gaming pc for son <£400 ?

[pritsey]

Hi all. Long time since I posted here! My teenage son wants a gaming PC for his bday in a few weeks. Not sure if best to go for a pre-built or self build? He wants and i5 but I'm thinking an i3 with discrete GPU may be a more realistic option - thoughts?

Thanks all!

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Do you need an OS,monitor and other peripherals??

[pritsey]

No to monitor and peripherals, OS is a maybe....

[Willzzz]

What OS do you have available?

[pritsey]

Theoretically any MS OS....but via MSDN...hence the maybe!

[Willzzz]

OK well it's going to be pretty tight, an i5 is totally off the table. An i3 is just about doable, I reckon you should be able to fit in a 1gb 7850 along with that.

You will have to self build in order to hit your budget and have a decent machine.

[pritsey]

So not worth just getting something like an i3 from dell and whacking and new gfx in at Xmas?

[Willzzz]

Well you could, that would cost around £500. Although on the plus side that would include a copy of windows and a few extra goodies, like card reader, cheap keyboard/mouse, DVD-RW, etc.
I'd dread to think what PSU it includes though.

[deejayburnout]

Does he have a PC at the moment?

[scaryjim]

What resolution is the monitor he's going to be using?

[aidanjt]

Consider an AMD rig, you can shave off a good chunk of pounds on the motherboard and CPU, and put more into the GPU where it's really needed. I clobbered together a quick spec here:



A wee bit over budget, but not bad either.

[rover214]

Antec 400W ATX 12v v2.3 Power Supply - High Current Gamer HCG-400 - (Active PFC/80 PLUS Bronze)
£43.55

Intel Pentium (G630) 2.7GHz Dual Core Processor with 3MB L3 Cache Socket LGA1155 and 5.0GT/s Bus Speed (Boxed)
£45.36

ASRock H61M-DGS Motherboard Core i7/i5/i3 Socket 1155 H61 mATX Gigabit LAN (Intel HD Graphics)
£34.62

Seagate 250GB Momentus 5400.6 Serial 2.5" Hard Drive ST9250315AS (S-ATA/3Gb/s/8MB/5400 RPM)
£38.68

Corsair Vengeance Low Profile 4GB (2 x 2GB) Memory Kit PC3-12800 1600MHz DDR3 DIMM Unbuffered
£19.26

LiteOn iHAS122 22X DVD±RW (Dual ±R)/RAM SATA Drive (Internal Drive Only Black)
£12.12

Zalman Z9 Black Midi Tower Case (ATX/M-ATX)
£36.42

Gigabyte Radeon HD 7850 Overclocked 1GB Graphics Card PCI-E Mini-DisplayPort DVI HDMI
£148.49


Sub-Total: £378.50

[pritsey]

Hes using my old shuttle with an xp2500+ cpu. The monitor is a dell 32" TV, red I think is 1366 x 1000ish. We also have a spare dell 20" 1600 x 1200.

[Willzzz]

Consider an AMD rig, you can shave off a good chunk of pounds on the motherboard and CPU, and put more into the GPU where it's really needed. I clobbered together a quick spec here:



A wee bit over budget, but not bad either.

That's a silly build. Why get a 7850 with an APU?
Besides you can get an intel motherboard for cheaper than that.

You aren't saving any money you are just choosing worse components.

[aidanjt]

That's a silly build. Why get a 7850 with an APU?

Why get a 7850 with an i3/i5 which has an IGP? It's there, but you don't have to use it.

Besides you can get an intel motherboard for cheaper than that.

A few pound, maybe, you can also get AMD boards cheaper, but you'd end up with a pile of crap, and you can't get an Intel quad core CPU for anywhere near £80. Overall AMD still trumps Intel when it comes to bang per buck at the tight budget end of things.

You aren't saving any money you are just choosing worse components.

What's worse? 4 cores are going to be more useful than 2.

[Willzzz]

Yes, we know 4 is more than 2, that doesn't mean that all quad cores are better than all dual cores.

A core i3 will absolutely thrash an A6 on every single benchmark.