Basic PC + GeForce Now or Budget Gaming rig?

dunxd · 18 Jun 2020 at 19:33

My son is going to turn 12 and wants a gaming PC for his birthday.

He's been playing Fortnite and dabbling with streaming on my iMac via GeForce Now (got himself into founders plan). I'd like to stop being evicted from my office, and he'd like to learn a bit about PCs so I figured a self build would be a good birthday present.

Would he be better off getting a low spec PC and continuing with GeForce Now for £7.99 a month, or doing the processing locally on a budget gaming rig. Budget is about £400. We already have a monitor, keyboard and mouse.

I'd put price difference into Steam credits for him.

dunxd · 19 Jun 2020 at 18:01

If we bump it up to £500 does it make much difference?

dunxd · 15 Jul 2020 at 22:20

Thanks so much for this. Do you know if the motherboard you recommend will support an AMD Ryzen 3 3200G with RX Vega 8 Graphics?

A friend has offered an old but good gpu card but we won't be able to test it works right until close to the boy's birthday, so I thought I could get onboard graphics just in case so he has a working pc on his birthday. However I'm not sure this processor will work with the same motherboard.

dunxd · 24 Aug 2020 at 20:29

@Sparx - thanks so much for your recommendation. I bought nearly everything you recommended, except my friend donated a spare graphics card he had, and I bumped up the memory to 16Gb and a Ryzen 5. We built it all over a couple of evenings with no major problems. The performance for the games he plays is better locally than GeForce Now. He is totally stoked (and more addicted than ever)!

dunxd · 24 Aug 2020 at 23:04

It was an MSI R6950 Twin Frozr, which is pretty old really (released in 2011), but for Dying Light, which my son just discovered, it's great. He can upgrade. Haven't tried the onboard graphics on the Ryzen 3400G - I wonder if this would be better than a 9 year old dedicated card.