A cable thread usually involves the thoughts of people in their 50/60/70s arguing with other of people in their 50/60/70s.
If this was similar to a cable thread people would be claiming all PC’s perform the same and arguing about how long they take to burn in.
Alley Cat seems to know the answer himself “low-end with upgradability or a bit more expensive but certainly not leading/bleeding edge" Upgradability is a no brainer.
I build my own computers; I helped my son build a gaming computer when he was 16 (he chose the components himself). He now specs and builds his own computers. He doesn’t listen to me, I’ve been telling him for a couple of years to back up his hard drive/operating system to no avail, although he is now 35.
Due to downloading games:
Internet downlink speed is relevant, especially on initial installs, release and big patch days. But that should be very similar for the consoles.
I haven’t had a gaming PC myself in ages, but I understand the blockbuster 3D games can take 50-100 Gigabytes each. Given how cheap SSDs have become, I would not start below 1 TB for a gaming PC and would check, if 2 TB can be afforded. (Should be less than 100€ more, unless you go for insanely fast ones, nobody actually needs.)
You can add more SSDs later as well, of course.
My favorite computer magazine builds their „perfect PC(s)“ every year around November.
This years „sensible allrounder edition with VFM“ is a current Intel 5-core (12th gen), 16 GB RAM (DDR4, VFM), 1 TB SSD, and selected components and settings (optimizing power consumption and noise). Without dedicated graphics, it comes in at 13W idle and around 800€.
You can add a decent graphics (330€), faster CPU (+200€) or double the RAM (+60€).
For most any games, the base seems to be sufficient; few games use more than 4-6 cores and to use very fast CPUs, you need the GPUs which cost 800-2000€.
This is of course a machine not optimized for coolness factors considered important by youths.
But this may give a baseline.
They also have a power house variant (latest AMD 16core) which wipes the floor with the former in compute intensive jobs (rendering, heavy compile jobs, …) for 1600€ (without dedicated GPU); but you will need very heavy workloads or commercial use (time is money) to make use of this. Games don’t.
I’ve had pcs from overclockers and from Chillblast, the latter were better but both good. Spec depends on what games he wants to play, some are much more demanding than others. It’s no different than questions on hifi really, all depends on your budget
Feeling a little guilty as I’d have liked to have had something ready for Christmas but I was initially against a gaming PC anyway.
Had a good chat with my son this afternoon and I don’t think he was honestly expecting one for Christmas.
If there’s a reasonable bundle value wise in PC World locally I may just go for something from there tomorrow, but I think I’d prefer to do my/our research on best bang for buck combos first which as I explained is something we could both do together though we may not get components until the new year.
I think it would be great to build a suitable PC together as it would be very educational for him rather than getting an off the peg computer, though I suspect it might be hard to achieve the same as cheaply as the big suppliers can build a custom PC.
I bought my thirteen year old son a high end gaming PC last year. I figured if you can’t beat it (screen time) may as well help him be the best (well ok, better). And as far as PC’s vs console’s go, PC’s win out for serious gaming because of the reaction time. Smaller but faster monitors are the rage, as well as super quick keyboards and mice. And ping time, don’t forget about the ping time! At the end of the day, it’s all about the PRAT…
I retired from IT support many years ago but I haven’t stopped building PCs so here are some random thoughts.
Regarding prices there are plenty of on-line stores selling components and the one I usually find best value is CCLonline. When you have decided on exactly what you want shop around and only use Amazon as a very last resort!
Once the word gaming is attached to a component it usually means that it has unnecessary colourful LEDs adorning every possible surface, often with the attendant price premium. If these gimmicks are avoided it is more than possible to build a very good machine at a significant saving over pre-built packages.
Windows 11 Professional licences can be had via internet suppliers for a little over £20 pounds but avoided the very cheap ebay ones which are usually bent in some way or other. For ultimate graphics performance the GPU is the most expensive component but the most lauded graphics cards are not strictly necessary. At this particular time Intel’s ARC 770 cards work very well with current generation chipsets on Windows 11 and in price/perfomance terms represent better value than the well known names.
Peripheral components such as keyboards and mice do not have to cost very much and can readily be found in supermarkets. Even fairly decent monitors are now far cheaper than they used to be.
There have been very significant advances in microchip technologies which mean that read and write speeds to both permanent and volatile storage have greatly improved and this also benefits internal data transfer at the heart of communications between motherboard components and CPUs.
When you see an impossibly cheap pre-built offering on Ebay it is almost always because the components used are several generations behind current technology and their performance will suffer for this. For example an Intel core I7 processor from three years ago will be much slower than a core I7 in current production. The labels are meaningless if you don’t look at benchmark comparisons.
If you have the time and inclination there is almost limitless technical information about building PCs on youtube but you do need to discriminate between sound advice and dross.
Finally dare I suggest that the idea that technical know how in this field is the preserve of the under 25s is absolutely false. Although there may be some truth in the fact that I can never remember what all the buttons do on the remote control!
