Gaming PC plus monitor/kb/mouse for £2,500

I'm in a position to buy a new gaming PC. My old PC is about 10 years old, with an upgrade about 7 years ago, so it's a bit dated. I have a healthy budget, but I do need to include monitor(s), keyboard and mouse as well. I think I've decided on two 27" 1440 IPS monitors over a single 4k monitor, and am looking at the Dell U2715H, because it's good for gaming, great for photo editing, nice and sharp for web development.

That will leave approximately £1,800 for computer/keyboard/mouse. Could I get a 1080ti? Should I build it myself or buy it prebuilt? I'm leaning towards the latter at the moment, although I've built a few from scratch myself so I'd probably do a half decent job. The only gaming I do at the moment is WoW and Diablo 3, but I enjoy Assassin's Creed series / Witcher 3 on the PS4. I'm too old to play much online FPS though without getting utterly pwned by everyone else on the server.

All comments very welcome! Thanks in advance :)

27" is on the small side for 2560x1440. I don't know what resolution your current screens are but if it's a 1920x1200 24" then you'd want a 32" at 2560x1440 for the same viewing distance, you'd likely find yourself moving the screen slightly closer if you went for 27".

If you're a console gamer then you might also want to wait for AMD's Vega cards and pick up a Freesync over HDMI monitor as that's more likely to also be supported by whatever you replace your PS4 with - the Xbox One X has already been announced to be supporting it.

You don't need to spend so much on a PC to run those games. I have a Xeon E3/Core i7 3770 and can run W3 with very decent settings at qHD using a GTX1080 and I might be CPU bottlenecked.

You can have a looksy at my review here:

http://forums.hexus.net/reader-revie...enchmarks.html

I play D3 and it have no issues running that and any slowdowns historically have been more down to the server time. WoW in its latest form,can be taxing but again from what I gather the server side can also cause issues.

Overwatch at worst on my system gets down to 80FPS to 90FPS during the heaviest batteles.

Regarding GPU performance,waiting until Vega is out in the next few weeks might make sense,to see what performance is like. Regarding CPUs,in October Coffee Lake is coming out to replace Skylake/Kaby Lake which has been out for a while and should increase core counts by around 50% it seems.

Some interesting replies. Thank you. I'm set on the monitors (I use 2 27-inch "2K" monitors at work with a MacBook Pro, and like the resolution a lot).

There is a sense of urgency to my build as my GFX card is starting to show occasional red lines across the screen during gaming, and D3 crashes to desktop and recovers every 5-10 minutes. Experience tells me the card is on its last legs!

I'm not just after a D3 machine. I want to spend the top of my budget and get something that can last such that I can play the latest games on medium settings in 3-5 years' time.


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Originally Posted by DaKid

Some interesting replies. Thank you. I'm set on the monitors (I use 2 27-inch "2K" monitors at work with a MacBook Pro, and like the resolution a lot).

There is a sense of urgency to my build as my GFX card is starting to show occasional red lines across the screen during gaming, and D3 crashes to desktop and recovers every 5-10 minutes. Experience tells me the card is on its last legs!

I'm not just after a D3 machine. I want to spend the top of my budget and get something that can last such that I can play the latest games on medium settings in 3-5 years' time.


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Not the best way to do it - never overspec the card massively over what you need,as graphics cards tend to get outpaced relatively quickly.

It's better to get something relatively decent and replace it ever two maybe three years if you can,and sell it before you upgrade.

Even three years ago the best card you could get was a Geforce Titan Black Edition and that is probably beaten by a GTX1060 now and has half the VRAM.

Plus if you look at my review I am on purpose ramping up the settings,and some of those settings tank performance for not much visual benefit.

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Originally Posted by CAT-THE-FIFTH

Not the best way to do it - never overspec the card massively over what you need,as graphics cards tend to get outpaced relatively quickly.

It's better to get something relatively decent and replace it ever two maybe three years if you can,and sell it before you upgrade.

Even three years ago the best card you could get was a Geforce Titan Black Edition and that is probably beaten by a GTX1060 now and has half the VRAM.

Plus if you look at my review I am on purpose ramping up the settings,and some of those settings tank performance for not much visual benefit.

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Not really one for the hassle of selling things to upgrade, and if I'd bought a card 3 years ago and it was equivalent to a 1060 now then I'd be fairly happy. So it sort of works. I'll re-read your review though

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Originally Posted by DaKid

Not really one for the hassle of selling things to upgrade, and if I'd bought a card 3 years ago and it was equivalent to a 1060 now then I'd be fairly happy. So it sort of works. I'll re-read your review though

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The GTX1060 would destroy a Geforce Black Edition in any DX12/Vulkan game and with double the VRAM you can have higher texture settings. So its much better to not spend all your budget now,keep some in the upgrade kitty,but have a solid base build. Remember in 4 years,a GTX1080 was 3.33x faster than a GTX680,and that was after being on 28NM for 4 years(20NM was cancelled):

https://tpucdn.com/reviews/NVIDIA/Ge..._2560_1440.png

Yes,a GTX1080TI might be noticeably faster in the short term than say a GTX1080,but within a few years,if someone had got a GTX1070/GTX1080 now,and replaced it quicker than staying with a GTX1080TI,with say the GTX3070/GTX3080 they will probably gain extra performance whilst also have cards better optimised for the newer games,and supporting newer APIs better.

A lot of people getting GTX1080TI cards for qHD are probably going to not have it 5 years as it would be like someone still having a GTX580 1.5GB today.

Things like CPUs,OTH,tend to last,as do PSUs,etc. Graphics cards are probably the part which depreciates the worst.

The only reason why I say CL is worth waiting for is because even though the Core i7 7700K is probably going to be the CPU which has the edge for the games you listed,it does make me wonder whether with Intel moving to six core and AMD to 8 cores,whether 4 cores will be enough in a few years time,as even Overwatch actually seems to be reasonably multi-threaded unlike all of the older Blizzard games,so it makes me wonder what Blizzard will do with any new releases.

Now if Coffee Lake can fit in existing motherboards that might not be an issue,but is kind of weird time for releases ATM TBF!! Ryzen has really shaken up the CPU market and it seems Intel is in a right panic.

You raise some very good points. Thank you.


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Taking on board what you've said, would you be kind enough to offer an opinion on this PC from Chillblast?

https://chillblast.com/chillblast-fu...gaming-pc.html

The only thing I think I'd probably change is to upgrade the sound, but will check the onboard specs first.


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Originally Posted by DaKid

Taking on board what you've said, would you be kind enough to offer an opinion on this PC from Chillblast?

https://chillblast.com/chillblast-fu...gaming-pc.html

The only thing I think I'd probably change is to upgrade the sound, but will check the onboard specs first.


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That does not look too bad for a prebuilt PC. RAM is a tad slow though,so I would use the 3GHZ RAM option.

Another alternative is to look at a Ryzen 5 or Ryzen 7 system,as they simply have more cores. It won't be as fast in WoW as a Core i7 7700k,but if you do intend to keep the system for a long time,I suspect they might be better longterm.

Coffee Lake is an October release it seems,so that is when the Core i7 7700K equivalent will be 6 cores.