Gaming PC for a 13 year old...

[Roboticarm]

Hoping for some advice please:
My 13 year old wants a gaming PC, I'd like to keep the budget below £1,000.00 if possible

I have the peripherals so would just be looking for the base unit.

I used to build PCs as a part time job so have some knowledge and experience but that was over 20 years ago building the original intel pentium and AMD based systems where 100mhz and 16mb of ram was considered good and 3DFX cards were the top spec graphics cards.

Not planning to build this myself so looking for recommendations for a pre built unit please

Still looks like AMD and Intel are the main chip choices and I guess more is better is still the mantra for memory and storage but I've no idea what spec is needed to run games these days

Any advice greatly received

[Silverbullet767]

Your probably picking the most expensive time in history to buy a gaming PC. The RAM prices and storage prices have ballooned massively in the last 18 months.

It would be helpful to know the resolution of the monitor, and which games they plan on playing.

ETA: RAM I paid £60 for a 32GB kit, price now £281 (DDR4! not even the latest DDR5)

2TB SSD: I paid £275 (5 years ago when 2TB was expensive) now £420

Edited by Silverbullet767 on Thursday 10th September 15:16

[Xenoous]

What this guy said. Go second hand or spend well in excess of £1,000 for anything remotely decent. I'm going to have an AMD Vega 56 8GB GPU up for grabs shortly.

[Silverbullet767]

Without knowing what the resolution of your monitor is or which type of games (demanding or eSports etc)

A good all rounder without significant bottlenecks (other than the single stick of RAM, however we are where we are) would be something like this.

It's the latest DDR5 platform and a GPU with 12GB will be ready for future titles as 8GB GPUs are struggling nowadays.

https://www.scan.co.uk/products/scan-view-rx-amd-r...

I wouldn't recommend this for 4k gaming however it could play lighter titles at that resolution.

[.:ian:.]

Around £1000 will simplify things somewhat!

There ain't much around that figure.
£999
https://www.scan.co.uk/products/scan-gamer-rtx-amd...

£929
https://www.cclonline.com/amz-gam-core-a20-horizon...

£950
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/ocuk-gaming-mach-1....

That last one has the best cpu, much bigger gap over the 5500 than you would think just looking at the number!

Otherwise all very similar

Next best one price wise is £1200
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/ocuk-gaming-carbide...
Cpu is faster and it supports pcie gen 5, compared to 4 on the 5600 and 3 on the 5500!

Edited by .:ian:. on Thursday 10th September 17:05

[Mr E]

With a 13 year old, I would (and did) build it with them as a project.

Echo’ing “bloody expensive right now” conment above. Consider used for GPU?

[Roboticarm]

Thanks for the help and advice so far.
Main game he wants to play is Fortnite but difficult to predict what he might move onto in future

In terms of monitor it sounds like my plan to use my HP monitor (1080p) might not something I need to rethink?

Do we think the current prices are temporarily high or is this the new norm ?

[Mr E]

1080p is fine, and means your GPU can be more sensible. Given budget, that s a good thing

https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/guide/mwv6Mp/modest-am...

Actually, that GPU is overkill IMHO for 1080p
Drop it for a used previous generation card, save £200

[.:ian:.]

Monitors are one of the few things that seem to get cheaper, you can get a perfectly reasonable high refresh rate 1080p monitor for under £100 or a 1440p for about £120

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Amzfast-2560x1440p-Adapti...

[Digger]

Mr E said:

1080p is fine, and means your GPU can be more sensible. Given budget, that s a good thing

https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/guide/mwv6Mp/modest-am...

Actually, that GPU is overkill IMHO for 1080p
Drop it for a used previous generation card, save £200

I disagree. If playing Fortnite, he'll (probably?) want as high an FPS as he can get plus his mates will all be comparing FPS sizes at that age . . .

[Digger]

I'm also naturally cynical about the current pricing of PC parts . . .

I hope I am wrong, but I don't envisage any GPU &/or RAM price drops any time soon . . . if at all

[Silverbullet767]

Yep, the AI tech bros have ordered all the RAM, the entirety of this and next year's worldwide allocation. If you want any you'll need to pay through the nose.

[Mr E]

Digger said:

I disagree. If playing Fortnite, he'll (probably?) want as high an FPS as he can get plus his mates will all be comparing FPS sizes at that age . . .

My kid was very happy when geometry dash reported something like 270fps at 4k

I reminded him that the screens were running at 60Hz

[Monsterlime]

As others have said, it is nightmare right now. I managed to build a new gaming rig late last year just before all the insane pricing came in, but it was close.

Things have gone up even more recently. You could have easily gotten a used 5060 TI on ebay for less than £400 a month ago. Now they are £500.

I really need to list the RX 7600 8GB I have, at a reasonable price, it is no good for AI really so isn't worth much. And my Framework 16 that I don't use.

[The_Doc]

I bought an off the shelf one, although they are made in batches from https://veno-scorp.co.uk/

And it was sub 700 and the boy plays fortnite at unlimited frame rate on it. So it serves frames higher than the 120hz monitor (bought separately) can display.

If you didn't want to build it yourself and you wanted some support/warranty

[Roboticarm]

https://veno-scorp.co.uk/products/nv-150se#looxRev...

What's everyone's thoughts on this one please?

Also the graphics cards, is there logic to the 5050, 5060, TI, GT etc ? Trying to work out if a ti is vastly different to a 5060 or if some are just listing the full name and others not

[mmm-five]

Roboticarm said:

Also the graphics cards, is there logic to the 5050, 5060, TI, GT etc ? Trying to work out if a ti is vastly different to a 5060 or if some are just listing the full name and others not

5050 is the very-low end, and every number letter increase is an upgrade.

The upgrade will be more GPU/ray tracing cores or VRAM.

The difference in brands is mainly just aesthetics, maybe whether it has 1/2/3 fans on it, and the OC (overclocked) ones have a tiny bit more performance (at a premium price).

So in Nvidia-speak, the performance progression of the [url=https://www.nvidia.com/en-gb/geforce/graphics-cards/50-series/]50-series GPUs (more info in the link)[/url[ would go something like this:

• 5050 (entry-level 1080p)
• 5060
• 5060 Super (rumoured)
• 5060Ti
• 5070
• 5070 Super (rumoured)
• 5070Ti
• 5070Ti Super (rumoured)
• 5080
• 5080 Super (rumoured)
• 5090 (4k gaming / AI stuff)

Benchmark charts courtesy of Tom's Hardware:
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gpu-hierarchy...

Edited by mmm-five on Saturday 12th September 10:32

[Silverbullet767]

Roboticarm said:

https://veno-scorp.co.uk/products/nv-150se#looxRev...

What's everyone's thoughts on this one please?

Also the graphics cards, is there logic to the 5050, 5060, TI, GT etc ? Trying to work out if a ti is vastly different to a 5060 or if some are just listing the full name and others not

Would be fine for Fortnite, AM4 platform with DDR4 is an older now discontinued platform with no new CPUs being released if you're concerned about an upgrade path, the 5700x3d/5800x3d being the only worthwhile upgrade. Also an 8GB GPU whilst fine for Fortnite will struggle with more modern games. But you're not going to get the latest AM5 platform or more than an 8GB GPU for under 1k.

[The_Doc]

Roboticarm said:

https://veno-scorp.co.uk/products/nv-150se#looxRev...

What's everyone's thoughts on this one please?

Also the graphics cards, is there logic to the 5050, 5060, TI, GT etc ? Trying to work out if a ti is vastly different to a 5060 or if some are just listing the full name and others not

I have:
Mini Nemesis 3 White - Intel Core i3 13th 16GB RAM NVIDIA Geforce RTX 3050 6GB N7-SE110 × 1
1TB SSD £619.00
with a nice Philips 27 inch curved backlit monitor with dual HDMI inputs which cots about £120 more.
Bought earlier this year

and it runs Fortnite and all his games just fine at high frame rates.

If you are running to a budget, then maybe just maybe you'll have to drop the frame rate a little on some games. But thats life. Keep buying the lottery tickets and hope for a win. As Mick Jagger said, you can't always get what you want.

I wish my dad spent a grand on my toys when I was younger !

[AlexC1981]

Roboticarm said:

https://veno-scorp.co.uk/products/nv-150se#looxRev...

What's everyone's thoughts on this one please?

Also the graphics cards, is there logic to the 5050, 5060, TI, GT etc ? Trying to work out if a ti is vastly different to a 5060 or if some are just listing the full name and others not

It won't set the world on fire, but you can game on it. You could save £100 if you bought the parts new and assembled it yourself and bought Windows from one of those cheap CD key/Groupon places.

As has been mentioned, it's using DDR4 RAM, so it is an older tech system. You could build a better spec DDR4 system if you are willing to risk buying some used parts, however when specifying parts yourself, it's very very difficult to avoid budget creep!