Gaming PC How much?

Mental_Mentor

Hi everyone

It is coming up to my son's 18th birthday and we want to buy him a computer. He is currently studying games design at college and will be going on to Uni to do the same. He needs a computer that uses adobe after effects, auto desk 3d max and adobe premiere.

Obviously there is not an unlimited budget but it is his 18th. what can you techies recommend?

Many thanks
Mental Mentor

pmcx9

there is a dell pc with 19" screen for £293 at the minute. whack a good graphics card in for about £70 and it blows everything other brand out of the water for under £500. he will probably be able to get the progs he needs off his mates.

Mental_Mentor

pmcx9 wrote: »

there is a dell pc with 19" screen for £293 at the minute. whack a good graphics card in for about £70 and it blows everything other brand out of the water for under £500. he will probably be able to get the progs he needs off his mates.

Thanks for this. Will this have the capacity to run games?

Cheers

Andy_L

What spec do the University recomend for the course he's going to do?

mostly

something like this maybe. He'll be able to upgrade in the future, I'd upgrade the power supply now to a 620watt, to keep it as future proof as poss. The newest graphics card at the mo is the 8800GTX 768MB but its very pricey at present. If he's doing games design I'd guess he'll need (or want) a card that will handle dx10 at some point.

BillScarab

Do you know what games he wants to play? Also what are the minimum specs required for the software you mentioned.

Personally I wouldn't regard a £293 Dell, even with a £70 Graphics card in it, as a gaming PC. A £70 card is a pretty ordinary card.

If the PC is to last him throughout university you need to either buy something with a reasonably high spec to last him or buy something that can be upgraded.

I'd be looking at an Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 2Gb RAM (or more if budget allows as I guess Adobe Premiere probably needs a lot) and a 500Gb Hard Drive. The difficult bit is choosing a Graphics Card, you can get an 8800GTS 320Mb for around £200 which would be nice, slightly cheaper would be a 8600GTS 256Mb which are around £140. Both of these support DX10, the latest version of DirectX. I think it would be a bad move to buy a non-DX10 card nowadays, especially if the PC hs to last a few years.

Something like this would probably be fine if it is within budget.

http://www.komplett.co.uk/k/ci.asp?sku=10206

I've bought a PC from Komplett before and it's a good, well built machine.

If you have a big budget try Alienware, they have a good reputation for games machines.

Little_John

Custom build is the best way to go when wanting a PC to run 3d studio max.

You know the polar bears adver for coca cola, it was done with 3d studio max.

We did testing on many different configurations for that PC dual processor, quad processor the lot. The quad system was faster but the cost was about 3 times that of a dual core system, so as an alternative we sold the guy a rendering farm which is multiple cheaper lower spec PC's that all work as a single unit to render each frame of the annimation the rendering was quicker than any PC we could have built.

Also custom build will give him the knowledge that he can upgrade it easier than if he bought a branded PC that normally use custom motherboards designed for that case, I know some manufactureres have moved to more standard boards but some havnt. you can also have an opertunity to spend on some areas and save on others. with gameing its almost all about the graphics card you can either spend a lot now and not upgrade again or save and he will need to upgrade again once the next game comes out and requires the newest card.

Decent gameing PC's are not cheap, I built one for a mate and it cost about £3000 but he wanted the latest and greatest (he had just won the lottery) at the time he decided to scrimp and only bought a single graphics card then moaned when he couldnt bump the grapichs all the way up to the best settings and them moaned when I told him he would need another card. Gameing PC's also loose their value very fast, that £350 graphics card on the 2nd hand market 2 months later may get you £200 that £500 processor will get you £250 if your lucky.

So things to concentrate on, fast processor, decent high quality branded memory and a top line grapichs card, other things that help high performance hard drives, dont mess about with standard 500GB drives go for western digital raptor drives they are smaller but their performance is miles better, you dont want to put anything in the machine that could cause a bottle neck. Another thing is the power supply it is often overlooked and people buy a £40 500w supply thinking that eill be ok, spend more and it will save lots of problems.

Ailienware are highly recomended in the gameing world but they are very expensive, I prefer to build somthing better and for the same money to my spec and requirements.

Over the years I spent about £4000 a year on keeping my PC on top of technology and I was getting stuff at cost price as I worked for an IT supplier about 5-6 years ago I stoped and bought consoles as they dont need upgradeing as often and cost less. to buy in the first place. I still have and use the original case I bought about 7 years ago, and the floppy drive is still the same everything else inside has been upgraded multiple times, I did manage to sell a lot of my "old" bits on and that made it less expensive to keep upgradeing but I still lost a load of money on each time I upgraded and sold the old part.

My advice would be to buy a PS3 or an xbox 360 for games, and then spend about £1300 on a PC that will deal with 3dSM and premier reasonably well.

neilwoods

Could go with dell. Go for quad core minimum and somethin like the Nvidia Quadro FX 4500.

Wouldnt go for custom build yourself, not for the software you want it to run.

3ds max requires some serious processing speed. The redndering alone using lightwave takes an age to, so you will need the quad core. If you used a sinlge or dual core to render a simple car, it could take hours.

You are going to need to have some deep pockets to run this lot, around £2000 just for the PC.

Software alone will be about £3000 (if bought)

dang

Look at this site -

http://www.computerplanet.co.uk/

Ive not used them yet myself,but I intend to when I next upgrade - the prices look like the cheapest around - even so I think I could still spend
2k + If the mrs would let me ;-)

Millionaire

It really depends what your budget is and/or if you've got money to burn.

I woudlnt personally spend £2k-£3k on a system as i think its a waste of money long term. You just wont get anything back if you decide to sell it, even a year or so down the line. Been there and done it.

If you can give a max budget, Im sure someone will get you the best spec for the price.

Lawbag_2

http://tomshardware.co.uk/2007/05/11/system_builder_marathon_uk/

a good place to start