£500/600
- Thread starter Di-rear
- Start date
What sort of games are we talking about here, indie type titles and older stuff or?
Do you need peripherals, monitor/keyboard etc?
Do you have a PC currently and if so what is the exact spec?
£500-600 wont buy you much of anything in the current climate if going new unfortunately, memory prices are through the roof. You should be able to pick up something second hand that will manage some light gaming, but you'd need to manage your expectations.
Do you need peripherals, monitor/keyboard etc?
Do you have a PC currently and if so what is the exact spec?
£500-600 wont buy you much of anything in the current climate if going new unfortunately, memory prices are through the roof. You should be able to pick up something second hand that will manage some light gaming, but you'd need to manage your expectations.
squad, insurgency sandstorm, arma reforger, gray zone warfare, maybe some bf6
i have a monitor, mouse and keyboard.
Last edited:
was thinking like a ryzen 5500 build 16/32 ddr4 etc
Even then mate.
The games you've quoted can be a PITA to run even on good hardware, you're going to need to seriously increase your budget or pull off a miracle finding second hand parts.
The memory alone is going to cost you £150-200 at a minimum, and I suspect you really want 32gb for ARMA and one or two of the others. A competent entry level GPU is going to be another £300 + on top of that right now.
The cost of RAM has more than tripled in the last year due to AI, GPU's have been sky high since Covid and SSD's aren't much better. Even prior to all of that you'd struggle for those games on a £500 budget, at least when going entirely new.
It's an awful time to buy a PC, worst I think we've ever encountered. I don't think you could even run something like GeForce Now with a bunch of those, but it might be worth looking into just in case.
5500 - £75
B550 - £76 B550 is pretty decent value brand new right now.
Nvidia 5050 - £220
16GB DD4 - £120
512 NVME - £65
650W Gold PSU £64 - OCUK have a Seasonic at that price right now.
Case - £25+
OS - varies
Total - £645+
Some might say thats not worth building. But I'd rather have it than a £500 Playstation 5.
I'd be tempted to pick certain items 2nd hand.
You have to be very very careful buying AM4 processors due to the number of people bending pins when "taken from a working machine". Not surprisingly this is the biggest place to save money as a percentage of outlay vs new. Of course you can make a bigger overall saving on 2nd hand graphics cards.
B550 - £76 B550 is pretty decent value brand new right now.
Nvidia 5050 - £220
16GB DD4 - £120
512 NVME - £65
650W Gold PSU £64 - OCUK have a Seasonic at that price right now.
Case - £25+
OS - varies
Total - £645+
Some might say thats not worth building. But I'd rather have it than a £500 Playstation 5.
I'd be tempted to pick certain items 2nd hand.
You have to be very very careful buying AM4 processors due to the number of people bending pins when "taken from a working machine". Not surprisingly this is the biggest place to save money as a percentage of outlay vs new. Of course you can make a bigger overall saving on 2nd hand graphics cards.
I do not disagree with you in this, but I do not think the OP will have a good time with that sort of build.
You often see games that list minimum/recommended requirements that absolutely are not valid, and unfortunately the OP has listed a bunch of the buggers. I've played a wee' bit of Arma in the past and dabbled in one or two of the other games, I'd feel uncomfortable running some of them on my current hardware because I know they're horrendously optimised, or simply don't do well if you load up anything other than the smallest map and unit/player counts etc.
Arma Reforger is a prime example of this, it really likes a strong CPU and even my 5800X3D gets unhappy at times (a lot, I'm being nice). The 5500 is essentially a 3600 in all but name due to the neutered L3 cache, you can pick up second hand 3600's for around £20-30 last I checked so there's a start point.
Last edited:
