Apologies, this has been done to death on here but a recent 20% off offer from Very had me thinking about what they offer, pre-built, for convenience and warranty support.

https://www.very.co.uk/electricals/gaming-pcs/gaming-towers/e/b/118781.end;jsessionid=iiuHditzmdSiobTQR2ZqlVmY2GdyvT9ytCLfes10uw1m_7DFYMre!-1768590221

Any thoughts on any of these, decent starter machines, top-end power houses, with 20% off the listed price. Probably looking to run Forza/flight simulator? Some reviews suggest they are upgradeable, so presume the gubbins for flexibility is built in?

EDIT, if anyone is kindly so minded to, pointers towards a good spec laptop too, for the son for GCSE level home schooling, not gaming.

Probably looking to run Forza/flight simulator?

Xbox, then?

Some reviews suggest they are upgradeable

As opposed to all those famously non-upgradable minitower PCs?

Get a quote off PC Specialist direct, might be cheaper – buy the top warranty.

Realistically, if you’re wanting to play the new MS Flight Sim, you’re going to struggle on any of those PCs from very. Prices have gone bonkers recently, and I think you’ll be knocking on the door of £1000 for anything even reasonably capable. Forza is much less taxing so you could get away with something less powerful but you’d still be looking at £600-700 minimum – they’re not £600+ PCs, you’d have paid £500 or less 6 months ago, it’s just the way prices are at the moment. If it’s just gaming you’re after then the new Xbox looks like the best bang for your buck by a very long way.

If you do want a gaming PC, look on places like cclonline.co.uk or awd-it.co.uk and pick something with a dedicated graphics card. This is about the best value I can find at the moment and would play Flight Sim no problem: https://www.awd-it.co.uk/awd-citadel-ryzen-5600x-six-core-4.6ghz-radeon-rx-5600xt-6gb-desktop-pc.html
but it still needs more and faster RAM, more storage and a better power supply

None of those – all overprices and stuffed in shockingly bad cases.

buy and build your own.

As for the home learning a basic chrome book will do.

Which would be the perfect advice if there were any components in stock anywhere.
Try getting a reasonable price for a Ryzen 5 5600X and a Radeon 5600XT as individual components if you can. Cheapest I can see is in excess of £700. Then you need case, PSU, memory, storage, WiFi card, etc. Suddenly £900 for a pre-built with the same components doesn’t sound as bad (even though technically it’s still way too much).

As opposed to all those famously non-upgradable minitower PCs?

You mean like the shit boxes Dell and the like used to pump out with proprietary IO panels, proprietary PSUs, proprietary mobos and anything else they could use to bugger any chance of you ever upgrading it?

I know times move on but people have long memories. FWIW I loved the Dell Dimension case I had as it was an absolute masterpiece in its day.

It’s not a great time to be buying a gaming pc right now.

I sold my 12 month old AMD 5700xt card for £600. It’s £350 brand new.

That’s the minimum card I’d be running right now for a gaming PC.

You’re gonna be looking at £1k+ for anything that’ll run 60fps on Forza and Flight Simulator.

You’re better off with an Xbox One X really, if you wanna spend less than £1k.

You mean like the shit boxes Dell and the like used to pump out with proprietary IO panels, proprietary PSUs, proprietary mobos and anything else they could use to bugger any chance of you ever upgrading it?

Is it 1995 again? Are you struggling to install NT4?

C’mon man. People have long memories, I as long as most, but is that realistic? This hasn’t been an issue in decades outside of SFF and all-in-one form factors, the last time I saw this sort of gratuitous proprietary nobbery in a minitower it had a Compaq badge on the front.

SFF PSUs are expensive for what they are, if you can find a decent one in stock.
I’d go for a normal, smallish proper ‘ATX’ case. ATX being the industry standard for components.

MS flight sim is a demanding game, so you’d want a fairly high end PC really, at current prices you’re looking at £1k minimum just for the PC, that’s before you buy a mouse or a monitor or anything else.

Prices are insane at the moment, my 4 year old graphics card I paid £250 for, is currently worth about £300 second hand.

Flight simulator is one of the most demanding games out there at the moment. The reaction reminds of when crysis came out a decade ago and no one’s pc could run it maxed out.

Prices are crazy as above.

I highly suggest using PC parts picker, start with a good airflow case (meshify C is the default), then set up a filtered search for 2 x gb of 3000MHZ ddr4 ram and a 1 tb SSD. Then pick a GPU and CPU and finally a compatible motherboard and PSU.

For CPU’s, AMD are typically better value, especially as they come with a half decent CPU cooler. GPU’s are immensely difficult to get hold off right now. I recently bought a 3060 ti and it took a week of jumping on discord stock alerts to get one, at a price inflated 15% above the original RRP (and that was from novatech!).

I’d expect to spend £800 in normal times for a decent entry level gaming rig. These days it’s more like £1000+.

Some great starting points here: https://pcpartpicker.com/guide/

Of those listed on the Very page, the Ryzen 5 3400g is both good and bad value. It’s the best bet without a separate graphics card, with Vega 11 graphics on the CPU chip, which are just below a 1050 graphics card for gaming. Trouble is you want FlightSim 2020, you need to jump in with a dedicated card to not be frustrating as heck on that, 1050ti, rx 580 as an absolute minimum, way better if you can. If you want a quick start and hold off on buying a dedicated card till prices (hopefully) drop after Covid, this will get you playing most games and you can drop the card in later.

As for buying a big name prebuilt, I’ve just bought, sworn at, and sent back a HP, because they’d locked you out of the BIOS settings and my extra stick of DDR4-3200 was defaulting to run at 2400 and no way to unthrottle it. I decided I didn’t mind this stuff if using a recycled office machine, but I wasn’t starting out like that after spending my own money on it.

At the time I did wonder why HP distanced their server arm and rebranded everything as HPE (‘E’ being ‘Enterprise’). Having since used some of their consumer-grade kit on occasion over the last few years I rather suspect that I now understand why.

C’mon man. People have long memories, I as long as most, but is that realistic?

I don’t know, I’ve never touched a corporate prebuilt since. That’s my point though, if I was browsing somewhere that would be at the back of my mind. Realistically it’s a non issue but sometimes you don’t know what you’re buying into.