally fight to the death over who helps you build your gaming rig, because they love picking the parts they love making it work and they hate working on cronky old hp and dell systems that people bring in because they’ve died.

Go and tell them your building a gaming pc for your son, and you want it to run x y and z games at 60fps or more, then tell them you’ve got £650 to play with which is more than adequate. They will walk you around the store and tell you the best components for the build and put it all into a bundle for you within budget. You take it home, whack a brew on, and build it in an hour or two. It’s amazing fun and you’ll have the satisfaction of telling him “I built this for you!” Or do it with him.

Maplin is quite expensive – give Scan a phone…

Maplin is quite expensive

The extra cost (which I felt was minimal) when I bought mind was worth the peace of mind. I’m not clued up on Scan – do they have a shop? In Maplins you can walk around, being told what will work and what wont, pay, have the stuff in your hands, go home and built it the same day, knowing it will all slot together like a breeze and work perfectly first time, no drama. I think for a first time pc builder that is pretty valuable.

Yes, they have a shop.

http://www.scan.co.uk/information/aboutus.aspx

Maplin are both pricy, and don’t have anything like the range in store that the OP needs. None of my locals even seem to have Intel in stock, its all AMD – and their range of in store fx cards is pretty poor generally.

And as for building it yourself – the pro is its really not that hard. The con – by the time you ordered parts, places like Yoyotech, Chillblast and the like, pc’s are actually cheaper prebuilt these days. I used to build my pc’s, years ago, but when I got this rig, I couldn’t buy the parts for the cost of getting it prebuilt – and on this pc, when I opened it up to add an extra hd, the cable maanagement inside was awesome.

@bruneep

Don’t know if this is of any interest, but I’m getting rid of this gaming pc:
classifieds clicky

Maplin can be very variable- my local ones have shelves choked with old crap kit that they can’t sell, and limited stock of good stuff as a result. I kinda thought they were all like that but I popped into one in that london and it was like it was a different chain- very good.

you can pretty much ignore all of the above, most of which isn’t relevant anyway. Your lad won’t care how loud it is

This is wrong.

….as is recommending that you buy from Maplins, I understand the peace of mind thing but quick comparison, 8 GB of memory is £80 even for slow stuff in maplins whereas today I bought 8GB of top end HyperX today for £19.99. An Intel i5 3570k, a chip that would be ideal for the system is £50 more expensive in maplins than scan, relate those kind of figures to a complete build and you are paying a small fortune for that peace of mind you speak of.

Arrrrgh my head hurts………….. Thanks for the input so far.

@ fakesounding the boy says he would’ve had that. 😥

This is almost as bad as buying lingerie for the wife 😐

So anyone care to spec me a build £700ish ? Chill blasts options are endless… 😕

Here you go 3770 16gb GTX660

http://www.aria.co.uk/Systems/Gaming+Range/Next+Day+Gaming+PCs/Gladiator+GTX-3770+Ivy+Bridge+Quad-Core+Next+Day+Gaming+PC+?productId=53182

…note no operating system on that last one (as far as I can see) so have to factor in the cost of Windows

Maplin sell overpriced outdated crap.
Building from scratch:
Intel core i5 (even from me who has all Amd kit!)
8gb of corsair or similar ddr 1600 memory.
Decent powersupply (corsair again for me)
Coolermaster case for aprox £70.
£90-£150 for either amd or nvidia graphics.
Add cooler, hdd, optical drives to suit.

Any more than that is excessive for all but the most committed gamer.

I would always spend extra on making it quiet, and dont forget a nice keyboard and mouse….both my kids love backlit keyboards. Daughter wants a gigabyte osmium for xmas!

Maplin sell overpriced outdated crap.

No it’s not outdated crap. Its the same stuff you get online, it’s just a little more expensive.

Lets agree to differ on maplin.
The ones in Leeds tend to stock a lot of no name motherboards and low end no name graphics cards and other components. The lack of recognised brands (eg saphire, corsiar, gigabyte etc), low turnover of stock and higher prices than ccl and overclockers means its the last place I would go for a pc.

I agree the staff are very helpful geeks of the finest order, and their special offers can be good on certain items, but they specialise in buying random kit from the far east and flogging it at huge mark ups. Lovely shop, for novelties or proper electronics.

I’m not a fan of self build unless you want to do it specifically for the achievement etc. Buying all the bits at retail means it’s very hard to do it for the same price as an unbranded pre-built system and if something doesn’t work you could be dealing with several warranties (it can often be difficult to confirm if certain issues are motherboard or RAM for example and if you got them from different places then getting replacements could be an issue). My pre-built system from Over-clockers was DoA, but one phone call, one courier collection and 4 days later I had a working system returned.

Time was, a self build saved you a fortune over a retail box. These days, the reverse is true.

The only compelling reason I can see to build from scratch (other than ‘it’s fun’) is if you’re an enthusiast with very specific preferences regarding what components you want.

Have a look into getting him a decent headset (headphones with attached microphone) – essential kit for a decent online gaming experience.

Load vs Quiet – don’t worry about it. You can make PCs quiet easily, the internet is full of forums full of kids your son’s age dedicated to tinkering with this sort of thing. Modern non-OEM CPU heatsinks use large, quiet fans – as do modern PSUs. Modern GPUs have quieter dual slot cooling. There won’t be anything in the case that’s loud – it’ll just be the case fans themselves. These are easy and cheap to muck about with later down the line.

So the boy has chosen http://www.chillblast.com/pconf.php?productid=18109 Is anything worth changing now at point of purchase.

Ta

Wireless Networking….otherwise limited to cable distance of router

Get an SSD for the system drive. Best £70 you’ll spend on a PC at the moment.