A gaming pc for my birthday

Don’t forget to allow a couple of hundred for a PC Gaming Chair.:blush:

Or the six hundred quid Daughter 2 paid for a 26" WS monitor…though I did think that Assassin’s Creed:Odessey looked d@mn good on it :smile:

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I’d go with a Ryzen processsor instead. You omitted the obligatory liquid cooling & RGB kit!

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The Ryzan looks like a good piece of kit. I tend to stick with what I’m used to; hence my lists.

RGB lighting is partly covered by Fatcat’s photo and a full suite of Razer mouse, mouse mat and keyboard, for that multicoloured “wave flow” lighting, but yes, he’ll need a few LED strips in the case to add to the overall effect (IiRC Corsair do a set for around £50).

And for added ambiance in the gaming room, Phillips HUE multicoloured lights with the app on the PC that changes the colour of the HUE to reflect the overall colour on the game screen - I kid you not, these things are for real…Daughter 2 has one…(et moi aussi :stuck_out_tongue: )

I did think about water cooling. Never tried it myself, I use a bl00dy great finned & fanned cooler.

Also, I do not overclock like the really serious pro gamers (hence my comments about Dons grandson not yet being a Pro).

I bet that, by now, Don is wishing the lad had asked for a PS5! :laughing: :laughing:

You do not need to spend £1,000+ to get a gaming PC suitable for a 12 year old.

Our 15 year old bought himself a used gaming PC for $450 (about £250), excluding monitor keyboard mouse. He’s using it with an old but perfectly ok 1080p monitor. 500GB SSD, 16GB RAM, dedicated decent graphics card. Plays current games without compromised graphics.

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Yeah, and Grandad can play his '78s on a Gramophone…

or more closer to home, one does not need an ND555 to stream audio; a Raspberry Pi + DAC HAT will do the job.

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A Microsoft Surface 3 laptop will not be sufficient for gaming, they are really focused on serious work stuff.

This is a proper gaming laptop:

Starting at around 1250GBP for a 16GB model with a Ryzen 7 CPU and a dedicated Nvidia 6GB videocard.

So the bottom line is, a proper gaming laptop would cost roughly the same as a separate business laptop and a PS5 combined.

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I bought myself a RoG laptop for Zwift last year. It’s seriously overspecified but is fast and runs Zwift with all the graphics options turned on.

Price-wise a reasonably decent PC and a console will still be cheaper than a gaming PC - the graphics card alone costs more than a console…

I understand your thinking but there is one serious problem with what you propose and that is the graphics card - or rather the lack of. The onboard graphics card of the laptop will be fine for windows and business tasks but not up to the demands made by gaming. A ‘good’ graphics card for gaming is circa £400.00, for example. If you just upgrade the hard drive and RAM what you end up with is a laptop that is well over specified for homework duties and yet still under specified for gaming.

I’d suggest you take a look at the games Don’s grandson actually wants to play (in the opening post) on the PC and reconsider if a £400 graphics card is actually required. :thinking:

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That’s a fair point - you can rack up Call Of Duty to a fair level though and there is always a more demanding game round the corner. Witcher is getting on a bit now but was a real test until recently.

Actually, I’ve just been checking out the specs and you are quite correct - both games are very undemanding compared to top spec games like Cyberpunk 2077 (for example). It also occurs to me that both games are really about on-line team play and internet speed will likely be more of an issue than outright graphics quality. Having said that, I still think a PS5 or Xbox will have greater longevity than a budget gaming PC.

Also depends on his friends - if they are all on Playstation he will need one of these not a PC if he wants to play online with them.

You really shouldn’t look at the minimum required specs for a game like Call of Duty though. The most important thing for online gaming is FPS, which should be 60 frames or higher for any enjoyable gaming.

From the Activision page:

"Here are recommended Specs to run at 60FPS in most situations with all options set to medium:

Video: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 / GTX 1660 or Radeon R9 390 / AMD RX 580"

All those cards are in the 400,- range except for the 1660 which is about 100,- cheaper. But note this is still only with medium settings, which won’t look very fancy.

Hmm… I hadn’t considered that and is an excellent point. My two nephews managed with Xbox all through their gaming teens and played many, many hours of on-line Fifa, CoD etc (this was only a couple of years ago) - neither have felt they needed a gaming PC as such.

Well I agree, and you rather confirm my own thoughts.

That doesn’t take into account the type of monitor. It might apply to a 40” 4K HD monitor, but I doubt it applies to a 20” monitor.

The above would apply to 1080/60hz resolution, running COD on 4k is out of the question with those specs:

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My son doesn’t over clock his CPU but I want to upgrade the stock AMD cooler with with a Noctua NH D15 chromamax Black in case he decide he wants to. Noctua make the the most premium fans

My son is running with with a GXT980 GPU and has no issues playing Watch Dogs: Legion, Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon and Division 2. FPS very smooth.