Building a gaming computer - where to buy bits?

m5rcc

wapow wrote: »

You seen the Unreal Tournament 4 engine demo? Its AWESOME dont you think?

Only one game exists in my life: Football Manager

Corelli

Realising I might have to drop some quality ... real life rears its ugly head .... I looked on ebay for 5i gaming computers ...

I'd appreciate some feedback on the specs of these.

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Galaxy-3-3Ghz-Intel-Core-I5-2500K-Gaming-Computer-PC-500gb-8gb-DDR3-HD-Graphics-/150755630925?pt=UK_Computing_DesktopPCs&hash=item2319bc5f4d

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Intel-Core-i5-8GB-DDR3-QUAD-CORE-gaming-PC-1GB-ATI-Radeon-HD6450-HDMI-/110839513839?pt=UK_Computing_DesktopPCs&hash=item19ce8cc2ef

Or this one, fans, 1tb all for under £400. No OS but we can cope with that AFAIK
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=300664081637&fromMakeTrack=true

neilwoods

Those 3 you listed are ok, if you want a basic home pc. Only 1 has a seperate graphics card and not one mentions what the power supply is, so would guess it is a basic one that comes with the case 500w or so.

in all honesty, be better to keep the money and save up a bit more. £400 is more an entry level gaming pc.

rosalie-lavender

neilwoods wrote: »

Those 3 you listed are ok, if you want a basic home pc. Only 1 has a seperate graphics card and not one mentions what the power supply is, so would guess it is a basic one that comes with the case 500w or so.

in all honesty, be better to keep the money and save up a bit more. £400 is more an entry level gaming pc.

I am inclined to agree with neilwoods about saving up a bit longer. It cost £800 to upgrade/rebuild my daughters computer and that was for a new processor/motherboard and graphics card, ram and a new copy of windows 7 with a new hard drive. All the other parts we reused.

Corelli

Hmmm, I am taking on board what you are all saying about needing to spend more. Trouble is that this purchase would have had us overdrawn as it is. Ah, offspring with expensive ambitions .....

Can anyone give me links suitable for a non techy person so I can read up for myself about the different sorts of power supply and diferent graphics cards? I thought a power supply was a lead with a plug on the end. Obviously not.

Thanks for all the help, I'll go away and leave you all alone for a while.

pledgeX

Corelli wrote: »

No OS but we can cope with that AFAIK

Your computer won't work without an OS. You have 4 choices:

- Use a free OS (e.g Linux). Unless you/your son is technically minded, you may struggle. Support has got a lot better in recent years, but gaming will still be tricky if not impossible to get playing properly. Especially on recent games.

- Buy windows. The best option but obviously the most expensive.

- Get a dodgy copy of windows (downloading or ordering from a dodgy website). This is illegal and stupid. Don't do it.

- The other option is to use an existing copy of windows that you have laying about the house. Depending on what type of license you have you MAY be able to install it on multiple machines, however this is unlikely. So check first.


As you've said this will be making you overdrawn, I would seriously re-consider this purchase. Do you really need to spend £400 to play games? Is that the sole reason for it? If so, why not just buy and xbox/playstation? Hell you could probably buy an xbox and with the leftover cash buy a cheap laptop/netbook to browse the net and for your kids to do their homework etc.

JamesK10

http://www.bit-tech.net/guides/

Custom PC, the print magazine from the same company Dennis Publishing, with its build a PC feature goes off sale closing time today so you might miss it at supermarkets but they are very regular and will roll around again.

To get familiar take a look at any of the guides there for PC builders although they were discontinued last summer when Intel's latest tech was due at the end of January (as always) - then it was delayed.

What you have to remember now for a modern gaming PC is that, boring as it sounds, the power supply is as important as the graphics card and you have to budget a decent chunk for it, I paid £70-80. The graphics card or GPU as it's now shortened to sometimes, will change every three months with a new range. As such it should be the last thing you're looking at buying.

RAID refers to one way of configuring multiple hard drives, if your kids meant more than one graphics card it's SLI for Nvidia cards and Crossfire for AMD/ATi, but that will cost more than it's worth, 9 times out of 10 a single card in the next generation will give equal performance and will just work. Right now you have to make sure that your graphics card has a minimum of 1Gb on it, some people will tell you that you don't need as much but some games will refuse to start without that amount.

I'll post more later as I got back at 8am and need to sleep but see if you're able to find that mag if you read this today.

The thing about the Xbox 360 is the console's generally cheap if anyone reduces it to £150 on average for the 250Gb model. You would then have to pay a membership to Xbox Live for the some of the multiplayer extensions to games. The platform costs basically one game (£30-35) per year, which works out cheaper than four three-month passes. A new PC would be dearer but at least you could attempt to run any of your preceding old games on it without having to buy any more. Keep saving until you have another £100 or so and you can either spoil yourself or be protected against any swing in RAM prices.

If your son likes Crysis then make sure you have room in the budget for at least two 12cm fans to go in the case as it will overheat a graphics card. Crysis Warhead the follow-on game is slightly less demanding but not by much.

Buying bits? If UPS is a decent courier in your area then Ebuyer aren't bad, also used CCL and Novatech in my time as well.

neilwoods

Could try this link, not the most up to date site, but it goes through the process of what you need and explains the difference's.

http://www.buildyourown-computer.com/Components.html

For £400 you can build a basic entry gaming rig, but you would allways be playing catch up (that can be said for any computer), but more so if you spend little in the inital build. At least if you spent double your budget, it would last longer before you needed to upgrade.

Gaming on a PC is expensive.

Marvels

I persoanlly shop between ebuyer.co.uk and cclonline.

I've find them competative and very good customer service. Returned stuff to ebuyer with no quibble in the past.

From a personal experience I wouldn't touch Scan with a barge pole.

Not only do I find them pricer than most but I have had some really bad experience with their customer service.

Eg - Ordered a Graphics card which the website showed in stock, but really wasn't. I was never informed, they took my money and kept quiet about it. Wasn't until I chased multiple times did they refund me. And when I say multiple times I mean at least 10 times...

Avoid IMO.

photodgm

For what it's worth I recently used DinoPC for a new system based on an i5. It was possible to build up what I wanted in several different ways so I did the cheapest. I did buy the graphics card I wanted from Dabs and fitted that myself. Very happy with the result but your budget is very tight for a gaming pc