have asked a similar question here a while ago,but once i have paid for the new arkham city/skyrim,instead of saving for some new lights as i was planning (my current lights are good enough tbh) i am planning on really trying to save some money for a good gaming pc.i cannot save anything crazy though (no £1500 plus super computers 😉 was hoping to be able to save £700 max (will take me at least 6 months though) thanks 🙂

Dude, do you ever get out? 🙂

i was out yesterday 😉

To GAME?

😛

Depends on what you already have (OS, case, monitor, keyboard etc) what you call decent, and what you want to run.

£400 upwards gets you a Athlon II X3 455 8GB RAM Radeon 5770 HD PC (w/o monitor) that on paper should easily be able to handle the latest MOH/BF1943/BFBC2.

700 is enough. For £750 I got a pretty well specced machine. Able to play Crysis on max graphics. It’s all down to the graphics card, amount of ram and processor, spend as much on those.

I havn’t played any games on my new system so can’t comment on that but for less than £500 I got a decent specced machine based around an AMD Phenom 1100T BE processor. The new AMD Bulldozer chips are due for release at some point soon (may already be out) but I wasn’t in the market for the latest, just the best I could get at the time for the cash I had available.

Basic spec:

AMD Phenom 1100T BE
Gigabyte 880GA-UDH3
8GB DDR3 Corsair RAM
500GB Seagate HDD (pulled from old system)
300GB Western Digital Velociraptor (pulled from old system)
XFX Nvidia 9800GTX+ (pulled from old system)
Samsung Blu Ray drive
Silverstone Raven RV02+ Case
Windows 7 64 Bit

Try aria. Some good systems on there or you could build one yourself. £400+ will get you something that is more than capable of playing most games. OCUK is also a good place to look and they have a great forum as well.

Mine is built around a core spec that was pretty damn good, 5 years ago. But dropping a new gfx card into it last week has brought it back up so it’ll happily run anything that’s out there on a 24 screen. Not at highest settings on some, I imagine, but not slouchily. Going to pop some more rams into it at some point just to give it a bit more oomph.

To hear some folks talk, it’s stoneaged and past-it but that doesn’t seem to be the case. And you could buy these unfashionable bits (Q6600 processor or similiar) for peanuts, overclock the bejabbers out of it, then drop a good card on top. Let’s say £400 even with a generous budget for case, coolers, etc and new Windows.

OverclockersUK

Build your own…

Specs wise, for gaming the GFX card is far more important than the processor and amount of RAM as you probably know. With that in mind I’d look at a spec like the following for a cheap gaming machine, somewhere around £400 all in with ok bits…

Core i3-2100 processor and suitable motherboard
4GB RAM (any more is pointless for gaming really and costs money better spent elsewhere)
ATI 6770 GFX card… At about £80 probably best bang for buck GFX card around now and should play any game at a high frame rate with high resolution.
500W+ PSU to make sure it’s got enough juice…

Quad core processors, flash motherboards and loads of RAM are all wasted on gaming machines. Nice to have for other reasons, but if you’ve got money spare that you want to blow, buy a better GFX card such as a 6870 for another £50…

Or buy a PS3/XBOX and several games, and get out on your bike a bit more often too! 😉

Or buy a PS3/XBOX and several games…

Eeek, they are soooooooooo shit compared to PC games in many ways, too simple/childish, crap controls…

thanks everyone,i should add that i have a 360 (am buying arkham city/skyrim for it).i agree that i should get out on my bike more though 😉 (that could be a problem come 11.11.11 😳

Alot of talk about graphics cards, CPU etc. Thats all for s**t without a high quality power supply, budget £80-£120 for that alone, around 650W will do but remember, its what powers all the other components mentioned above and new kit is greedy as hell, you need good clean power with steady rails.

Brake-neck – Member

Alot of talk about graphics cards, CPU etc. Thats all for s**t without a high quality power supply, budget £80-£12

No need to spend so much, it’s not something you want to cheap out on too much but £50 gets a decent enough Corsair GS600. You could probably go cheaper but that’s a quality bit of kit

Alot of talk about graphics cards, CPU etc. Thats all for s**t without a high quality power supply, budget £80-£120 for that alone, around 650W will do but remember, its what powers all the other components mentioned above and new kit is greedy as hell, you need good clean power with steady rails.

You only need spend serious money on a PSU if you’re going to be adding tonnes of peripheries, or running dual GFX cards really.

My 650W CoolerMaster PSU was about £55 and it’s 80+ rated, similar units with similar 5 year warranties are available from the likes of Corsair also. For a PC with only a single 5770, you’d not need more than 500W and this brings the price down to about £40-45 for anything half decent.

Look for Scan daily deal systems you’ll get a great i5 base unit often with 8G of Ram but 4 is fine and to upgrade at later date will cost about £30, add a Nvidia 460 or 560 and you’ll fall within budget. Forget Overclockers their days of being cheap are gone and their build quality is questionable.

As it happens Scans weeekend offer does just that http://www.scan.co.uk/todayonly/ with Nvidia 560 Ti and Windows 7 64bit from software4students and you’ll be sorted.

overclockers really ?

I second what Drac said, scan used to be awful but they seem to have improved loads and thier prices are good.

A good games system will need an equally powerful CPU to compliment the graphics card otherwise the CPU will create a bottleneck effect and you won’t get to see the peak performance of the card.

A good games system will need an equally powerful CPU to compliment the graphics card otherwise the CPU will create a bottleneck effect and you won’t get to see the peak performance of the card

Yup and why mboy may be right no need for quadcore just now, you’ll need one within weeks as BF3 will really benefit from this and the extra ram plus good quality card. The next gen games are on their way may as well get ready for them now instead of doing a half way job.