Best pre-built system £800-£1000

Hi,

Friend is asking for recommendations for a gaming rig for their son, budget is £800-£1000 and need everything, base unit, monitor, keyboard and mouse. Quick look on Scan came back with these.

https://www.scan.co.uk/products/sca...a-gtx-1660-super-240gb-ssd-1tb-24-monitor-win

https://www.scan.co.uk/products/sca...tx-1660-super-240gb-ssd-1tb-24-monitor-win-10

Anything better out there in the pre built category?

Any reason to pick one of the above over the other?

Thanks

 

Linux tech tips is doing an undercover on american and Canadian rebuilds, sometimes you pay a little more for better support / better build quality or shipping quality

I'm not saying scan are bad I'm just saying the price diff might not just be in profit margins

 

Of those two pre-builts I'd pick the Ryzen, simply because there's an actual upgrade path.
The Intel system is on an already dead platform, and I doubt the extra FPS you get by going Intel is going to be noticeable on a 1660 Super.

Unfortunately the PCSpecialist systems are a little more expensive than the Scan ones.

 

Is someone buying prebuilt gaming rig really going to be upgrading anything but a GPU, it is gaming after all, CPU doesn't mean much at all once you hit a certain level, the 9400F is great as is the 3600, 3600 probably stronger, either will do the job, the Ryzen system comes with a 320 board so probably won't get newer chips anyway.

any further dough on upgrades would be more wisely spent on more RAM or GPU, that CPU will never need to change.

That said you are more likely to get a cheap Ryzen chip down the line used rather than an Intel chip should the person want to do a cheap upgrade but upgrading to newer chips is not really that straight forward on Ryzen, low end boards used in these types of builds probably don't have the power stages or BIOS support so it is a minefield/.

 

Yeah there probably won't be much upgrading being done on this down the line, just really wanted to double check there weren't any better sites to go looking for a decent build.

 

It may be a little cheaper to get a prebuilt PC, then separate monitor and peripherals.

 

Any recommendations?

 

I Couldn't find much better, most prebuilt seem to be variants of a similar thing for that money really, you'd only do better building yourself or going for older spec CPU etc.

 

Credentials: I am currently building 2 rigs for customers.

These look fine and a good price, mine are similar price point but minus the screen and with larger storage.

My main gripe with both builds is that a 240gb SSD is just pointlessly small for modern gaming. If you have a 1660S/Ti you're gonna be installing games that climb over 100-200GB each. You just will. If all your games are like 20-30GB midrange titles, you don't need a £1k PC.

I consider a 1TB SSD the minimum. Also M.2 Is a total waste of time in cost-value terms, the impact on game loading times is negligible and they're about twice the price of SATA. I'd rather they binned both those drives and put one 1TB SATA SSD in there.

Have a look at Overclockers to compare, because they have some very good prices. They do tend to cheap out on PSUs but that's not the end of the world really.

 

Both systems have M.2 SATA drives, which are often cheaper than their 2.5" counterparts (it's largely the same hardware just in less packaging). They're not NVMe but prices on those have fallen and they're not necessarily twice the price of SATA but can be (if PCIe 4, buffered, tlc). Here's an NVMe PCIe 3 1TB drive for less than a hundred quid (albeit with compromises) https://www.amazon.co.uk/WD-Blue-SN550-High-Performance-Pcie/dp/B07YFFX5MD.

I agree with the sentiment that its size could cause frustration.

 

Negligible price difference on M2 SSDs these days even with NVMe unless you want the latest and greatest PCIe 4, I just buy cheap gen 3 drives. ~£1 per 10GB is reasonable for the performance on offer.

These prebuilt systems come with a 1Tb spinner which is fine, I have the same setup on my daughters machine and use StoreMI/fuzedrive to create tiered storage, this works well to create a large accelerated 1.25Gb drive but is probably off on a mad tangent for this post but as it comes with AMD system, could be another feather in the AMD cap. though for ~£20 you could buy a license and do it on the Intel drive machine. https://www.enmotus.com/fuzedrive

 

I agree with your valid points. However, the actual impact for gaming is pretty much just in the loading screens, and the problem here is that NVMe makes almost no difference:


Like, if prices approach parity, you may as well get NVMe, yes. But while it's any more expensive, I reason that the customer may as well save the money to apply it to something else in the build. at time of writing, NVMe is about 20-40% more expensive at least.

Also apologies for slightly necro'ing the thread, I forgot to reply to this originally. Busy times.

2020-12-10, edit for posterity: