Desktop PC for the home

Looking into buying a PC that we can connect to the TV, initial plan was to let our 4 year old continue her ICT stuff at home from school, some streaming and general browsing.

I have since found out Fall Out 4 is coming out soon, and rather than buying a PS4 or Xbox One a PC would do.

Stuck between getting a micro PC such as Intel NUC – i7 or i5 or Gigabyte Brix with AMD A8

Or a custom made, but small – however having been out of desktop PCs for many years, I have no idea what to spec.

What specification should I be looking for? What are Intel’s onboard graphics like these days?

Or getting a custom made.

I’ve been out of the desktop

Custom.

Look up Steambox, one of the posters on here made his own for less than the cost of an XBone IIRC. Your main restriction will be form factor, personally I’d go with something like an Antec Fusion for living room looks with plenty of air space then deck it out as you please.

Nothing much has changed over the years, micro-pcs are fine for media centres but will shit the bed if you try to do any decent gaming on them.

Fallout 4 will require a monster graphics card to play at decent resolution…..I’d budget for a grand minimum

NUC’s are perfect for small desktop and media center but even the new I7 ones cant handle intense graphics (onboard gfx)

I’d look at building it yourself and overclockers.co.uk would be my first choice to look for hardware.

Form factor is your limit when building a gaming machine as decent graphics cards these days aren’t small. Also decent PSU required for any graphics card worth its salt….these will not fit in a ITX case

Fallout 4 will require a monster graphics card to play at decent resolution…..I’d budget for a grand minimum

*cough*bullshit*cough*

If you feel the need to spend a grand to play a game at “decent resolution” then you’re getting ripped off. TV is 1080, my sub £500 Core2 with a 2yo card can manage just about everything comfortably at high settings at that resolution. My main bottleneck is the ‘ancient’ CPU if I’m honest otherwise I’d be hitting Ultra-town.

squirrelking – Member
*cough*bullshit*cough*

😆

Quirrel – Member

Stuck between getting a micro PC such as Intel NUC – i7 or i5 or Gigabyte Brix with AMD A8

I would go with Intel NUC i7/i5 as Gigabyte can be a bit loud by comparison when the fan kicks in … apparently.

For the reasons explained above, I would go with neither.

I want to transport 6 bikes and as many people, I’ve not been in the car buying game for a few years though. Do I want a Ford Fiesta or a Honda Jazz? Or should I get something suitable for my purposes that isn’t an overpriced Volkswagen commercial vehicle?

One grand is total overkill. I priced up a gaming rig for a friend the other week and got it to roughly £500 for a seriously good spec including the latest line Nvidea GTX 960 graphics card. You can email me if you want and i’ll send you some specs.

Have a look at the Toms Hardware system builds.

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/build-budget-gaming-pc,review-33134.html

A 960 is not high end.

What does it score in 3Dmark Firestrike?

Scores for comparison:
7000: 7970 and i7 920 both overclocked by about 20/40% respectively

8000: same GPU, Xeon 5650 @ 4ghz (£50 chip in old mobo)

10000: Xeon plus GTX970

17000: Xeon plus SLI’d 970s (99%th percentile score at 1080p)

On a budget 7970/R9 285

More £ GTX 970.

And this is why the last time I wanted a gaming PC I bought a console.

Why, Cougar?

Here’s the link to all the current example systems from Tom’s hardware.

http://www.tomshardware.com/t/build-your-own/

Don’t get me wrong, the 960 is a decent card, I just don’t think it’s high end.

strikes me that it’s entirely possible to miss not a lot in term of gaming these days and save a shedload of cash if you just work to realease dates fro 2/3 years in the past! 😆

Maybe i’m just getting old! 😀

Okay yes it’s not ‘high end’ but it is in this years latest card lineup and you will get amazing performance. I built my pc about 5 years ago and have a 460 which is still able to play games on ultra or near enough. I read a comparison between the 460 and 960, it came out with 2.5x better FPS. The price difference between the 980 and 960 is huge. Your call at the end of day whether or not if you want to spend mega bucks or build a good solid rig that’ll give any console a run for its money 🙂

Can’t comment on the PC gaming spec (wish I had time for that) but this requirement:

to let our 4 year old continue her ICT stuff at home

Could easily be met by a £30 Raspberry Pi (which may free up some cash for spends graphics cards!)

^ Last time I built a PC was when Voodoo still used pass through cables and everything was single core.

I will look at the Tom’s hardware. I had given it a go reading some basic builds, but decided it would be more efficient to ask the hive mind here for some real life advice.

I did consider simply getting a dirt cheap Win 8.1 media centre for home use and simply trying to play falout and any games that come out on my Surface.

A day of reading ahead.

I liked the small coolmaster boxes I saw yesterday which were about a foot cubed.

It used to be the case you could save by building your own PC but these days there is very little in it as margins are razor thin on PC components across the board.

For example this PC from scan will run most things :

http://www.scan.co.uk/3xs/configurator/cheap-amd-gaming-pc-next-day-delivery-uk-g20a

Only £432 which is a great price.

I have the R7 graphics card and it runs for example, Shadow of Mordor and Skyrym at plenty high enough detail.

Only if you go to resolutions above 1920×1200 do you need more oomph from you card.

You won’t be able to build a PC of the same spec for much less than that if at all.

Can highly recommend scan as a company also. Would choose them over overclockers any day.

They of course have some more pricey options which even more POWER!

Look up Steambox, one of the posters on here made his own for less than the cost of an XBone IIRC.

That was me:

Steambox

follow up:

Steambox Experience

Obviously 18months later you’d get a bit faster for the same money now.

Why, Cougar?

The constant bloody arms race (and the inevitable pissing contest it generates in some circles).

I’ve been there. I’ve been gaming since every new title required fiddling with CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT to get the bloody thing to work. The last desktop PC I bought cost me £1500 (in the 3DFX days as Quirrel says) and even with rolling upgrades it was obsolete practically as soon as I’d got it home. You spend a second mortgage on a GFX card to find that all of a sudden games require a new version of DirectX or pixel shaders and you’ve once again got an expensive paperweight. It’s a fool’s errand.

My gaming these days is on the 360 and every game I’ve ever bought since it was new eight years ago Just Works. At some point I’ll replace it with a One and will expect to get several years out of that too. The laptop I replaced the desktop with is good for indie titles and retro games – I’ve got like 200 games in Steam most of which I’ve never even downloaded. Sure, PC games are “better” – higher res, greater frame rate, moddable etc, but I don’t for a second regret getting out of that silliness.

I don’t doubt that for some it’s the preferred route and I’m not criticising those who choose it, but I simply haven’t got the surplus cash to fund that sort of habit any more. It’s not for me.

I think a ZX Spectrum will be adequate for all your needs failing that a Comodore 64 will suffice as well.

Many thanks I’m going back to play on my game and watch now.

If you want a pre-built PC then it may be worth having a look at the Dell outlet. http://www.dell.com/uk/dfh/p/
Picked up an absolute beast of a Precision 7810 desktop (for work purposes) a couple of weeks ago with dual graphics cards, dual processors, 32gb ram etc for much less than it would cost to buy the bits separately. Supposedly it has a scratched/damaged case but we have yet to spot the damage. Delivery does take about 7-10 days though.

I think a ZX Spectrum will be adequate for all your needs

I bought one of those last month, but thanks for the suggestion.

The constant bloody arms race

While I have the deepest respect for m’learned collegue, I have to point out a flaw in his arguement – viz:

This hasn’t really been the case in the last couple of years, certainly not like it was in the era which he’s thinking of. Power consumption has come down quite a lot, but performance hasn’t increased anywhere near as fast as that [hence my kickass graphics points posts above on the ancient X58 platform]

The older AMD chips are still competing well against the newer NVIDIA ones, and I urge you to consider AMD, as NVIDIA are a cunch of bunts:

http://www.reddit.com/comments/367qav/

Part of the reason for the slowdown in the PC Graphics performance is the lack of competition between AMD vs Intel and AMD vs NVIDIA. In both cases AMD has been the victim of anti-competitive practise of one sort or another, and this unfair competition is holding the entire industry back.

Last point, the CPU+GPU [‘APU’] in the Xbone and PSSST4 is actually an AMD APU, so you could build a PC/steambox that is basically an ‘open’ console. I am no expert on APUs though, so you’ll have to figure that one out for yourself [hint – fast RAM].

Nonetheless, here’s a very recent rundown of GPUs

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-graphics-card-review,3107.html

I think Cougars lost the plot. How he thinks his latest components are obsolete as soon as he walks through his door is beyond me. People are still buying two year olds GTX 770s and having a great time gaming. Must be doing something catastrophically wrong.

People are still buying two year olds GTX 770s and having a great time gaming.

I think you’re missing his point that he is still happily playing games on his Xbox 360 TEN YEARS after it was first launched.

Compared to that the upgrade cycle on gaming PCs is painfully short.

I disagree. Why not just keep playing the same games? It’s still the hardware.

I remember splashing out silly money on an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro, back in 2003 specifically to play Half-Life 2. To be fair, I was into PC hardware/gaming at the time, and had a top spec monster (phase-change cooling, water cooling, etc)

It took a while until I was tempted to the darkside – consoles – but I would never buy a PC for gaming again.
I love the simplicity of the 360… insert DVD, play…

Part of the reason for the slowdown in the PC Graphics performance is the lack of competition between AMD vs Intel and AMD vs NVIDIA. In both cases AMD has been the victim of anti-competitive practise of one sort or another, and this unfair competition is holding the entire industry back.

My current PC is an Athlon II x4 640 bought in 2009 so getting on for 6 years old. I think the processor cost me about £80 at the time, a new pc will mean a new motherboard and cpu, the same pricepoint nowadays only get’s me something 25-30% faster than my 6 year old processor which is a bit disappointing!

OP:

Here you go, a simple PC suitible for games @ 1080p for under £575 including Windows 8.1

http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/p/JcWfLk

I’m sure with a bit of effort that could be trimmed back or expanded to include an SSD or 16Gb ram.

Dammit man, don’t answer his question, there’s arguing to be done 😉

Buy a console for gaming and a laptop (with monitor/screen/keyboard) for everything else.

Cheapest way, and both will do 5 years quite happily doing what they do.

Dammit man, don’t answer his question, there’s arguing to be done

No there isn’t. (-:

This hasn’t really been the case in the last couple of years,

That may well be the case, I haven’t looked in several years now. As I said, it’s why I got out, that was seven or eight years ago. I think I got the Xbox in 2007 and a laptop in 2008, and both are still going strong today. I’m just now considering upgrading the Xbox, and I’m in no hurry to go that as I’ve got months of gaming lined up for the old console still.

People are still buying two year olds GTX 770s

That’s a two year old card which a quick Google would suggest still has an RRP of £240 (I shudder to think how much it cost when it was new!). I could get an Xbox One for that sort of money. Care to take a wager on which one will still be usable for modern gaming in seven years’ time?

My current PC is an Athlon II x4 640 bought in 2009

Pffft.

My current home PC is a Athlon 64 x2 3800 – I paid £252 for that CPU back in 2005 so I’m damn well getting my money’s worth!

It also sports a Radeon X800XL 256MB with fanless heatpipe cooling (£200 back in 2005).

And it runs Vista x64! Yeah baby 😀

(actually last night I salvaged a crappy ATA drive from our old Humax PVR, bodged it into the PC and installed Win7 on it – purely so I can blag the free Windows 10 license! 🙂 )

Weighing in again.

Current spec:

ASUS P5G41T-M LX
Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6850 CPU – 3.0GHz, 2x4Mb cache, 1333 FSB
8gb Corsair Vengence DDR3
Sapphire HD7850 OC 1GB overclocked from the box
Antec 550W Truepower PSU
Coolermaster Hyper 212 Evo heatsink
WD Caviar Black 500GB HDD

Been running the above since 2012 (besides the GPU as the old 4650 dies 2 years ago). Easily keeping up with modern stuff, the processor was second hand and TBH is the only part I feel the need to upgrade as CPU bound throttling is becoming an occasional problem in Planetside 2.

It’s not the arms race it once was, I paid less than £500 all in. Spec it right and a decent gaming rig will last years.

In seven years time I’d have thought the technology will have progressed so much that gaming on a 7 year old xbox the games will have had to be cut down on all of the graphical options that would be possible on newer systems. At the end of the day of you choose a pc build carefully youd be able to get the same amount of use out of it… Doesn’t even have to be expensive.

Don’t get be wrong I’ve always loved my Xbox for simplicity but the lack of customisation and accessories really hamper its potential. Also consoles are for kids 😉

Dammit man, don’t answer his question, there’s arguing to be done

No there isn’t. (-:[/quote]

Actually, I think we’re all trying to help. I just like taking the piss outta myself.

In seven years time I’d have thought the technology will have progressed so much that gaming on a 7 year old xbox the games will have had to be cut down on all of the graphical options that would be possible on newer systems

You say that but,

I don’t think I really care, and I’m not sure as I ever have. My 360 might not be able to do 60fps Ultra detail at 4K resolution, but it still has its moments where I think “ooh, that’s pretty.” Towards the end of life of a console, developers are really pushing the envelope of what they can do with it.

Thinking about it, I guess PC games tend to rely on hardware more, because they can. If you play a new game on a five year old PC, you’ll probably have to set all the graphic options to ‘low’ and it’ll potentially look worse than a fiver year old game; in contrast, a new console game will look better than a five year old title as the devs have got more proficient with the platform. </rash generalisation>

And don’t get me wrong, I do miss the PC gaming and there are some things which just don’t translate well to consoles or have to be dumbed down. But I think what it boils down to though is I’ve bought the t-shirt and simply can’t be arsed any more, I’d rather just sit down and play something on a big TV rather than frob about with it.

Different strokes for different folks innit

You could even buy a secondhand console and save more money!

I’d rather just sit down and play something on a big TV rather than frob about with it.

Pretty sure Green Day said something about that in a song….

I’ve been around the shops today asking at a couple for build prices.

For around 320 GBP AMD A10 8GB 128GB SSD + 1TB HDD , some fancy power supply and keyboard and mouse.

For 420GBP
– I5 4690 8GB mini ITX cube case – same ssd and hdd + GT730 2G DR3

However, having sat here and read this, it makes me wonder if I should get the I3 powered Nuc or similar, and a console.

Whoever it was thaqt had about the 3GFX.

I had the competitor to Voodoo for a couple of days, but it was so bad, with no pass through cable, that I took it back to Game and changed it for a Voodoo 1, with I think, 16mb ram.

GT730

Probably a bad idea. Any non-GTXseries NVIDIA card will usually really suck. You need to do your own research, but if the machine is built with gaming as a priority in any sense, I’d definitely not recommend that!

http://www.3dmark.com/fs/3595098 = GT730 = 2,000 3dmarks [GPU]

http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/3293157 = GTX 750Ti = 4,400 3dmarks [GPU]

And that’s ^^^ still an entry-level card.

EDIT: DDR3? Nope nope nope.

EDIT2: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-gt-730-announcement,27087.html
Read the comments.

EDIT3: http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/review/graphics-cards-pc-upgrades/radeon-r7-240-vs-geforce-gt-730-review-3597245/

You’re looking at circa 20FPS at 1080p 😯

“OUR VERDICT
The 128bit MSI GT 730 is the best card here, although the Radeon R7 240 isn’t far behind. However, if you’re serious about playing games and can stretch your budget another £20, we would highly recommend it as the Radeon R7 250X is a far better card. The truth is that none of these three £45 cards are really good enough.”

EDIT 4 – If you want to game, ditch the SSD and put the money into a decent GPU.