Basic gaming build for £450 or £600

Associate
Joined
14 Jul 2012
Posts
4
Location
London
Ok, so I'm looking to build a PC for general work, watching films, and some basic gaming. Budget will be either £450, or £600, depending on what everyone recommends is sufficient. I'll put some more details below.

Things I already have: mouse, keyboard, monitor (23 inch LG IPS235V).

Games: I play some (older) first person shooters like unreal tournament 3, left 4 dead 2, modern warfare etc. I also play oblivion and would (ideally) prefer to build something which can run skyrim at 1920x1080 on high (please tell me if this way too unrealistic for the current budget - I have a feeling it is, so could perhaps stretch the budget to £700 if I waited a month or two). I think this would give a little bit of future-proofing so I could still run games at a half-decent setting in the future.

Work: I occasionally need to use mathematical software like Maple, Matlab and Magma (mostly Magma), so having something which can cope with these would be very helpful. I'm not talking industrial scale computations, just general stuff that won't slow down the PC to a crawl and which will still let me read PDF files at the same time.

Miscellaneous stuff: not bothered about an ssd, wouldn't mind a bluray drive, and would like a decent wireless dongle because I live in the opposite side of the house to the wireless router. Also am not bothered about overclocking, but if it helps with running games/mathematical software significantly, I'd look into it.

Questions I have:
1. Is any of this even feasible for £600?
2. If I dropped the condition on playing skyrim, would I be able to get away with doing everything else for £450?

Mainly, I want to do a custom build because then I can use decent components which are more reliable in the long run, and also it's about time I learnt how to build a PC.

Thanks in advance for reading this and helping me out. The graphics card is one area in particular where I am totally at a loss for what to aim for.
 
Back
Top Bottom