Our hunt for a cheap pc for the little fella (8 years old) is hitting a brick wall,
We wanted to buy a pc for about £300, that will be mainly used for playing Minecraft, and watching youtube, I was in the local computer place the other day, but all of the builds that they were suggesting were probably hitting the £500 price, and in truth, I don't really know what I'm buying.
Through work, I can get a small discount from Dell, and I've seen this, which we'll get for about £470, which is way over what I wanted to pay, but as a family PC, I may consider paying. What's the verdict anyhow?
http://www.dell.com/uk/p/alienware-x51-r2/pd?ref=PD_OC
I'd check the spec and price a one elsewhere as Alienware tend to be pricey.
Did you try Computer Orbit?
Novatech used to do good value builds and a quick google reveals this is still the case...
http://www.novatech.co.uk/pc/gaming/
This is my last thread here
Pm me, I might be able to get you a better dell discount.
Try Chillblast - always well recommended in the mags.
YGM Hot Fiat
[url=
Budget Gaming PC Build[/url]. Use onboard graphics or drop the graphics card to something around like an AMD 6450 to bring it down close to the original budget. Add a more powerful card back in later along with an SSD if he gets into gaming more seriously.
Cool. You should have a reply
Cheers people, as an aside, does Minecraft actually require any real computing power?
Some but not huge amounts hence the buy a better graphics card at a later date comment above.
You can alter the video settings, but it will still grab as much cpu as it can get, on my i5 Macbook as an example running it for a few mins saw a total CPU utilisation between 45% and 75% ish.
I'd agree with the other posters get one with integrated graphics in the CPU to start with that you can add a graphics card to later if needed. AMD has the lead in the performance stakes when it comes to the graphics grunt when its built into a CPU, but their CPU performance is lower than Intel.
This spec comes in under your budget >>
Noting that you will need to add to that price for Windows but they can supply Windows 7 on a disc, so no crapware included.
Stay away from the alienware man,it's a £300 PC with a £40 graphics card
We bought a secondhand box from ebay and put a £60 graphics card in it, plenty quick enough.
I think in all of this, the most important thing is that it needs to look cool to an 8 year old.
@Drac, I tried Falcon in Sunderland, but they were a bit to 'enthusiast' for me. I think they assumed that I knew what they were talking about.
My 8yr old is very happy playing Minecraft & watching YouTube on a £99 base station from tier1online.co.uk.
Has 160gb hard drive, 4gb of ram & comes with 64bit Windows 7 Pro. All ex IT stuff, but kids arent that fussed.
Honestly can't fault it. Meant we could spend more on a decent 24" screen for it.
And when he does fiddle & mess it up it's easy to reinstall Windows.
These look Ok Paul and nearby to you.
Don't take the Minecraft requirement and then go looking for 'gaming' PCs. Gaming PCs are (or should be) very powerful machines for getting the very best performance out of the most demanding games. I may be wrong but I don't think Minecraft is one of these despite being a game.
Most games normal people play (ie not uber hardcore gaming geeks) will play on any old thing.
Cheers Drac. I might have a punt at that!
If all you want it for is playing Minecraft and a bit of light Webbage, would something like a PS3 not be a better spend than a PC?
Or come to that, a tablet of some form (they run "Minecraft Pocket", what the difference is I've no idea)?
(Also: What Molgrips said. You don't want a 'gaming PC', you want a 'PC').
These guys were recommended in a recent PC thread I started...
[url= http://www.aria.co.uk/ ]http://www.aria.co.uk/[/url]
Very reasonable prices, very helpful on phone. I'm probably gonna buy from them.
If all you want it for is playing Minecraft and a bit of light Webbage, would something like a PS3 not be a better spend than a PC?
Or come to that, a tablet of some form (they run "Minecraft Pocket", what the difference is I've no idea)?
We've got an XBOX, which is where the majority of Minecraft gets played, however he's turned to using my Mac mini, for designing skins and all the rest of it. I'm quite keen to get him involved in a 'proper computer' though, as I think it will be quite useful in an educational manner.
Ah, fair enough.
Presumably you'll need to budget for a monitor as well, then.
I've got a 24" viewsonic monitor spare, with a vga input. So we're good for that.