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I have no idea if this is the right forum for this.

My son (17YO) wants a gaming PC so he can play games from steam and more of the competitive style games.

How much would that cost? How much/little can I get away with spending? Are there retailers I should be looking at? For price sake do I nee dto be looking at building one or just buying it off the rack? What are the base levels of ram and hard drive space that he'll need?

Thanks for any help you can give,

Andrew

One thing you want to be certain of - if you're going to go with a fully-built PC, don't get one from a big store, get it from a specialist PC store (probably online).
I'm in the UK, not the US, so of course there might be exceptions - but I've heard horrible things about the markup on some of the offerings that, say, Target or Walmart have put out in recent years. The price doesn't seem too bad until realising that certain key components have been skimped on, like the power supply. You'll get much better support from specialist places too.

It used to be the case that building a PC would save you money, but these days that's only really true if you already have some pieces in place already - for instance the monitor, or a copy of Windows if that's the OS you're going for.

For specs - as this is for gaming, I'd recommend 8GB of RAM as a minimum, ideally you want 16GB. This is however by far the easiest component to upgrade by just popping the lid and swapping the part out.
Hard drive space - 500GB as a minimum, 1000GB (or 1TB) recommended. You could go more if you want - but most important here is that you want this to be a solid-state drive, or SSD. Older, disk-platter style HDDs are fine as cheaper extra storage, but if a system has an HDD as its main drive? Steer well clear.

Lastly, there's something you've not mentioned here but it's arguably the key component for any gaming PC - the graphics card. However, that gets trickier to recommend without having a set budget in mind, as the price on this also sways the wildest from high to low end. So I'll follow that point up with a question - what kind of games are we looking at exactly, do you have any particular names in mind eg. Fortnite, PUBG, Call of Duty?

A few further thoughts:

1) A common setup today is to have a 250GB or 500GB SSD as a "main" drive which has your windows OS installed on it and some other software; but then to have a second drive which does most of the work for games, documents etc...
SSD are more expensive than HD, so if price is an issue you can certainly use an HD 1TB drive for games. With games SSD mostly just improves the loading time for the game. Which is nice, but not totally essential.

2) For storage with modern games (esp a lot of the console cross overs and online games) the game size have had a huge jump. Some are easily over 100GB in size. So at least 1TB storage is going to be wanted unless he's only ever going to play one game (which would be rare). If you find you've more money then a 2TB would be better.

3) There's basically a triad of motherboard - processor and graphics card when it comes to games. The motherboard defines what processors can fit; the processor and graphics card will define how well it performs - varying game to game as some weight more to the card and some more to the processor. In general these three components are where I'd want to spend the bulk of any pc money since they are where the most impact will be seen in performance. Of the three the processor is probably the one you'd want at the best end you can get since that's the harder to upgrade - graphics cards are pretty simple to upgrade just pop it free and slot the new one in.

4) Today its much easier to build a PC at home, but if you've not done it before I'd second finding a local geek/computer shop and having a chat with them about budgets and what they can do for you and having them put it all together.

5) I'd recommend getting a "full tower" when it comes to the size of the PC. Full towers are bigger and give you more room to put in updates or tinker around. They are basically easier to work with. Smaller sizes are on offer, but can limit you on what you can upgrade with later in terms of cards or harddrive space and can also be trickier to fit things into because everything is more compact.
If the tower is just going to sit under the desk then a large tower is much easier to work with.

6) Screen makes a difference, but at the same time its a very easy part to upgrade later. Again its an area where if you find yourself budget limited you can put it lower down the chain and consider updating later.

7) One saving is you won't need a sound-card. These were a thing for a long time, but now unless you are mixing music and such they are overkill. Most motherboards (esp higher end ones that you'd want for gaming) are going to have more than enough quality and audio output connections for a decent speaker system.

Motherboards will also typically come with most of the wireless network connection elements you'l need too so no need for a network/wireless card either

8) As an aside if he's into competitive games I'm going to take that to mean online games; if so what's your internet speed like?


As a totally rough guideline if I were building a gaming PC in the UK I'd be ballpark thinking of £1000. That said I'd likely be excluding monitor, keyboard, mouse, speakers from that price

 Overread wrote:
5) I'd recommend getting a "full tower" when it comes to the size of the PC. Full towers are bigger and give you more room to put in updates or tinker around. They are basically easier to work with. Smaller sizes are on offer, but can limit you on what you can upgrade with later in terms of cards or harddrive space and can also be trickier to fit things into because everything is more compact.
If the tower is just going to sit under the desk then a large tower is much easier to work with.

Oooh, very good point. And to add to this - avoid anyone that presses the point about trying to sell you a gaming laptop, unless your son will be travelling a lot.
You don't get as much for the money, and they're much much more difficult (if not outright impossible) to upgrade later.

Yeah laptops sound neat, but honestly unless you really need the mobility they are not worth it. Heck I'd wager today unless you're regularly travelling to "off grid" locations or by train for long hours - a laptop is often just not worth it. Casual communication can be done with a tablet and any "serious" pc work is easier on a proper desktop.

Plus, as noted, laptops are basically impossible to upgrade; even if you can you get far less "power" for your money with a laptop. Gaming wise I also see a lot more users have issues with laptops in games because they often use slightly different hardware configurations which means they are not always as best supported as regular PC hardware. In addition to that, for gaming, is overheating which can be more of an issue - again its all crammed in tight so there's less room for air to flow. Sometimes they need bolt-on cooling fans/bases just to keep at a sensible temperature when running games/other demanding software for long periods.

I'd always suggest a tower case, as laptops are better for work or college work, not games.

The way I do this is:
Look at the games he wants to play, and get the highest entries in the recommended spec of them.
Look at a reputable hardware supplier for pre-build machines, and look at the range of prices they do.
Scale it back to a reasonable pprice, which you like the look of.
Fiddle with the spec to allow for:
A second hard drive, to allow for slower apps and games to go onto that.
16 GB of RAM, preferrably as a pair of sticks with a spare pair of slots for later (4 slots on the botherboard),
A 750W power supply or more,
If VR is an option (for now or later), factor that into the spec.

Getting a pre-built machine is good for support, but building it yourselves is usually much better for tweaking and knowing what is in there.
It's all square pegs and round holes these days. The info in the manuals will point out which bit goes where.

Don't forget an OS. Dual-booting into Linux was a thing back a while ago, but Windows is the norm.

I'd leave VR out honestly - far as I can tell for most VR in higher end games is much more demanding on the system so its going to push you right into the high end of the market. Plus the VR systems itself run for a considerable amount of money.

VR is certainly more stable and likely to stick around and grow than in the past; but its still a very top end feature and high price end of things.

Depending on your budget, you can check the autogenerated builds at PC Part Picker to get a good idea of what it will cost.
The Ryzen 3600 is the current baseline, best bang for the buck, CPU at the moment.

Both AMD and Nvidia will be announcing their new video cards in the next couple months, so existing video cards will drop in price when that happens.

If you plan on building it yourself, keep an eye on power supplies for availability and pricing. There's a shortage right now on them.

On the subject of power supplies - get a modular one if at all possible. Basically there's two kinds - fixed and modular. Fixed have a fixed number of types of cable coming out of them. Modular have a bank of connection slots into which you can plug a variation of cables as you need.

The bonus is modular allows you more ability to add more items and vary your power setup very easily; whilst with a fixed you're fairly stuck with what you've got. Which might be fine for the initial build ,but might hit issues if you want to expand later.




I'll also note that the power supplies come in different wattage ratings, however they only take what they need. So its advisable to have a supply that can supply more than you need. It won't cost any more on your electric bill, but it means that you've head room to expand and also aren't running it at its limit.

Another big consideration, while not related directly to the PC, is the connection to the internet if playing online games.

My boys were connected to the internet via Wifi and constantly complained of lagging issues when playing with their friends online. So, I paid extra to boost the download speed of my internet. It marginally helped, so I figured a direct ethernet connection was the way to go, so routed a wire through the walls from our router to each room. This helped a lot.

TLDR- If playing online connect to internet with cable, do not use wifi; Make sure your internet provider has more than 100mps (250 is better) download speed.

 MDSW wrote:
Another big consideration, while not related directly to the PC, is the connection to the internet if playing online games.

My boys were connected to the internet via Wifi and constantly complained of lagging issues when playing with their friends online. So, I paid extra to boost the download speed of my internet. It marginally helped, so I figured a direct ethernet connection was the way to go, so routed a wire through the walls from our router to each room. This helped a lot.

TLDR- If playing online connect to internet with cable, do not use wifi; Make sure your internet provider has more than 100mps (250 is better) download speed.

While generally a LAN cable is the safer connection, WiFi today is not really worse, IF your Access Point provides a good signal and you don't have tons of metal in your walls. We have had WiFi only for gaming for the last 9 years, never a problem, even when both me and my wife play simultaneously. Pings of 15 (Counter-Stikre) to 100 (WoW).

This sounds more like a problem with your AP (location) or the WiFi cards.

 ender502 wrote:
I have no idea if this is the right forum for this.

My son (17YO) wants a gaming PC so he can play games from steam and more of the competitive style games.

How much would that cost? How much/little can I get away with spending? Are there retailers I should be looking at? For price sake do I nee dto be looking at building one or just buying it off the rack? What are the base levels of ram and hard drive space that he'll need?

Thanks for any help you can give,

Andrew

Truthfully, given the kind of questions you're asking, I'd go with just ordering a fairly standard box from whatever manufacturer website you prefer. Self build doesn't seem like something you'd want to bother with. For non-experts/'pro-gamers'/youtubers, the difference is rarely worth the bother.

The system I've currently got would be around $1000 now (its about 4 years old). I don't trust the graphics card to be able to run the upcoming Cyberpunk game on High settings, but for everything else its fine.
i7 processor, 6 or 8 GB graphics card (do some research here, as we're a year into a transition phase from one type to another), 16 GB memory, 500MB SSD, 1 TB Hard drive. That's really most aspects sorted for the next several years (should see him out of college unless he's greedy about upgrades)

Definitely not a laptop though.

I would avoid buying any PC from Best Buy, Wallmart or any box store. Cyberpower PC is not bad online and if you travel to the Philly area you have Microcenter which will build it for you in store or have pre-builts.

Thank you all so much for your responses. I am not 200% sure which games he wants to play but has mentioned wanting to be able to download from Steam.

Need to digest all the great info.

Thanks so much!

ender502

I've gotten two from CyberPower PC. The most recent one a few months ago. It ran about 600-650 US without the monitor. The only 'modern' games I've played on it have been Overwatch, retail WoW (max settings no issues), and Total War: Warhammer 2 on ultra unit scale. Only TW has been a little laggy at times during battles when there are 4 max stack armies on the field, but at that point the game is rendering 4000+ units.

 ender502 wrote:
Thank you all so much for your responses. I am not 200% sure which games he wants to play but has mentioned wanting to be able to download from Steam.

Basically the way the PC game market has evolved over the last 10-20 years or so is that Steam is basically the online store almost every game appears on now. So downloading games from Steam is little different to saying you want to buy sweets from the sweet shop when asked what sweet you want. The physical copies have also reduced* dramatically with many gamers now only being sold online and often through steam.


There's a few other sites (Battle net, Origin, Uplay, Epic game store, GOG) which are sometimes focused on a single specific developer/publisher (eg Battlenet is mostly Blizzard and Activision games); or offer a niche (GOG publishes and patches a lot of older/classic games as well as some modern ones - many classics do also later appear on steam); or are competing (rare- basically Epic Game store at present).



It might be that he's only got a rough idea what games he might want to play. Depending on his age you might want to oversee his choices. I'm unsure what (if any) parental controls Steam has beyond your son being limited by not having a card/paypal to buy games with


*many highstreet game stores have gone from a whole wall of PC games to a single standing shelf unit; often only major titles bother with a major retail release. A good few do special/limited/collectors editions in physical even if otherwise having a limited physical release.

Overread's just reminded me - even games with physical copies usually require a download of some data, and some are effectively just an installer program on the disc that then goes and fetches the entire game via download anyway.
I bring this up because I understand that data caps and throttling are much worse in the US than they are here? So that's something to consider.

 Super Ready wrote:
Overread's just reminded me - even games with physical copies usually require a download of some data, and some are effectively just an installer program on the disc that then goes and fetches the entire game via download anyway.
I bring this up because I understand that data caps and throttling are much worse in the US than they are here? So that's something to consider.

I've only used 2, maybe 3, ISPs, but I've never experienced an issue with downloads in general other than games have crappy built in downloaders.

@ OP the best thing you could do is speak to friend/family who knows how to built and set up a computer.

Getting one off the shelf will be around 200%-300% more expensive than if you bought all the parts and got it built.

The most expensive part of the build will be a the GPU (graphics card) and the CPU (processor).

Its well worth investing a bit more and have a high tier machine. It will work and run and be relevant for many years mine is about 4 years into its cycle and it still works like a dream.

The only thing ive upgraded is a new graphics card and monitor. Orignaly had a second hand GPU from CEX and monitor I got off some guy on gumtree for £5.. So I guess what Im saying is your lad can always upgrade his GPU or monitor the following year (save up birthday or x mas money or whatever). As long as the core is well built with decent motherboard, cooling, CPU etc. the graphics which games rely on can be improved as time goes on.

Hey guys. So, I looked around and still feel kind of lost. Can you look at this pic and give me your opinion on features vs price? I know every said to avoid the big stores but this is costco. Just bare with me...

A *BIG* part of the reason why we say to avoid big stores - yes, even Costco - is because they tend to skimp on the power supply (PSU) in particular. I note that the PSU spec isn't listed here.
I perhaps should have mentioned it before, but didn't want to overwhelm you with info.

The trouble with going for a cheap PSU is two-fold:
- they can easily be sub-par for the amount of power the PC wants to draw, leading to the graphics being bottlenecked, problems with the slots on the case getting enough power (typically the USBs), which can be tricky to diagnose.
- even if the PSU is rated for higher power-draw, if it's a lower quality part then it runs the risk of blowing out and taking multiple other expensive parts with it - potentially the motherboard, which can then take *everything* else with it. Your "saving" then ends up costing you an entire new PC as a result. (Yes, I've seen this happen.)

We aren't kidding when we say avoid the big stores. Please don't think, "oh, but..." ...just trust us on this one.

That's in dollars? I assume, but, to be sure...

That range on the Lenovo site lists the PSU in the GTX1660 model as 650w.
But, there is another with a 400W PSU. Both of those are at least $100 more than this one.

I figured as much. ALARM BELLS RINGING!!
Ok, check out this article - points 1 and 5 in particular, maybe 6 if you're so inclined. I don't trust that 650W figure as far as I can throw it - which considering I'm not there to be able to lift it, translates to "not at all".

https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/6-things-know-buying-power-supply-unit-psu/#:~:text=When%20you%20are%20assembling%20a,t%20take%20this%20risk%2C%20ever!

Thanks for the heads up on the PSU. I was wondering if the specs looked ok mainly as a point of reference.

Again, thanks so much for the help.

ender502


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Skinnereal wrote:
That's in dollars? I assume, but, to be sure...

That range on the Lenovo site lists the PSU in the GTX1660 model as 650w.
But, there is another with a 400W PSU. Both of those are at least $100 more than this one.

Would the 650w be good enough? How about the 400w?

 ender502 wrote:
Hey guys. So, I looked around and still feel kind of lost. Can you look at this pic and give me your opinion on features vs price? I know every said to avoid the big stores but this is costco. Just bare with me...

That its Costco makes it worse. Bargain basement junk at adequate prices isn't just a motto, its a fixation.
Which is fine for canned goods, but really not for electronics.

Voss wrote:

 ender502 wrote:
Hey guys. So, I looked around and still feel kind of lost. Can you look at this pic and give me your opinion on features vs price? I know every said to avoid the big stores but this is costco. Just bare with me...

That its Costco makes it worse. Bargain basement junk at adequate prices isn't just a motto, its a fixation.
Which is fine for canned goods, but really not for electronics.

Thanks for the less than helpful response. How about you take your privileged, snobbish bs and shove it up your ass?

ender502

Yeah, that could have been phrased better.

If you know the make and model of each part of your PC, you can expect (and check) that you're getting quality parts.
As was said about the PSU, raw power is not good enough. Stable power is what you need, and a spec sheet of a part can tell you what you're getting. That is why we buy parts and build our own.

If $899 is your current target figure, we can try pricing up an equivalent PC, roughly about that spec.
I'll get onto that when I get home.

As for CostCo, Cyberpower PC (mentioned by trexmeyer) is sold there:
https://www.costco.co.uk/search?text=cyberpower

 ender502 wrote:

Voss wrote:

 ender502 wrote:
Hey guys. So, I looked around and still feel kind of lost. Can you look at this pic and give me your opinion on features vs price? I know every said to avoid the big stores but this is costco. Just bare with me...

That its Costco makes it worse. Bargain basement junk at adequate prices isn't just a motto, its a fixation.
Which is fine for canned goods, but really not for electronics.

Thanks for the less than helpful response. How about you take your privileged, snobbish bs and shove it up your ass?

ender502

Unless you own Costco, I'm not sure what you decided to take offense to there. Multiple people warned you away from big box stores, and Costco tends to source products from even cheaper sources. Thus, the result would be worse.

But sure, I'll be less helpful from now on.

Voss wrote:

 ender502 wrote:

Voss wrote:

 ender502 wrote:
Hey guys. So, I looked around and still feel kind of lost. Can you look at this pic and give me your opinion on features vs price? I know every said to avoid the big stores but this is costco. Just bare with me...

That its Costco makes it worse. Bargain basement junk at adequate prices isn't just a motto, its a fixation.
Which is fine for canned goods, but really not for electronics.

Thanks for the less than helpful response. How about you take your privileged, snobbish bs and shove it up your ass?

ender502

Unless you own Costco, I'm not sure what you decided to take offense to there. Multiple people warned you away from big box stores, and Costco tends to source products from even cheaper sources. Thus, the result would be worse.

But sure, I'll be less helpful from now on.

I'm guessing because you have to basically pay a subscription fee to shop at Costco so there's that investment that I guess he's seeing that you're basically attacking.

Having worked at Costco, they give you value bulk deals on everyday goods, but when it comes to higher quality stuff like electronics, I gotta agree with Voss and say that it's best you look elsewhere unless it's a TV.

 Skinnereal wrote:
Yeah, that could have been phrased better.

I think it's a fair summary of anything Costco that isn't bulk purchases of cheap, low-quality items. Cause that's the majority of what Costco sells, and their "high-end" stuff isn't exactly known for superior quality. It's like going to a dollar store and expecting to find fine wine.