Building first pc!

Associate
Joined
23 Jan 2026
Posts
2
Location
England
Hii! I’m looking to buy parts in order to build a pc, my budget is around £2.5k (including monitors) but can be more if beneficial . I’m looking for it to be primarily for gaming, is there any advice for parts as i’m unsure where to start


Looking for the best i can get for the budget :)
 
Are there any particular genres of game you prefer to play? Are you hardcore into CoD or WoW or is it more general?

If primarily gaming, what sort of secondary tasks do you intend to use it for?

edit: Regardless, this would play pretty much everything out with good performance:

My basket at OcUK:

Total: £2,516.77 (includes delivery: £0.00)​

Included a 34" Ultrawide OLED, an ultrawide might not necessarily be ideal for the games you play but it's a preference of mine and I own a variant of the monitor I've listed. A more traditional resolution OLED such as a 27" 1440P can also be had for £400-500, or you may prefer to opt for a non OLED for whatever reason, I will say that OLED will give you the best image quality out of current monitor tech.

I've listed an M-ATX setup as again that's my preference, you could build a standard ATX for similar money.

There is the odd saving to be had here and there, but I wouldn't say it'd be worth it as you've a very healthy budget.
 
Last edited:
I'd seriously look at prebuilt to compare prices

an example, someone just ordered this on another thread. i just priced it up and parts actually came in slightly more than the prebuild. not always going to be the case but with price of ram being what it is at the moment, it's not out of this world either



My only other suggestion is not to skimp on the monitor...that's the bit you're looking at all the time so getting something like a decent oled will really pay dividends when you have that great response time and infinite blacks

As above, but also, any idea what size monitor you want, 32", ultrawide, 4k or 1440p? It really comes down to personal preference..i game on a 42" oled, but others would find that waaay too big....32 or 27" are the general most common sizes now, and if 32", would personally choose 4k, 27", i'd settle for 1440p to get better fps

 
Last edited:
Are there any particular genres of game you prefer to play? Are you hardcore into CoD or WoW or is it more general?

If primarily gaming, what sort of secondary tasks do you intend to use it for?

edit: Regardless, this would play pretty much everything out with good performance:

My basket at OcUK:

Total: £2,516.77 (includes delivery: £0.00)​

Included a 34" Ultrawide OLED, an ultrawide might not necessarily be ideal for the games you play but it's a preference of mine and I own a variant of the monitor I've listed. A more traditional resolution OLED such as a 27" 1440P can also be had for £400-500, or you may prefer to opt for a non OLED for whatever reason, I will say that OLED will give you the best image quality out of current monitor tech.

I've listed an M-ATX setup as again that's my preference, you could build a standard ATX for similar money.

There is the odd saving to be had here and there, but I wouldn't say it'd be worth it as you've a very healthy budget.
Thank you! I will definitely look into these, primarily it will be used for gaming..which to be honest will be its main purpose, so the rest isn’t a worry :)

I initially hoped to have two monitors, but the monitor you showed looks really good in terms of image quality etc! And I hope to get into more hardcore games as with windows, steam will allow me to play them :)
 
Thank you! I will definitely look into these, primarily it will be used for gaming..which to be honest will be its main purpose, so the rest isn’t a worry :)

I initially hoped to have two monitors, but the monitor you showed looks really good in terms of image quality etc! And I hope to get into more hardcore games as with windows, steam will allow me to play them :)

If mainly for gaming twin monitors will have limited benefit, especially if you're hoping to use them to expand the overall game resolution.

The only real benefit would be having a secondary browsing window for Browsers/Chats/Discord etc, and honestly you could source a cheap as chips £20-30 screen for that sort of purpose.

I would recommend trying to be as expedient as possible in terms of buying the RAM and the NvME, and to a lesser extent the GPU. Memory and products utilising it have spiked in price heavily, and are only going to keep increasing in cost vs availability in the foreseeable future. I'm not sure how much stock of the RAM I listed is left, most new sets of 32gb you'll find online are closer to or above £400. Storage with NvME's have spiked heavily also, a week or so ago a comparable NvME to the T500 was £200, being those with DRAM, they're now almost all over the £250 mark. The GPU in question was £550 not all that long ago to boot, you have room to wait a little on the other items but don't overthink the three things I've mentioned too much or you'll end up spending potentially a lot more.
 
Last edited:
Look at the kioxia below m.2 below. It's a gen 5 ssd for £219.99, so cheaper than a lot of the gen4 ssd's. Still 2tb, 10k read, 9.6k write with a 1200TBW endurance, so noight wrong with any of that. The nitro+ mobo actually keeps it's ssd quite cool in review, though can't remember if that was the atx or matx version @Gray2233 listed above is the matx board. the atx is slightly larger, has 3 m.2 slots and is wifi 7...above 2 slots and wifi 6E. other than that, the same...matx slightly cheaper as a result...if you go for atx, rember need to get a atx case, the phanteks above is mATX.

I would go test a ultrawide screen before you delve in, just to be sure


My basket at OcUK:

Total: £219.95 (includes delivery: £0.00)​
 
Look at the kioxia below m.2 below. It's a gen 5 ssd for £219.99, so cheaper than a lot of the gen4 ssd's. Still 2tb, 10k read, 9.6k write with a 1200TBW endurance, so noight wrong with any of that. The nitro+ mobo actually keeps it's ssd quite cool in review, though can't remember if that was the atx or matx version @Gray2233 listed above is the matx board. the atx is slightly larger, has 3 m.2 slots and is wifi 7...above 2 slots and wifi 6E. other than that, the same...matx slightly cheaper as a result...if you go for atx, rember need to get a atx case, the phanteks above is mATX.

I would go test a ultrawide screen before you delve in, just to be sure


My basket at OcUK:

Total: £219.95 (includes delivery: £0.00)​

It's also lacking DRAM which is why I prompted the T500, probably doesn't matter too much for a gaming build but I'd rate it over gen 5 speeds.
 
Last edited:
It's also lacking DRAM which is why I prompted the T500, probably doesn't matter too much for a gaming build but I'd rate it over gen 5 speeds.

yeah, I get you, but modern dramless drives are way better than older ones (i'd be more concerned with the heat output gen5 drives give, but the nitro+ keeps its drives cool)... it's relative performance is upper middle, it can write 4gb/s for 435GB before it sdlows down, so s/b good for gaming. I have a sn850x as primary but use a nm790 4tb as my gaming drive (which is dramless). that pretty much wipes the floor with everything anyway(ther nm790 that is)


downloadinbg games you'll be limited by your internet, andgaming is just read speed
 
Last edited:
yeah, I get you, but modern dramless drives are way better than older ones (i'd be more concerned with the heat output gen5 drives give, but the nitro+ keeps its drives cool)

Yeah, they only really get hot when you do high sustained writes and both versions of the Nitro are covered in nice chonky heatsinks.

The airflow in something like the XT M3 is excellent too, which will certainly help.

Edit: That RAM is already up another £20, they probably wont get anymore future stock in for it either given Micron scrapped the Crucial brand.
 
Last edited:
Back
Top Bottom