My son wants a gaming PC .
he currently plays XBOX , and he has no specific requirements .
Went to a shop today and seller said gaming laptop would be better , and cheaper compared to a tower ?
what do i need to look out for ?
I have no clues . and the laptop he showed me was a Lenovo for 680euros . good towers were starting at 700 euros plus , plus screen etc....
we are in france if that makes any difference .
Gaming laptops are more expensive and not as fast so the guy is telling porkies.
PS Specialist are good. We have an older gaming laptop and it was about £1,200 but it's graphics capabilities aren't a patch on my son's gaming pc for similar money.
Towers can be upgraded easily.
I don’t like gaming laptops fundamentally.
First and foremost PC gaming is as much about upgrading and tweaking as it is actually playing games - you can’t do much with a laptop.
All our first line support guys cut their teeth building gaming machines, they can’t stand gaming laptops.
Not to mention like-for-like laptops are less powerful.
You need to set a budget as things can easily get out of hand.
Your biggest spends will be the CPU and the graphics card, followed by RAM. You'll also need an SSD and a normal hard drive (the SSD boots incredibly quickly).
The gaming laptop has a 1TB SSD and a 1TB hard drive, but the Tower has a 256gb SSD for the operating system, but two 2GB hard drives for game storage.
I bought the laptop as my son had just been diagnosed as Type 1 and it was a way to allow him to play games at hospital and home and away. This sparked his PC interest and within a year he was building his gaming tower.
As P-Jay says, the building of it, and having super neat cabling and lighting is part of the fun of tower PC's.
The sales man is having you on, I would ignore him to a point.
You do not NEED an SSD, especially as its for your son, I'm pretty sure he wont be fussed with loading speeds of the operating system or speeds between loading screens in game.
Depending on what games your son whats to play, you can build a PC to suit. You could potentially pick up a 2nd hand tower for a couple of hundred Euro, or buy a pre-built for more or again, ask around here for a decent spec (with your given budget) and i'm sure some of us could give you a spec list and you and your son can build it together.
thanks guys , will investigate further but laptop idea is out of the window .
Yeh, ignore the laptop. If you can, an SSD is a the number one speed demon upgrade for general use, but they add cost. It's an easy upgrade later on, when your lad loads lots of drivers and stuff, but that can be done dead easy a year or two later and there is free software to do it. Your lad will have upgrades on his Xmas lists !!!
I'm a bit of an SSD skeptic, I think they're pretty overrated but these days an OS-sized SSD can be had for £30-£40 and that's pretty worthwhile. It won't be the best but it'll do the job. And it's so much easier to do it on day 1.
I always build my own- you can really get a good balance and put the money where you want it, and as above, if you can do it yourself then that pays dividends in future too for upgrades, overclocking, stuff like that. And because it's such an enthusiast market, you can always pick up slightly outdated kit for less- most of this PC was bought used and is built of top end kit like my i7 processor, which had just been replaced by a new generation of top end. But I suspect at this price a built system might be more economic.
<p>Look at AMD Ryzen for a budget way in. R5 2420G has on board APU and is supposed to be pretty decent, that means you don't have to spend megabucks on a graphics card until either production ramps up or cryptocurrency whales find something else to ruin. Just for gods sake make sure you check your motherboard and RAM compatibility, this current gen has issues that the next gen will have sorted but until then certain varients of the same RAM don't work (or would proabbly be fairer to say do work as they seem to be the exception rather than the rule). I plotted out a build a while back so can point you in the right direction if you like.</p><p></p><p>Logical Increments is a great guide to current builds. FWIW their "entry" build is still more powerful than the 10 year old Core2 quad I'm still running so don't think you're being a cheapskate. Use that in conjunction with PCPartPicker to find where to buy components cheapest and you can get a pretty tidy build for not much outlay when compared to a console. As far as RAM goes I'd say 8GB is probably the sweet spot and worth spending a bit extra on.</p>
What sort of games does he want to play? For the budget you're talking about he's going to end up playing games at console framerates & resolution so not a lot of point unless it's PC only stuff like WoW he wants to get into. PCs are great for gaming (and I can't stand consoles personally) but you have to pay a lot to get something noticeably better than a current gen console
I’m a bit of an SSD skeptic, I think they’re pretty overrated but these days an OS-sized SSD can be had for £30-£40 and that’s pretty worthwhile. It won’t be the best but it’ll do the job. And it’s so much easier to do it on day 1.
Really? Maybe I'm impatient but an SSD has been the biggest quality of life upgrade on any PC I've used. It doesn't do much for gaming once everything is loaded and running, but there's a lot of games that load much quicker on an SSD and the PC will be more responsive in general.
Definitely get a 250GB one in there unless budget is really tight, 500 would be better.
Look at PCPartPicker builds at your budget and just go with one of those.
If it's going to get use other than pure gaming I'd start with an AMD entry level CPU, 8gb memory, a 256gb SSD (easy to manage game installs as and when playing through them on Steam as opposed to keeping everything installed) and then the fastest discrete GPU in your budget.
Cheap mobo, entry PSU from a good company and budget casr.
Should be doable at your budget unless prices have gone up again since Christmas.
update :
would this one be good enough for Fortnite :
https://www.amazon.fr/gp/product/B06XSFP2MR/ref=ox_sc_act_title_1?smid=A2PMBAYX6G8IJ&psc=1
It's a funny build that one, the CPU in it is a bit long in the tooth, and the platform (am3) is EOL.
You'd be better off with a ryzen system (am4) if you want an AMD build.
I'm not familiar with AMD builds but if you went with an Intel/Nvidia build you're going to be looking at about £1000 (inc. monitor) for something that will play Fortnite smoothly at 1080 (steady 60fps) (an i5-7xxx, 8GB RAM, 1060 GPU). But that's console performance so unless he really hates having a controller for FPS games (I can understand why) then it will be a bit of a waste of money (unless there's other non-console games he wants to play).
To get something noticeably better performing than a console for Fortnite you're probably looking at £1500, the good news is that spec should be fine for most games for the next 3-5 years (you'll need to reduce graphics detail/quality over time but it doesn't detract much from the gaming experience).
SSD skeptic? What's there to be skeptic about? 500+ mb/s read-write speed vs hdd at like maybe 80mb/s. For big modern games SSDs can reduce loading time and reduce in game stuttering massively. The game I've been playing the most recently (DCS World) pretty much requires an SSD to play due to the size of the maps and the number of models etc being loaded in.
Depending on what you want to spend.
I would recommend:
intel i5 or equivalent AMD cpu (I don't know my AMD but their ryzen cpus are supposedly really good)
A compatible Mobo
NVidia 1060 6gb GPU (at least)
8GB DDR4 ram (preferably 1x8gb stick for upgrading later)
SSD ~256GB (allows for OS and a few games then), or a smaller one for just the OS
HDD +1TB
Then obviously you need a monitor, keyboard, headset/speakers, mouse... Sometimes you can find bundles of keyboard, mouse and headset on amazon. Monitors can be had for about £100 1080p(HD) and 60Hz refresh rate.
That's a good start and fairly robust setup so you wont need to upgrade it substantially for a few years.
I think he has a point to be fair, my gaming PC has a 1TB NVMe + 4TB hybrid HDD, I run virtually all games off the 4TB HDD. Sure some games, with a lot of in-game loading, can benefit from SSD performance but most won't (Fortnite wouldn't). So whilst an SSD primary drive is generally a sensible recommendation I think if trying to maximise gaming performance on a tight budget you're probably better off spending the money elsewhere.
The principal contrast will be video card, however, there are more subtle things that can cause issues like a PSU not being sufficiently intense to run a decent video card or your motherboard being physically too little to introduce it (or not giving you a chance to utilize some other extension openings you may require for other stuff.
Went to a shop today and seller said gaming laptop would be better , and cheaper compared to a tower ?
what do i need to look out for ?
Salesmen talking bollocks.
As others have said, a gaming PC will be a significant cost to build something appreciably better than a current-gen console. I think I'd want to at least ask why he wants it particularly before dropping North of a grand on a PC.
At that price range Im not sure what works out better, building your own or buying a whole pc.
Have you tried the sub reddit build your own pc?
When I last looked (a year or so ago) it seemed around the £1500-1750 point where it made sense (financially) to self-build, but even then only just (and that's not factoring in any value for having a single contact for warranty issues). I self-built mine but it ended up costing me more as I had a faulty motherboard but the manufacturer washed their hands of it saying I'd broken CPU pins (it worked fine for 6 weeks albeit with me having to reduce CPU voltage to have it run stably so pins couldn't have been broken on installation but I didn't closely check the pins before sending the board back (or thought to take photos if everything had looked fine) so if there really were damaged pins it would have been during CPU removal or in transit/at the manufacturer), I couldn't prove it though (I could have tried small claims etc. but I figured it probably wouldn't go anywhere)
Cost me another £200+ to buy a replacement - I doubt I'll self-build again but barebones kits are probably a good compromise.
I am not sure what the current equivalent is, but we bought one of our sons this laptop for Christmas 2016:
It runs Ark (much) better than the PS4 and also runs fortnight well.
It was £600 at the time, seems to be well built and we have not had any issues with it.
As per another post above the biggest factor in gaming performance is the graphics card. It’s important to remember monitor resolution as we though.
I thought about upgrading my aging second gen i5 (Sandybridge) but that would require a new motherboard and RAM as well so in the end just went for an nVidia 1060GTX 6Gb and this will run any current game at a respectable frame rate but then I only have a 1920x1200 monitor. If you go for a qhd or 4K screen you’re going to need something much more powerful to run at native resolution.
As for cpu the new Ryzen v2’s look very good - a Ryzen 5 v2 with 8 gb ram would be a solid entry point.
I use an ssd for boot purposes and then a large capacity spinner for games storage. Works very nicely.
Late reply but this is fairly decent, if a little over budget..
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My daughter is looking at a gaming desktop, but it's going to be budget compared to my sons (their own money saved).
Given the games she plays run perfectly well on a HP i5 laptop, we are going to use the integrated graphics on either a i5 8400 or an i3 8350k until she has enough cash for a graphics card. This should keep the initial build to about £450 for the base unit, as she already had a big monitor and gaming keyboard/mouse.