Looking to build a PC as a Christmas present for me/my kids. They are keen to get modding minecraft etc and it is either this or a PS5. Seeing as PS5’s are like hens teeth a PC it is. Budget is fairly fluid but aiming at around £600. I like gaming but get that this isn’t going to be a monster at this kind of price. Also want to be able to output and use on the TV in the lounge and a monitor in a bedroom. Not sure what the best way of doing this would be?

So, first things first I guess.. Where to situate the PC (living room or bedroom) and form factor. Mini or mid ATX? Space is at a bit of a premium both in the living room and the bedroom. Guess I would prefer to situate in the bedroom if possible but think the living room will get used most.

I am considering Mini ATX or Mid ATX Any considerations to be given to either?

Cheers,

I don’t know much about your questions but I take it you know about this site?

https://uk.pcpartpicker.com

Budget doesn’t need to include monitor btw. Just the actual PC (assuming peripherals aren’t extortionate).

grum
Free Member
I don’t know much about your questions but I take it you know about this site?

https://uk.pcpartpicker.com

Hadn’t seen that before but looks really useful. Last time I build myself a PC was around 2001 and built from parts from a PC fair!

Also, from reading around AMD seems to be the way to go at this price so wil probably be aiming towards a Ryzen build if that helps/makes any difference at all.

Ryzen 3400g (£125) would save you the cost of a graphics card and will run most games on mid settings.

You could go miniATX but by the time you’ve added wifi cards is there any point in not getting an ITX motherboard, and case and making it even smaller.

Sending HDMI over long distances isnt cheap. Id work out how you plan to do that first, it would be quite easy to spend more trying to do that than to buy a PC that could deliver better graphics than the link can deliver anyway!

Not many people need full ATX these days, micro ATX is a good compromise, mini ITX is smaller still but most components cost more and the smaller end of cases can be tricky to build – plus if you’re using a full size GPU then the case won’t be that small anyway.

Something like this would do nicely: https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/bq39jp

As said, 3400g would mean you could get going without a separate GPU and drop one in later.

Steam Link used to be a good solution for sending display down to a TV – the hardware isn’t sold any more but the software is available to run on a Raspberry Pi 4.

Hmm… I hadn’t realised that multiroom was going to be such a pain. Thought it would be “get x graphics card with 2 hdmi outputs” and that would essentially be that. It appears that any solution is likely to be outside the actual PC build itself so perhaps I should ignore this requirement for the moment if it isn’t going to actually affect the component choice. Would an old laptop with a remote desktop connection to the new PC be a suitable solution?

Admittedly not tried it but I can’t imagine gaming via RDP would be a good experience, I guess Minecraft isn’t too graphics intensive though.

What are you wanting from the two display output? To be able to play either from the living room or bedroom or play in one location and just watch from the other?

If playing from both locations you’d probably need to look at a gaming laptop although £600 might be optimistic (although Minecraft would likely be OK). I guess a small base unit would work to – for convenience you’d want a USB dock in both locations with keyboard, mouse and local display connected so you just need to plug the dock into the laptop/base unit each time.

Personally I’d wait on a PS5, although that’s going to be a pain moving about frequently to.

@thisisnotaspoon – Thats backwards. Most mini ITX boards have built in wifi. Its really only ATX baords that dont have wifi built in, nearly every mini itx board I’ve just looked at has built in wifi.

If you think of big ATX boards and their builds, gonna be a big/medium rig in a fixed location so can just pop in ethernet cable or will have adequate space for a wifi card. Mini itx boards go in smaller cases that can be portable with less space thus needing a built in wifi.

@OP – check out the pre builds on pcpartpickers, they have some good budget builds you cna tweak

Multiroom could probably be addressed using an Nvidia Shield to stream to the other rooms from the PC. They’re small (the non pro is tiny) and gameplay is quite good on Gamestream.

this any good to you https://www.hotukdeals.com/deals/amd-ryzen-5-budget-pc-3552714

Before people start down the remote screen thing – how far apart are the two rooms ? a 10m HDMI cable really isn’t too difficult to get hold of …

Maybe wait for ryzen 4000 APU pc’s to hit the shelves, in a week or two. I have a 3400g and even for emulators I added a rx560. Playing any modern games on it would need lowest graphics settings. 4000’s look a lot quicker in press releases at least.

I can’t imagine gaming via RDP would be a good experience,

Windows 10 has screen mirroring. “Project to this PC” or something. It’s Miracast in all but name, probably considerably better performance than RDP for this sort of thing.

A better question might be, once you’ve cabled / cast your display to another room 10 metres away, how are you expecting your controllers going to work? You can do it from an Xbox, I’m not so sure about from another PC.

You could look at something like this Mini PC – Ryzen 7 4700u, just add Ram and an NVMe SSD & your good to go.
https://www.ebuyer.com/990699-asus-amd-ryzen-7-4700u-ddr4-mini-pc-pn50-bbr049md

My pc at home is an Intel 8th Gen version of the above and it copes well enough with Chrome, a few virtual machines and Ableton

NVMe SSD

NVMe M.2 on that.