It’s has been a long time since I last built a gaming PC (15 years or so) and now that Smudger Jr has decided he doesn’t want a PS4, and wants to do grown up gaming, I need to get him a box that will do him for the next 2-3 years.

Soooo, what would be considered minimum specs for a decent gaming PC? Budget is a bit up in the air – I’m thinking £500-£750 – is this realistic? Will it be enough to get him something that doesn’t annoy him with its limitations? I’ve told him that if we can’t afford something decent, he’s better off sticking with consoles till he can afford a proper machine – no point buying a compromise.

He will be into FPS and simulations (flight/racing etc).

I must admit, I was in the same position last year, and ended up spending £1k on a machine that future proofed me. I went for an i5 processor (theres not much difference between an old 15 2500k, a i5 3570k and the new i5’s.

So you could have an Intel chip a couple of generations old and its still going to be fine. Dont bother with i7’s for gaming, the additonal hyperthreading does nothing for just about any game written today.

I bought a machine bundle that also had an Nvidia gtx670 graphics card fitted, and apart from the fact its been surpassed by a cheaper, but practicably no faster 700 series card, it still races through anything I play at full speed on a 1920c1080 monitor. Its over a year old and still realistically as good as you need for gaming.

Not that much help as your budget is a couple of hundred lower, but you should be able to get a machine to those sort of specs now.

Try Chillblast, Yoyotech, Overclockers as system builders, rather than lumbering into PC world, you’ll get a far better machine for the money.

You can build a decent PC capable of handling every game for about £300 these days if you shop really smart.

£750 will get you an absolute monster.

(Not including monitors or peripherals, a good screen is still £150 plus)

YoYoTech have gone bust I believe, don’t give them your money.

I’d get

An i5 – get a K version
a 760Ti if you can afford. 660Ti is good also for less £££
700W PSU by a known brand, Corsair would be good but you pay a premium with them.
An ASUS board.
An Antec case or somthing, they do sturdy cases at cheap prices. little bells & whistles tho.

that might be in your ballpark. long time since i’ve priced anything up mind you so I may be well off.

Thanks chaps – I’ve got somewhere to start now.

I have literally just finished building my sons gaming pc.
Came to just under £500 and he’s very pleased with the performance. Warcraft is wrapped up to max and still runs very fast. I missed a trick by buying one of these CPU+gpu combined things and then a graphics card that wasn’t compatible. Didn’t realise they had to match.

Really depends you can definitely build a decent gaming PC/base unit for £500 but you do have to go budget on some components. I think decent very up-gradable machine costs about £1000. Simulators can be very demanding on CPU.

I built my PC 3 years ago with an i7 950 and it is still an overkill processor for most stuff. It has two GTX 460 in SLI and after 3 years I would probably want to upgrade them now. I would definitely recommend getting an SSD as they are really cheap these days.

I would go with Asus components as they are very good from my experience.

[EDIT] Oh yeah unless something has chnaged since I built my last decent PC in Feb this year then buy an Intel CPU unless your building a bargain bucket PC.