How much do I need to pay for a gaming computer?

Cerro

If you are willing to build something yourself then a very good gaming PC can be had for around £1000 - good enough to last 2 years. While you might think that is horribly expensive the games for PCs are much cheaper than the games for consoles and PCs can be upgraded, consoles cannot. At £30 per game for a PC compared to £50 for most top console titles, its not long before you start making up ground on your larger initial investment. Plus you can do more with a PC than you can with a console.

You don't need to upgrade often, i got by with my last PC for 2 and a half years by only upgrading the graphics card, processors today give out far more than what is required. You can also increase the useful life of a gaming rig by overclocking it - its far more involved and you really need to understand the calculations and bios options but once you do you extend the life by another year or so. Of course, doing so pushes parts beyond their spec, voiding warranties and shortening their lifespan but few PCs ever get kept around for 10yrs anyway, so knocking off 4 years off its life isn't going to mean much.

If you buy a dell or some other branded off the shelf PC for gaming they don't last as long because they use cheaper components - most people don't understand the difference between expensive, high speed, low latency ram and just your average ram but plenty of it. If you don't want to build it yourself i suggest you get a console. Better still you and your son, build it together - that way he will learn how to put one together too. Its alot less daunting that some would have you believe, a few screws for the motherboard into a case and the rest pretty much just slots together.

So it all depends on how involved you want it to be and how much you are willing to spend, if you can't be bothered with all the fuss just get a console. I have a Wii along side my PC and its alot of fun, but looks abit bland in places, the other two consoles can't match my PC and do pretty much the same thing. I can give you a spec to get you started, but you need to give a budget.

A word of caution, online retailers tend to be much the same for price. Its always worth checking around but use one that has a good reputation for service and reliability. cclonline, komplett and scan are safe enough but ebuyer and overclockers tend to be pretty nasty when it comes to mistakes with orders or bad parts - trouble is you won't know until you have a problem with them but once you do, you know never to go back (and you find others also have similar experiences).

Dacarlo

Lakeuk wrote: »

buy him a console, an expensive upto date PC for playing the latest games will only be good for 18months

Rubbish.

I'll point out that with the right emulator you can play plenty of games from consoles on your PC too. I built mine about 18 months ago and its still excellent and will run any of the latest games at full tilt with most of the graphics turned up to the full yam.

Console games cost a fortune and it only plays games. True a reasonable PC will set you back more than a console but in the long run the games will be cheaper and when it comes to upgrade a bit you want have to dump the whole thing and start again.

Someone mentioned £1000 as an amount to spend on a gaming rig. Sure if money is no object and you must have an 8800 ultra meg 756Mb ram monster. But .... The 8600GT will happily serve you for a few years, hell I'm still using a 7600GT and it runs the likes of Fear, Halflife, Quake4, doom3 and all the other common modern games with the bells and whistled ramped up at a good resolution. The Reason I would upgrade to an 8600GT is if a) I dont wanna spend hundreds on the top end and b) I want a good mid range card capable of running the incoming DirectX ten games (next year?).

Currently my system as mentioned has been running for around 18 months. I will probably chuck some more RAM in there (cheap) and get an 8600GT (also cheap) and I reckon it'll do me for a couple of years from this point at least barring faults. My previous system was an AMD Athlon 3800+ and lasted a few years too with little in terms of upgrades. I'm still using the same case I bought for that box and as I upgraded I either sold the parts or donated them to my friends/family for their systems.

MickKnipfler

Thanks guys. A couple of things:

We've had PS1 and PS2. I thought as he's starting senior school, a PC will allow him to do other things too.
I want to install IP CCTV cameras and would like to use his PC to manage the application and store the images to an external disc
He's only 12 and at the moment probably doesn't need the latest high spec machine (although I guess he will in due time).
The screen does support VGA and HDMI (no DVI)

Little_John

The price of games is pretty irrelevent, ok a PC game costs £25, a 360 or PS3 game costs £40 It costs less to buy the console than the PC so you have a load of money to go and spend on games.
You can get a PS3 and a few games for £430 and the PS3 wont need upgradeing ok free software updates and will play every that is released for it without having to worry have I enough memory or is the graphics card up to it. Yes upgradeing is easy but its asier to know you don't need to think about it.

I learnt my lesson after spending £300 - £500 a month buying new upgrades.for 2 years.

MickKnipfler

I see that Xbox360 prices are coming down this week

Little_John

Yeah I saw that even more money saved or to spend on games.

boyse7en

>Fear, Halflife, Quake4, doom3 and all the other common modern games

Those aren't exactly modern though, are they.
Doom3=2004, F.E.A.R = 2005, Quake4 = 2005, Half-Life = 1998

If he wants to be playing new games like Crysis, Bioshock, etc. then he is going to need something a bit more whizzy.

A console (even a PS3) will be cheaper but less useful generally, as he'll be able to use the computer for homework, writing essays and using your credit card to buy off the internet

Even if you spend only £800 on a rig, then you'll need to buy an awful lot of games for a PS3 to come close to the same cost, even if the games are £15 dearer (about 25 games)

Cerro

Little_John wrote: »

I learnt my lesson after spending £300 - £500 a month buying new upgrades.for 2 years.

I went 2 years hardly touching my PC - bought a new graphics card for it and that it was it, lasted another year before I decided to replace it. That was £100 for an extra years worth of gaming and I could have done it again but decided to upgrade before the PC reached the end of its life.

£300-500 per month worth of upgrades, for two years? In two months thats a brand new PC - what were you doing, building something for the CIA? Or did you just buy into whatever was advertised as the newest and best?

£1000 will get you a PC that will last 3 years. Spend less and it probably won't last as long but its easy to upgrade. In fact your biggest spend should be the graphics card, the rest should last a good 2 years even on a budget.

Mobeer

I think part of the problem in this thread is that there are three types of gamer:
- the extreme gamer, who continually upgrades their PC, plays all the latest games at the highest graphics levels, thinks nothing of spending £250+ on a graphics card, builds their own pc to get exactly what they want
- the economy gamer, who upgrades their pc once a year or less, thinks a £100 graphics card is reasonable, is happy to play slightly older games, or compromise on graphics quality to save money
- the cheap gamer (maybe not present in this thread), owns an older or lesser pc, thinks spending £60 on a discrete graphics card is a bit much, is happy playing games they like that perhaps are long in the tooth

With no real idea how much money you have to spend, or what level of interest you have, anyone in any of these three categories could advocate a particular budget and specification.

Little_John

Extreme gamer good way of putting it. I wasnt building a system for the CIA no but It was quick.

I was running dual and quad procesors way before they were even thinking about sticking multiple cores on 1 cpu, dual graphics cards, scsi hard drives in a raid, huge amounts of memory, multiple monitors, Virtual Reality headset, It was crazy. This was back in 1998, 1999 and 2000 so the specs were miles lower than they are now but the top stuff is still the same price now as was back then £300 for a graphics card I did borrow a £1500 graphics card once from work just to see what it could do and it only had 32mb of memory on it we were sticking 2 of them in some machines. It was fun but very expensive.

I had nothing to worry about in the world, 18 and earning more than most people I knew, life was easy and I had a 90% disposeble income.