Building a Gaming PC Advice Please

scaredofdebt

Hi,

Just wondering what the current best options are for a mid-range gaming PC, budget is about £1,000 so I know it won't be really cutting-edge but that's the budget.

I don't need a monitor but will need Windows.

I'm assuming 16 GB is enough RAM, I will be doing some video-editing so is 32 GB worthwhile?

I prefer SSD and would like 1 TB minimum.

What's the current thinking about GFX and CPU?

Budget can go up a couple of hundred or so if worth it.

Cheers,

Neil_Jones

Get as much memory as you can afford.

A second hard drive is always good, biggest you can get (doesn't necessarily have to be SSD), because raw video takes up shedloads of space, especially in this day of HD and 4k video.

Gaming is more about the graphics card than anything else, so you may be able to skimp slightly on the processor in favour of a graphics card.  Decent power supply is a must, please don't spend £250 on a GPU and pair it with a cheap and cheerful power supply you got for £20.

scaredofdebt

Thanks, yeah was looking at a main SSD of 1TB with a secondary HD drive, SSD is stupid money over 1 TB it seems.

HD drives are so much cheaper, I've seen 5TB for under a hundred quid!

What's the best SSD deals currently?  I'd like 2TB ideally but don't really want to spend ~£200 on one.

chunter

Probably get a better repsonse if you keep an eye on this forum. https://www.hotukdeals.com/tag/electronics

interstellaflyer

No need for a 1TB SSD, use something like a 250GB M.2 drive (modern boards generally have an M.2 NVMe slot) for your operating system etc, this will be faster than a conventional SSD and then use a 1TB HDD for storing games, video, images etc.

mksysb

You may want to look at an AMD processor, as the latest versions are faster and cheaper than the equivalent intel cpu.

interstellaflyer

My entry level build with a basic B450 motherboard, Ryzen 3400G 16GB 3200 DDR4 RAM stands me at £450 or there abouts, Sabrent 250GB M.2 NVMe drive on the board and a 480GB Kingston SSD for storage, I was building a general use PC rather than a gaming machine.

MinuteNoodles

scaredofdebt said:

What's the current thinking about GFX and CPU?

Budget can go up a couple of hundred or so if worth it.

Cheers,

Nvidia RTX 3070 or 3080, AMD Ryzen 3700X if you're going to be doing video editing as well as gaming. 
Disagree with the advice to just get a 250GB SSD, it's just not big enough nowadays with the size of programs and games. Get a 1TB, there's plenty of games that will benefit from the faster loading speed and many of them now are getting up to over 100GB installation size. 

interstellaflyer

MinuteNoodles said:

scaredofdebt said:

What's the current thinking about GFX and CPU?

Budget can go up a couple of hundred or so if worth it.

Cheers,

Nvidia RTX 3070 or 3080, AMD Ryzen 3700X if you're going to be doing video editing as well as gaming. 
Disagree with the advice to just get a 250GB SSD, it's just not big enough nowadays with the size of programs and games. Get a 1TB, there's plenty of games that will benefit from the faster loading speed and many of them now are getting up to over 100GB installation size. 

It's plenty big enough, you only need it for the OS, you don't need it for storing games, it's standard practice when building gaming computers to use a lower capacity SSD for OS etc and use a larger HDD for storage of games etc.

forgotmyname

16GB was more than enough, "WAS".  Using the Win10 XBOX Panel which showed me at 98% RAM usage (16GB).

SSD and games is a mixed bag,  I  found GTA 5 had issues loading off a fast SSD, but worked fine loading off a
standard hard drive.  No idea if there was a fix or patch, just moved it to a standard drive.

Looking for an answer at the time found the issue affected quite a few games, possibly linked to games that
scanned itself for altered/non standard or cheat files.

scaredofdebt

mksysb said:

You may want to look at an AMD processor, as the latest versions are faster and cheaper than the equivalent intel cpu.

This is one reason I asked on here.  I built a PC about 18 months ago and for the first time ever used an Intel chip as they were allegedly the best value then.  But histrocially (since early 2000s) I've used AMD as they were usually better value.  So it's gone back to AMD then?