Budget Gaming PC - Build/Buy Options - £800 tops.

[wolfeeh]

I've been out of the PC gaming scene a significant amount of time now - last 7-8 years due to the direction my life headed in - marriage, divorce, career changes etc.

I have mostly been using consoles in the meantime and for the last 3 ish years playing WoW on my macbook pro and the odd bit of Starcraft 2.

So I haven't really been following the PC / Windows hardware side of things at all for the last few years - no point in depressing myself etc.

My step son has now expressed an interest in getting a gaming PC for his birthday (end of august).

With the best will in the world & significant amounts of overtime my Fiance & I can budget an absolute max. of £800 to go towards said PC. Yes I know this isn't exactly Killer PC territory.

Realistically what would people recommend for this budget, either in terms of an outright buy (been looking at CyberPowerSystems) or a quick build option?

Either option will need to provide a complete system - base unit, monitor, keyboard, mouse, speakers or headset, WiFi (ethernet not presently an option, will be later) & copy of Windows.

Depending on how good the options are, I may well be buying another two PC's before Christmas of a similar spec.

Preference is given towards highly upgradeable as after Christmas financial constraints become much less limited and new GPU, CPU, RAM etc and likely imminent ugprades.

Likely games to be played include WoW, Starcraft 2, CoD MW3, BF3, Skyrim.

 

[ECA]

£800 these days will get you a pretty fucking good pc.

Mainly because development is locked to the pace of consoles, and cross platform games play on xbox/ps3 and pc is lightyears ahead so you can play pretty much everything.

Ram is cheap as chips, any i5 system with a midrange gpu and 8gb of ram ( ram is cheap atm - ridiculously so ). will run almost anything on ultra these days.

 

[Raven]

I spent just shy of £600 last Christmas and it plays anything at ultra settings easily.

 

[wolfeeh]

Raven, did you build your own or buy ready made?

other questions; if looking at intel, what i5 should I consider? will a mobo that takes an i5 accept an i7 as an upgrade?
is it worth considering AMD - FX8150 as this seems their top of the range part and a system featuring this chip +8GB RAM +1GB Nvidia GTX 560 is within my price range.
Is it still the case that nvidia cards work better with intels and radeons better with AMD or has this gone by the wayside?

 

[Wij]

I just installed this little combo into my old tower:

http://www.cclonline.com/product/73...lite-Athena-Motherboard-Bundle/MBB-INTEL-MID/

£300 and the i5-2500k is a damn fast processor. My year-old-ish GTX460 works fine with it and plays anything I throw at it now, smooth as silk.

Have the CPU already seated is a nice little conveniance.

 

[wolfeeh]

Th

I just installed this little combo into my old tower:

http://www.cclonline.com/product/73...lite-Athena-Motherboard-Bundle/MBB-INTEL-MID/

£300 and the i5-2500k is a damn fast processor. My year-old-ish GTX460 works fine with it and plays anything I throw at it now, smooth as silk.

Have the CPU already seated is a nice little conveniance.

Thanks for the link wij, I've seen a few nice ones there that look suitable but I will keep looking. While that bundle is very reasonable I need a complete system, either in bits or whole.

 

[Poag]

I got this

http://www.ebuyer.com/353787-zoostorm-gaming-pc-7873-0410

In an advertising email this morning. I've not had a prebuilt PC before, but the spec is pretty good! and pretty much what I have in my gaming PC atm.

 

[Scouse]

What ECA said tbfh. I'd spend 500 quid on the bits and 300 quid on a 42" telly - I'm about to have a game of Tribes Ascend on mine right now

 

[wolfeeh]

tv isn't an option, has to be a monitor. The zoo storm from ebuyer is nice but doesn't include monitor and peripherals in the budget either.

Anyone got any experience with AMD A8 cores?

 

[ECA]

Don't for the love of babyjesus, get an AMD these days.

The i5/i7 are so ridiculously better.

 

[BloodOmen]

Have to agree, having just come from what would be seen as a decent AMD I'm never going back to AMD after seeing how much quicker this I7 is.

 

[cHodAX]

Yep i7 is a no brainer, it offers more peformance than any gamer needs at reasonable prices.

 

[Scouse]

tv isn't an option, has to be a monitor.

Why?

They're effectively the same thing nowadays anyway. I can do excel on my TV and I won't have to strain my eyes.

Plus L4D2 was great fun on it last night

 

[wolfeeh]

Why?

They're effectively the same thing nowadays anyway. I can do excel on my TV and I won't have to strain my eyes.

Plus L4D2 was great fun on it last night

There are various reasons, but one is portability, the system will need to move rooms on occasion

 

[soze]

Stretching 1080p to 32 inches is not good if you are sitting 60 cm away I would prefer a 20 inch 1080p.

 

[wolfeeh]

it's a moot point anyway. TV is not happening, monitor it is.

 

[Poag]

I got a BenQ monitor (24") from overclockers recently for £150 delivered. Compared to my 22" samsung (about £250 new) it sat next to the colours at so much brighter and clearer, the screen is light (the base weighs it down), and its power consumption fairly low.

BenQ G2420HDBL iirc.

 

[Lamp]

I've been tinkering with my spec for ages, and the price keeps going up and up. Took a step back. Realised I actually don't need water cooling, a ridiculously oversized & overpriced case, 6 fans, 2 SSD's, a £300 graphics card and 32GB RAM.

8GB Ram / Average Nvidia card, 2 TB Hard will do me. Reckon I can slash my costs in half.

 

[Lamp]

COOLERMASTER HAF 912 PLUS MID TOWER GAMING CASE
Intel® Core™i7-2600k Quad Core (3.40GHz, 8MB Cache) + HD Graphics
ASUS® P8Z77-V: PCI-E 3.0 READY, WIFI, SLI, CROSSFIREX
16GB KINGSTON HYPER-X GENESIS DUAL-DDR3 1600MHz, X.M.P (4 x 4GB KIT)
1GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 560 Ti - 2 DVI,HDMI,VGA - 3D Vision Ready
2TB 3.5" SATA-III 6GB/s HDD 7200RPM 64MB CACHE
600W Quiet 80 PLUS Quad Rail PSU + 120mm Case Fan
SUPER QUIET 22dBA TRIPLE COPPER HEATPIPE INTEL CPU COOLER
Creative Sound Blaster® X-Fi™ Xtreme Audio
IIYAMA E2773HDS 27" LED WIDESCREEN, HDMI/DVI-D HD1920x1080
LOGITECH Z506 5.1 SURROUND SOUND SPEAKERS - 75W RMS

 

[Noc0de]

Do you need the sound card, is the on-board sound not good enough?

Also, I keep hearing people rave about SSD's - so wonder if it's worth economising elsewhere (i.e. on-board sound, and/or i5 instead of i7) and getting an SSD?

 

[ECA]

Ya, you'd be way better off dropping the x-fi for a 120gb ssd.

 

[caLLous]

While you're upgrading everything at once Lamp, you might as well put an Ivybridge CPU on that Z77 mobo. The i7-2600K will work just fine but you get better energy consumption and performance with the new Ivybridge chips. Look at the i5-3xxxK or i7-3xxxK lines, the k just means it's unlocked for overclocking. The i7-3770S and i7-3770T are under-clocked, lower-power-consuming versions of the i7-3770K.

And yeah you really don't need 32gb of RAM unless you're doing some mental multi-tasking with full HD video editing work or a load of VM's or something. I got 32gb because I thought "why not" but 16 would've been more than adequate with hindsight.

And yeah (again), drop the off-board soundcard. No need in this day and age unless you're doing something specialist.

And, I never heard of that CPU cooler before. Noctua ftw.

 

[Lamp]

Drop the OS on the SSD for faster boot-up?

 

[wolfeeh]

hah it's quite ironic, I was in currys / pcworld today looking for fans (i mean actual cool the house fans, not computer fans) and I stumbled across a bit of a bargain - £730 no name whole PC with Geforce 560Ti 1gb, core i5 (think it was 2500k), 8 gig of ram, 23" 1080p monitor, pretty much everything i need... didn't have the right bank card on me. Meh.

 

[Lamp]

sounds good...but pc world....

 

[caLLous]

Yes Lamp, OS on SSD.

 

[wolfeeh]

Well I do agree, but I am actually struggling to find anything that is competing with it spec wise on the intyweb for the price.

 

[Noc0de]

I know most people will advocate buying all the parts separately and building it yourself - but these days I'm not sure I could be arsed with the stress of it all, and trying to overclock the CPU, run burn-in stress tests etc and finding that is anything goes wrong it's ultimately your fault. Has anyone bought a pre-built PC from Scan before?

Also, quick question re: SSD's - I assume people are quite happy with running their OS and games (i.e. Steam) from the SSD given the space premium on them? I think I recall there being some utility where you can move games from your steam directory on a larger/slower disk on to the SSD and then move them back once you're finished with them? I would people just say get a larger SSD or 2 smaller ones - one for OS and one for games?

 

[Bahumat]

Install steam on ssd, run steam and then start to download a game. May not even have to do that.
Once it starts, cancel download and quit out.

copy and paste the steamapps folder over your own and it will pick it all up

I did this a few years back so have a read up to confirm its still this simple

Some people go on about exporting and importing but tbh it's not requires

 

[Poag]

SSD,
http://www.ebuyer.com/268693-corsair-120gb-force-3-ssd-cssd-f120gb3-bk

£75 120GB go buy one!


Personally I use symlinks between my conventional HDD and my SSD, keep the original on the HDD as .bak create symlink, copy contents...profit.