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My 13 year old son is obsessed with the idea of a gaming PC. He already has a PS4 pro and is absolutely certain that a PC will take him to the “next level” of gaming awesomeness…
The thing is, I can’t get past the price. It seems that for the same or better performance of what he already has, or a PS5, we’d need to spend well over £1200 (which is not going to happen..!!!).
I think the other thing that bothers me is that I think he already spends way too much time on his games, which I think is colouring my judgement. Don’t get me wrong, he plays football for a couple of teams at a decent level, trains twice per week, and has 2 a week (or 3 if school team has a game), and walks to and from school every day, so he is quite active.
So, can I get a gaming PC that offers a similar or better performance as a PS4 -pro but can also be upgraded over time, for a budget of around £600?
Ideas, options, links etc. Are greatly appreciated - I just can’t seem to find any independent/impartial online comparisons, other than businesses trying to flog a PC.
Prices and availability of graphics cards is ridiculous at the moment.
You could have a look here for advice https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/community/new-to-pc-gaming-upgrade-advice.172/
The spendy bit is the graphics card. Depending upon what he wants to play you could start with say a Ryzen5 cpu with the built in graphics chip. My daughter has a Ryzen5 without graphics but with a GTX 970 graphics card that came from my sons machine when he upgraded to a RTX 2070.
you could just say no. 😆
can I get a gaming PC that offers a similar or better performance as a PS4 -pro but can also be upgraded over time, for a budget of around £600?
No.
There's been a few similar threads of late, may be worth a read.
https://singletrackmag.com/forum/topic/computer-decision-making-help-please/
https://singletrackmag.com/forum/topic/basic-gaming-pc-roblox-minecraft/
“ So, can I get a gaming PC that offers a similar or better performance as a PS4 -pro but can also be upgraded over time, for a budget of around £600?”
No.
The thing with consoles it that they are designed to run games really well and that’s about it. They make them in huge numbers so the economy of scale is amazing.
When you buy a gaming PC you need to do a lot of balancing. You have to make sure you have a half decent CPU so it can pump into the the graphics card, your graphics card needs to be able to process the info it’s getting fast enough. You need enough memory too, and fast hard drive space (I am downloading Forza Horizon 5 now and it’s 200gb+ in size!). The case has to be able to provide ventilation so a decent case and efficient quiet fans too.
And that’s just the main unit. You also need a monitor which can display the graphics well - you’ve got the think about frame rate matching the refresh rate (consoles are stuck to 60hz but I have a 144hz gaming monitor that will sync itself to the graphics card output) and the response time being decent too.
And then there are the peripherals - you might be ok with a basic mouse and keyboard but my Corsair K70 gaming keyboard and mouse were £150 on their own. No not necessary but what works ok in an office environment may start to limit your experience. A PS4 has a dedicated robust controller designed for the job!!
I started out a bit back with a £1000 PC for gaming and soon realised that I was going to need a lot more to play the latest titles at decent frame rates. Having an inbuilt CPU GPU is ok for office or older games - maybe - but a kid wanting to better the experience of a PS4 it’s going to a terrible let down.
I ended up upgrading pretty fast to to £250 GPU, up to 16gb of Ram and another HDD, then a fancier monitor as the cheap one I got wasn’t quick enough. And I’m only a casual gamer and not too bothered about the latest kit. The FH5 I got I reckon I’m going to need to get a new GPU to get the best of and I’m looking at another £500 for that!
That’s the exact response I thought I’d get… I tried to do a lot of homework around this and just couldn’t see how it was possible. Thanks all 👍🏻👍🏻
I got a cheap-ish middling PC last year (i3-10100F, GTX1650, 8GB ram, 240GB SSD) for £500 and I reckon I was lucky, the same thing now but with a GT710 is £600-odd 😲 Hell, even the GT1030 DDR5 in my work potato is 'worth' more than the (used) PC it originally came in!
There are some refurbed 10th gen i5 (6 core, 12 thread) PCs on ebay for ~£500 which'd be ok until you can get a graphics card if your lad can handle the ignominy of not being able to run <insert new game here> in 8K at a squillion FPS.
There was a gaming laptop on HotUKDeals for £900. Seems a decent spec.
Gigabyte G5 15.6" FHD IPS 144hz i5-10500H RTX 3060 16GB RAM 512GB NVMe Laptop
Think you would struggle to get anything significantly better than a PS4 for less
“ There are some refurbed 10th gen i5 (6 core, 12 thread) PCs on ebay for ~£500 which’d be ok until you can get a graphics card if your lad can handle the ignominy of not being able to run <insert new game here> in 8K at a squillion FPS.”
That would be only ok for office work, won’t even play older games. With an office case which would be no good for airflow with a decent GPU in, that’s even if you could fit a proper full height dual (or triple) slot GPU. My £250 GPU is a double slot model and it’s going to start struggling to play new games soon at 1080p, which is the base resolution to be aiming for and what I have at the moment.
To be playing 1080p triple A new games right now at decent frame rate (100fps) you’re probably looking at a full system price of £1300-£1500 new for something that will have some longer term (well as long as you expect in PC land) upgradability.
To run 4k games at a playable frame rate and decent level of detail you’re looking at a £1000 GPU really, and a £500 monitor to make it worthwhile, with the rest of the computer probably weighing in at another £1000 on top.
PC gaming is amazing, but to be honest it’s crazy expensive to be able to play the new games as they come out.
i thought it was bad enough about 3 years ago when i paid £400 for a vega64, the make i have is going second hand for over £600 at the moment but i would still need to add more to it to get a card with any worthwhile improvement.
i'm at 1440 and don't need really high frame rates(60hz monitor) and fully expect if i bought any newish games wouldn't be able to run them maxed out.
now is not a good time to get into pc gaming.