gaming center help

[reeceharsley]

Hello guys

Need some help im on the long journey of opening a gaming center, but im unsure what spec pc's to build im limited by budget like everyone as when buying 15-20 of them £100 can make all the difference I need somthing with enough grunt to run todays releases on medium to high

Any help would be greatly appreciated also if anyone has advice of any kind of opening, running or working in a gaming shop that would also be helpful

[ShavedApe]

This seems like an tough thing to do I wish you the best with this one. Everyone has there own ideas on whats best for gaming and of course would depend on what games are to be run too.
While I love PC gaming and for me its the only way to get the true gaming experience I would of thought for your purposes a console set up would be best. Consoles have a smaller learning curve and are much more pick up and play. Thats not to say there aren't any skilled console players out there btw Im sure some of you could give us PC players a run for our money.

From a PC perspective I would say cpu anything with 4 cores will get the job done on medium Intel or Amd.
I would think, 4 gig of ram, I would say mid range motherboard sure people will say low end but the motherboard is for me the most important part of a pc choose wrongly and it doesnt matter how good everything else is. High end is fine but if your not going to be overclocking then you will probably be paying for features you will never use.

PSU You can probably get away with 5-600 watt perhaps even lower but I always seem to go overkill with psu since I dont intend to replace them often and what I mean by that is when i upgrade my gpu I dont want to have to buy a new psu as well just so I can run it.

GPU I would say go ATI youll save money on your budget and still get the same and in some cases better performance that nvidia cards costing considerably more. Difficult to say which on this one I play mostly FPS games and of course want the most fps I can get the smoother the game looks better its not always about how pretty it looks for me but that said I always buy the best I can afford.

Hard drives while SSD's are amazing they are also very expensive for their size sure they are getting cheaper but they are not quite there yet. A good SATA drive will still get the job down really well and cost a lot less thus saving on the budget. Your not looking for boot speed and while ssd's can increase level loading times so can the cheaper ssd cache's if your really must improve your HD performance.

Keyboard and mouse I guess you need to look for build quality above everything else because they will deffo take the most abuse.

I would avoid pre built systems if you can while the temptation to have someone build it for you might be handy if you have to buy 15 or 20 systems you will be paying a premium for a pre built system that quite often get built with inferior parts to increase profits. That said there are some shops take scan for instance that will build it for you if you require and also offer pre built systems that you can configure to suit your needs.
The big thing here I guess is your going to want to make sure you know whats inside and how it went together because someone has to take it apart and fix it when it goes wrong and if thats you it will be a whole lot cheaper.

Hope that was helpful im sure there are others who have thoughts on this to these are just mine

[reeceharsley]

I should add that I worked in local computer repair shop and have a btec in IT so I can build repair take apart a pc but I've been away from the game for 3 years now so I'm a little out of touch on what the standards are. My last gfx card was an ati 1900gt lol

I want to try to offer around 15 pc and 10 Xbox because during my ongoing reasearch have found that offering a mix appeals to a wide audience the max budget for just each pc is 400-600 probley the latter with around 150-200 for monitor and peripherals

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I would look at whether you can claim back VAT on the cost of the components,as you are running a business.

[reeceharsley]

Yeah very true to claim back vat a business needs to take 75,000 which very very early projects say I might but my gut says that's wrong

[outwar6010]

yeah for this consoles would be the best idea as it would be very easy to maintain many of them you dont need to worry about game setting on each rig etc all you need is the multiple consoles and 24 inch tvs

ps ps3s are around 150 now and decent tvs are around 200-300 so you could make more gaming stations