Help me find a gaming PC.

DWatts

No, the i3 is down a notch from the i5. It goes up - i3 < i5 < i7. But the current generation i5 is just as good as the old i7, which I have - and I have no problem playing the latest games.

Graphics cards are an interesting issue, because they keep releasing new ones with greater speeds but games aren't getting that much more advanced. If you got the latest-and-greatest from Nvidia or ATI you could run some of the latest graphics options from DirectX11 smoothly, but games are designed to look good without them. Mostly, they're tacked on graphical effects so that people who spent £400 on their new graphics card can feel good about it.

I have an ATI 5770 I got off ebay last year for £100, and I don't have a problem running games on high settings. So, to pluck out a random (newer) graphics card - if you went for the ATI 6850 you'd run games no problem.

Ximian

I'm with Hammyman, build your own. For a budget of £700 you can build a decent system. I'm in the process of speccing a new build for myself, my info below might help and give you a rough idea on what a new build will cost:

Intel i7 2600k (not necessary for games, i5 2500k will suffice for games and can be overclocked) £237, i5 2500K is approx £160
8GB RAM (RAM is pretty cheap now, approx £58 for 8GB, 4GB should suffice for games though)
P67 Motherboard approx £103
New Coolermaster case and 650 W PSU (£94)
1TB SATA HDD £40
1 SATA DVD writer £14
[Optional] CPU cooler - approx £50 for an air cooled unit, you'll pay more for liquid, useful if you plan to overclock the CPU
Graphics card - Nvidia GTX 560 approx £150, GTX 460 - approx £105
Monitor - rough estimates: £65 - £120

The build above is approximately £700-730 depending on what you want, but that's a decent high end spec, add a keyboard and mouse, a decent soundcard if you don't want the onboard soundcard, approx an extra £100.

I like this site to compare CPU performance, you can see that the Intel i5 beats the AMD Phenom II X4 840 by a large margin: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html
The AMD CPU is also about half the price of an i5 2500K

Youtube is also very useful for product comparisons and research.

Some of the new generation graphics cards have 3D technology and will usually cost more, plus a 3D kit for the full 3D experience. It's very easy to spend over a £1000 for the latest and greatest. Unfortunately, no one can predict where the technology will go, I still have my original build PC that was the greatest many years ago, has 2GB RAM, an AGP graphics card and AGP was replaced by PCI-e, IDE was replaced by SATA, and now you have SSD which outperforms SATA.

HTH

Phil3822

Some real good info here guys, thanks. Am still looking about and researching.

AmongTheLiving

There are a bunch of vendors in the UK like Palicomp, Chillblast, YoyoTech, CyberPower or Eclipse Computers which have excellent pre-built gaming PCs, and in all cases they're totally customizable. I can't post links yet, but a quick google search will take you straight to their websites. Might be worth looking at!

boogiemaster

I built two gaming PC's recently as me and the wife love to play games. The wife loves world of war craft and I love anything.

The wife has an amd system and I have an Intel 2600k system and they both handle games no trouble at all.

I got my parts from http://www.aria.co.uk/ but they have pre built systems and their prices are brilliant to.

Phone them up and tell them what your after and they will build a system to your exact needs if you don't like the ones they have.

They will build a PC around the money you have including operating system