How to go about getting a solid gaming PC?

Starduster

Starduster

Starduster

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21 Jun 2017
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Hey everyone!

I'm going to have some money to invest into a gaming system very soon but whenever I think about getting a gaming PC I always find it daunting.

I'm familiar with what all of the different components do and I feel like I could put them all together with relative ease, it's just I have absolutely no clue on which parts are decent. I actually spent around £400 a few years ago on a pre-built PC thinking I'd be able to play games well on it. Turned out my toaster would have had an easier time running them... I blame myself for that though, wasting all that money as I hadn't done enough research. It certainly knocked my confidence though.

So I'm wondering what you folks would recommend? Is it a better option to just buy a pre-built PC and cash out a lot more? At least that way I wouldn't be worried about the system not working. I'm totally willing to learn how to find the components and build myself, it's just I'm not sure where to start.

I'd better give you an idea on my budget and what I need the PC to be capable of. I can afford to go up to the £1800-2200 range to be honest. I've heard that you can get a decent system for way less. If that's possible then great. If not, then I have the money to go higher.

I would like to be able to play pretty much any game though at a stable framerate. I'm not too concerned with ultra-high graphics. As long as it plays smoothly and looks pretty enough then I'm happy.

Thanks for all your help! :D
 
Some thoughts - very difficult to work on 'pretty enough' as screen resolution and graphics settings have a massive impact on the most expensive components.
Do you have anything to re use? Monitor, keyboard mouse etc.
I recently built a 7700k, 1080ti with 32GB ram and a 500GB ssd. All on a Z170 board. The whole system was around £2000 with Win 10.
Recent Intel launches may make you wait a bit and an AMD solution may be cheaper.
Andi.
 
andicole0 said:
Some thoughts - very difficult to work on 'pretty enough' as screen resolution and graphics settings have a massive impact on the most expensive components.
Do you have anything to re use? Monitor, keyboard mouse etc.
I recently built a 7700k, 1080ti with 32GB ram and a 500GB ssd. All on a Z170 board. The whole system was around £2000 with Win 10.
Recent Intel launches may make you wait a bit and an AMD solution may be cheaper.
Andi.
Click to expand...

Thanks for your reply.

Yeah, I didn't realize how vague 'pretty enough' could sound! :p I'd want the games to look nice while running smoothly. If I have to spend more in order to get that then I'm totally willing.

Some of the other terms you threw at me there kinda went over my head. Like 'Z170' and '7700k'. Like I say, my knowledge is really lacking in quite a few areas when it comes to PC building.
 
Starduster said:
Thanks for your reply.

Yeah, I didn't realize how vague 'pretty enough' could sound! :p I'd want the games to look nice while running smoothly. If I have to spend more in order to get that then I'm totally willing.

Some of the other terms you threw at me there kinda went over my head. Like 'Z170' and '7700k'. Like I say, my knowledge is really lacking in quite a few areas when it comes to PC building.
Click to expand...

Sounds like you're best choosing a monitor to start with then people can sort you a build accordingly :)

Perhaps look at a 27" 1440p screen and see if that looks suitable for what you would like.
 
Webzta said:
Sounds like you're best choosing a monitor to start with then people can sort you a build accordingly :)

Perhaps look at a 27" 1440p screen and see if that looks suitable for what you would like.
Click to expand...
Yes that's a good start, we can then get a spec for a cpu and graphics card to drive it properly. 27" 1440p will produce excellant results.
Z170 is the motherboard chipset 7700k is Intels high end cpu (at the moment anyway).
I'm thinking you'd be better getting OCUK to build it for you.
Andi.
 
Oh, I forgot to mention about stuff that I already have. I'd probably be good to go on all the peripheral stuff, I have speakers, a headset, keyboard etc. I was going to look into an upgrade on those things though. Luckily I'm more confident in purchasing the peripheral equipment like gaming mice!
 
andicole0 said:
Ok, next would be to consider if you want to go higher than 60hz. Have a look at free sync or gsync monitors.
I would then go to the OCUK pc configurator and see what's in budget.
Andi.
Click to expand...

So I should pick one of the base PC's from OCUK and then build up from there with that specific monitor selected?
 
That budget gets easily quite high end PC.

If you want to PC to last something like 4-5 years with least part swaps AMD Ryzen would give good amount of CPU cores.
Intel is also going to finally release more than 4 core CPUs on mainstream platform late in in few months or two.
While being better (not massively) than Ryzen for most current games Intel's Kaby Lake (that i7 7700) still has same four cores reached decade ago.
In consoles games are already well optimized for multiple threads so in couple years games are likely to start using more than couple threads.
And more than four core CPUs are also better able to handle all background processes running in todays PCs and better avoid frame rate drops from those.


In graphics cards Nvidias are currently faster and especially more power efficient, but cost lot.
First really new architecture AMD graphic cards in many years are going to be released in late July so that migth bring back some long needed price competition.

In monitors G-sync costs clear extra and if you want to use that you'll be locked to Nvidia graphics cards.
Freesync again is AMD's name for open standard DisplayPort's Adaptive-Sync feature.
(Nvidia basically made proprietary version of variable refresh rate feature of embedded DisplayPort standard)
If wanting to avoid lock to one maker Freesync is the obvious choise.
Nvidia could likely support it just by driver update if people stopped paying Nvidia's monitor tax.




Starduster said:
Oh, I forgot to mention about stuff that I already have. I'd probably be good to go on all the peripheral stuff, I have speakers, a headset, keyboard etc. I was going to look into an upgrade on those things though. Luckily I'm more confident in purchasing the peripheral equipment like gaming mice!
Click to expand...
If you're happy with it keyboard will keep working.
If you have some bigger shop nearby you should preferably try "mechanical" keyboards to get feeling of switch types before jumping to them.
Those can have very different feel to basic keyboards... while also being lot more noisier.

You didn't mention game types but unless having good surround speaker set headphones are easier and cheaper path for quite good immersion as long as your head/ear size is close to average:
 
Don't worry too much about the refresh rates, whilst 144/165 is all the rage - in reality there are the majority of users running 60Hz. If you've never tried it you don't know what you're missing.
 
For value, a ryzen 1600 with overclockable motherboard,16gb ram,256/512 ssd boot device with a 1 or 2 TB hard disc for mass storage, r480 or r580 (ideally wait a month or so for new amd cards) coupled with 27inch 1440p freesync monitor. Cases are personal thing, 30 to 100's take your pick

That will play pretty much anything at medium to high settings
 
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