Esports in school

[SquirreIX]

Hi all, new to this forum but you'll probably give better advice than reddit.

I'm a teacher in an all girls secondary school and I'm looking to set up an esports + streaming club for our girls (on a very tight budget)

The purpose of the club is to foster interest in esports, play competitively, form an esports team and learn how to record, edit and stream gameplay. Ideally we'd do this through Rocket League and CS:GO and OBS.

To do this, we need to upgrade our PCs. I considered consoles, but tbh they're more of a headache for recording and streaming and just as expensive. Then again, the computers currently in our IT suite are 8 years old with dell optiplexs with i5-3470s and spinning disks with integrated PSU's without GPU power. Basically the only thing we have is xbox 360 controllers

So the question is: What is the cheapest way we could introduce esports?

My current cheapest would be installing low profile GT 1030 and SSD's in each machine for £100/machine for that 1080p 30fps low settings feel

I understand this task is ridiculous, but appreciate all suggestions.

 

[ShivP]

SSD not really necessary, spend money on GPU power

Also work out how many girls you will have coming to the club - if I know anything about secondary school clubs you will only start with a trickle of people and then it will build at which point hopefully you will get some more budget. Start with some decent GPUs for 2/3 machines?

 

[SquirreIX]

We have 9 students and 3 staff at the moment, so hoping to go for more PCs (maybe 6 for 3v3 Rocket League) rather than 3 that play anything. I'm pretty sure the hard drives are only 320GB 5400rpm drives, so we'll need to check those.

Unfortunately there's actually zero budget for the club, so we're trying to secure some kind of funding (either external grant or pooling department money), which is why we need to get a figure

 

[Tetras]

I agree about the SSDs, you can game fine on 5400 rpm drives. It would still be a squeeze for £100 per machine though, a low profile 1050 Ti is more like £130, which is 4 years old tech now.