My uncle wants to know what a gaming PC will cost him for his grandson at Xmas. He's asked me because in days gone by I used to build such things but not so much anymore. I suspect he'll be on a tight budget but had stipulated a complete build including monitor and a light up keyboard. I don't imagine he's talking about a mechanical £150 Corsair but just something that looks a bit fancy. There isn't a fixed budget to work to (helpful!) so I'm thinking a budget 1080p build (he's only 12). No need for freesync and RGB fans and overclocked watercooling etc etc. It might be something off the shelf works out cheaper/easier/better but I wanted to ask you lot first if you could spec something......
To get something half decent he'd be looking at over £1k... But does it have to be all new stuff? Because a used office PC with a new GPU (depending on how far you go with that you may need a PSU as well) and an SSD will easily cut the budget in half with minimal impact on gaming performance.
Just to be clear, "complete 1080 build" means a rig capable of gaming well at 1080p and not a rig based around a GTX 1080?
Here's a full rig with a 24" 1080p monitor and peripherals for a smidge over £1k. Little bits could be trimmed here or there to bring the cost down. You'd need to add the cost of windows on, but you can often find it on Groupon for 15-20 quid.
Yes, 1080p gaming. I suspect certainly nothing more than a 1060 6GB at most. He's 12 and will not be playing Battlefield V in ULTRA with VR and a thai massuse massaging his aching little fingers. We can be sensible with the specs.
Hehe, I also came expecting a GTX1080 build BTW : GTX 1060 and modest CPU would be good enough. I like the idea above of repurposing an Office PC with a Gfx upgrade or even going second hand - you can go back a few generations and get excellent HD (1080) gaming performance, a decent 2 year old i5 / i7 with a GTX 1060 upgrade and 16Gb RAM would be great. My son has a 3 year old i5-4690 with a GTX780 and it runs games @ 1080p pretty smooth and mostly maxxed out, I'm not suggested that as an option but purely to illustrate the point that gaming at 1080p doesn't require Carlos Fandango super-duper hardware. Chunks
If they didn't mind 2nd hand that'd definitely be the way to go for cost effectiveness. Edit: always worth keeping an eye out for sales though.
