Looking for advice for my son £600 budget gaming pc

Associate
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Hi, completely new to all this. My son is looking for a gaming pc either to build up or complete and has managed to save around a £600 budget.
He plays a lot of rocket league and call of duty, is he likely to get anything that will run these any better than the new Xbox series X for that budget or is he better of sticking to the consoles? Wouldn't want him wasting money on something that won't perform how he needs it too.
He already has a gaming monitor and keyboard mouse etc and I'm fairly handy so could put one together for him if needed.
Any advice or recommendations would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance
Anthony
 
Soldato
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It's a really bad time to buy at the moment due to stock shortages, what little is available tends to have a massively inflated price.

It's due to a mixture of Covid related stock shortages and the current mining craze as far as GPU's go. Entry level gaming GPU's like the RX580 were going for close to £100 new this time last year, now they're £300-400 and absolutely not worth that sort of asking price. Your best bet is to get a new Xbox or PS5 if you can get your hands on one, otherwise it's waiting things out to see when prices start to settle.
 
Man of Honour
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Hi

xbox series x can do 4k resoloution you wont be able to get that sort of performance for £600 pc.

The state of the graphics card market means a shortage and very high price
 
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OP
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Thanks for the quick replies.
Did hear a little about the current crazy prices from a customer of mine the other day.
I did think from a little dig around that he would be better upgrading the Xbox for the budget he has.
Looks like he would need to double his budget for something suitable.
The only other option he would have is the second hand market but I really wouldnt know what to look for and I'm not sure it would be advisable with the rate that electronics go out of date.
 
Soldato
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You would need to spend around £1000 just to get the same performance as the new consoles assuming you can get some of the parts cheap like a 3060ti FE for example.
 
Soldato
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I don't think it's possible to build a gaming PC with £600 right now atleast not with new parts and even then it will fall far short of the performance a console offers.
 
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I've had a chat with him and he's still fairly set on a pc rather than the new X box.
Are there options out there that will get him going and run games like call of duty well enough for now and allow him to upgrade the graphics card at a later date.
He's currently using the older Xbox one s so would be happy with an upgrade over the capabilities of that.
I've seen a few second hand gaming set ups local but have no idea what sort of specs I should be looking for.
 
Soldato
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Find whatever used GPU you can if possible, or if you manage to swindle anything decent like a 3060 Ti then happy days (about £369 if you get FE, unlikely though so looking £400-450 for AIB models). Otherwise look for Nvidia 1660 Super, 2060, 2060/2070 Super, or AMD 5600/5700 XT etc GPUs on the used market if possible.

Then I'd go with something like the below if you want new for rest of system (which is all in stock currently)... Ofc it's over the £600 budget but if you want something decent and upgradeable, this is the path I would go. :)

If wanna spend another £50 you could get a 1TB NVMe instead of the 512GB SSD as well. But 512GB can suffice a gamer if it's just to put a few games on. But Fortnite and COD would prob fill over half of a 512GB drive.

My basket at Overclockers UK:
Total: £662.82 (includes shipping: £0.00)
 
Soldato
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This is probably more suited to your budget and would leave around £200 for the GPU, a used gtx 1070 would be ideal but realistically your probably only going to get a RX570 4gb or gtx 1650 for that currently as the price of crypto has drove up GPU prices with even used cards selling for more than they did 2 years ago.

My basket at Overclockers UK:
Total: £417.55 (includes shipping: £11.70)
 
Associate
OP
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Thank you for for all of your helpful replies.
He's managed to find a refurbished pc within his budget that will hopefully give him a start. He will look at upgrading the graphics card as and when everything returns to some sort of normality.
It's an Intel i7 with 16gb ram and an Nvidia gtx1650 has a 1tb HDD and a 240gb SSD and already has windows 10 preinstalled.

I'm sure I will be back on for advice on upgrades later in the year.
Regards Anthony
 
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