Computer Gaming?

[Kieranbs01]

There's no need to spend stupid amounts of money, saw someone put 2k? SRLY. For the people that have built high spec pc's for gaming will tell you that its more on the GFX card than the CPU, not saying that you can go dirt basic though.

Here's a great base for a gaming pc:
http://www.aria.co.uk/Systems/Bundl...60GHz+8GB+Overclocked+Bundle+?productId=47131

An i5 overclocked to 4.6ghz there's really not that bigger difference between the i5 and i7 for gaming because as I said its the gfx that's going to be the bottleneck. Mobos plenty enough as well with sata 6gb interfaces for fast data speeds meaning faster game loading times, 4GB of ram is going to plenty for the games that are available atm anyway and its plenty easy enough to upgrade at a later date then just o/c again.

As for gfx cards this is a decent card for the price!
http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Comp...R5+PCI-Express+Graphics+Card+?productId=47001 Decent clock speed with a lot of streaming processors! would be amazing to run these in crossfire though but it will give out a good refresh rate.

Ideally to top it off you would want a ssd to make everything just that little bit faster. Make the os and some programs boot from it and run everything else from a secondary hdd.
Theres no need for 1000PSU's for the above 850 is more than ample! No need to burn money! But if you haven't a big enough psu or a decent branded one don't try and run decent hardware off it- all end in tears sooner or later.

 

[G3 NYX]

There's no need to spend stupid amounts of money, saw someone put 2k? SRLY. For the people that have built high spec pc's for gaming will tell you that its more on the GFX card than the CPU, not saying that you can go dirt basic though.

Here's a great base for a gaming pc:
http://www.aria.co.uk/Systems/Bundl...60GHz+8GB+Overclocked+Bundle+?productId=47131

An i5 overclocked to 4.6ghz there's really not that bigger difference between the i5 and i7 for gaming because as I said its the gfx that's going to be the bottleneck. Mobos plenty enough as well with sata 6gb interfaces for fast data speeds meaning faster game loading times, 4GB of ram is going to plenty for the games that are available atm anyway and its plenty easy enough to upgrade at a later date then just o/c again.

As for gfx cards this is a decent card for the price!
http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Comp...R5+PCI-Express+Graphics+Card+?productId=47001 Decent clock speed with a lot of streaming processors! would be amazing to run these in crossfire though but it will give out a good refresh rate.

Ideally to top it off you would want a ssd to make everything just that little bit faster. Make the os and some programs boot from it and run everything else from a secondary hdd.
Theres no need for 1000PSU's for the above 850 is more than ample! No need to burn money! But if you haven't a big enough psu or a decent branded one don't try and run decent hardware off it- all end in tears sooner or later.

2.8k

 

[G3 NYX]

anyway i would not reccomend water cooling at all, there is just too much to go wrong

Something will only go wrong if you build it wrong, I always stress test my water cooling systems for 24 hours before I send them out!

 

[James28]

All these people telling you you need to spend ££££££ to build a PC that will play games is way exaggerated.

You can build a PC that will play games at decent settings for perfectly decent money.
I built my own PC about 3 years ago, spent about £600, could play the original Crysis at max, and it still plays BF3 fine, and many other games.
Yea thinking of upgrading pretty soon, but I do think the cost people are making it out to be in this thread is wildly exaggerated.

At the end of the day its what your happy with.

 

[z8jay]

My PC has cost me approx £400 to upgrade from a dual core with crappy AGP gfx card. Now runs just about everything I throw at it. Only thing I'm changing is the graphics card - purely to run games like Skyrim and/or BF3 on higher settings.

 

[Felgz]

Gigabyte GA-H67M-D2 Intel H67 (REV B3) Socket 1155 DDR3 PCI-Express Motherboard £65.99

Intel Core i5-2500K 3.30GHz (Sandybridge) Socket LGA1155 Processor - Retail £161.99

EVGA GeForce GTX 560 SC 1024MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card £149.99

8GB Corsair XMS3 (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-10666C9 1333MHz Dual Channel Kit - £34.91

£412.87


Mid Range Gaming PC.. will run everything out now and for the next 2 years..

CPU is easily Overclockable to at least 4.5Ghz with the right after market heatsink..

Intel is the way to go for perfomance.

 

[G3 NYX]

All these people telling you you need to spend ££££££ to build a PC that will play games is way exaggerated.

You can build a PC that will play games at decent settings for perfectly decent money.
I built my own PC about 3 years ago, spent about £600, could play the original Crysis at max, and it still plays BF3 fine, and many other games.
Yea thinking of upgrading pretty soon, but I do think the cost people are making it out to be in this thread is wildly exaggerated.

At the end of the day its what your happy with.

Nobody said to spend that much, my 'workstation' isn't just used for gaming.

 

[wozzaa]

There is some crap posted in this thread.

Ok rather than keep giving him specs and PC's to buy take into account he has already said he has a new 750w PSU. Which is easily more than enough for ANY single GPU based system.

Hell I ran an i7 over clocked with two 5870's in CF off a 620w Corsair unit. The reason people like myself need 1000w PSU's is the extra hardware we run. Cooling, lots of drives, now running 3 GPU's. Your average user will do fine off a 500-600w PSU. I already asked him about that earlier, as some people buy cheap cases with 300w PSU's and then wonder why they get crashes.

He said he already has a case and has a £400-£500 budget.

Wouldn't buy a HDD now due to the current price hikes. So use an older drive from another computer until prices come back down again as they are up as much as 400% at the moment due to the floods.

So it is a fairly easy build in terms of parts for the money.

GTX 560 TI (£170) Amazing card for the price will work brilliantly.
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/1gb-point-of-view-gtx-560-ti-40nm-4008mhz-gddr5-gpu-822mhz-shader-1645mhz-384-cores

Corsair 8GB memory (£35)
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/8gb-...0-(1333)-non-ecc-unbuffered-cas-9-9-9-24-150v

Intel i5 2500K (£166)
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/intel-core-i5-2500k-unlocked-s1155-sndy-bridge-quad-33ghz-hd3000-igp-850mhz-6mb-cache-95w-retail

Asus motherboard half decent spec. (£111)
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/asus-p8z68-m-pro-intel-z68-s-1155-ddr3-sata-iii-6gb-s-raid-sata-pcie-(x16)-graphics-on-board-micro-a

Total is just over your budget.

Will run pretty much everything you can throw at it.

 

[sbridgey]

Gigabyte GA-H67M-D2 Intel H67 (REV B3) Socket 1155 DDR3 PCI-Express Motherboard £65.99

Intel Core i5-2500K 3.30GHz (Sandybridge) Socket LGA1155 Processor - Retail £161.99

EVGA GeForce GTX 560 SC 1024MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card £149.99

8GB Corsair XMS3 (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-10666C9 1333MHz Dual Channel Kit - £34.91

£412.87


Mid Range Gaming PC.. will run everything out now and for the next 2 years..

CPU is easily Overclockable to at least 4.5Ghz with the right after market heatsink..

Intel is the way to go for perfomance.

have ou ever built a pc before or have you ignored the budget?

 

[sbridgey]

There is some crap posted in this thread.

Ok rather than keep giving him specs and PC's to buy take into account he has already said he has a new 750w PSU. Which is easily more than enough for ANY single GPU based system.

Hell I ran an i7 over clocked with two 5870's in CF off a 620w Corsair unit. The reason people like myself need 1000w PSU's is the extra hardware we run. Cooling, lots of drives, now running 3 GPU's. Your average user will do fine off a 500-600w PSU. I already asked him about that earlier, as some people buy cheap cases with 300w PSU's and then wonder why they get crashes.

He said he already has a case and has a £400-£500 budget.

Wouldn't buy a HDD now due to the current price hikes. So use an older drive from another computer until prices come back down again as they are up as much as 400% at the moment due to the floods.

So it is a fairly easy build in terms of parts for the money.

GTX 560 TI (£170) Amazing card for the price will work brilliantly.
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/1gb-point-of-view-gtx-560-ti-40nm-4008mhz-gddr5-gpu-822mhz-shader-1645mhz-384-cores

Corsair 8GB memory (£50)
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/8gb-(4x2gb)-corsair-ddr3-xms3-classic-pc3-10666-(1333)-non-ecc-unbuffered-cas-9-9-9-24-150v

Intel i5 2500K (£166)
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/intel-core-i5-2500k-unlocked-s1155-sndy-bridge-quad-33ghz-hd3000-igp-850mhz-6mb-cache-95w-retail

Asus motherboard half decent spec. (£111)
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/asus-p8z68-m-pro-intel-z68-s-1155-ddr3-sata-iii-6gb-s-raid-sata-pcie-(x16)-graphics-on-board-micro-a

Total is just under £500.

Will run pretty much everything you can throw at it.

seriously, try again

 

[Sparky]

The range of views from this thread on a 'car' forum proves how complex making a pc really is, I am looking at all the suggested options and am still open to opinion, Its a slight shame a group of you cannot all say yes that persons idea is good, it is all rather complex but I am looking into all options so thank you

 

[sbridgey]

look here, lots of useful info, genuine benchmarks and a hardware buyers guide.
http://www.bit-tech.net/

 

[wozzaa]

seriously, try again

Go on tell me why? Why would you spec a dual core i3 for a gaming machine. Especially when more modern games easily take advantage of 4 cores. Crysis, Crysis 2, civilisation, rage, skyrim they all run better on a quad core. Anyone saying to use a dual core for gaming now is just being silly. Quad cores are in the majority of gaming rigs for a bloody good reason now.

 

[sbridgey]

You try speccing a whole pc for less than £500, not just the basic components. Dual core is all that is required for gaming, fact. That i3 is a very good processor only 4 fps behind a 2500k in cyrsis proven here.

8GB of RAM, who needs that much games use 4GB maximum.

i do agree with the 560ti, great card for the price but can he afford it, im not sure if he can.

i managed to spec a very capable system for just over £500, he said he needs a hard drive and i wouldnt be putting my new gaming pc in some old crappy case.

 

[Kieranbs01]

Go on tell me why? Why would you spec a dual core i3 for a gaming machine. Especially when more modern games easily take advantage of 4 cores. Crysis, Crysis 2, civilisation, rage, skyrim they all run better on a quad core. Anyone saying to use a dual core for gaming now is just being silly. Quad cores are in the majority of gaming rigs for a bloody good reason now.

An i3 processor will run game such as Crysis 1 and 2! I know this because I've done it! The second gen of i3's have 4 virtual cores which give them the speed of a medium spec quad.
My second pc which I use for light editing runs games on high with ease.
All depends on what you want to spend anyway.

 

[G3 NYX]

I played Crysis on my Acer Aspire One with a single core 1.6Ghz Atom with inbuilt graphics

About 6FPS...

 

[wozzaa]

I think the problem is it depends on the person playing the game and the settings they are using.

Don't think any of us will agree on specifications as different people want and need different things.

I can say that buying a system now is a bad idea though. New intel CPU's are due any day pretty much. As are new Graphics cards from ATI and Nvidia.

 

[ekaJ]

I built a new pc in 2009, before the new Intel processors.

Athlon X2 2.9Ghz
4GB RAM
GTS250
450W PSU

Cost me £350 and its run everything I want it to so far.

So with the advances in tech since then, you should get a fairly decent rig for your budget.

 

[Silent_Scone]

Don't be dragged into spending hundreds on a decent CPU, if it's a gaming rig it will be far beneficial to spend it on PSU and graphics card(s)

 

[@Spoonie]

Mouse, keyboard, Monitor and O/S required?

 

[Munson]

I think the problem is it depends on the person playing the game and the settings they are using.

Agree entirely. Often hear people saying "this one time, I had a Pentium 4 and a 6800Ultra, and I ran Crysis maxed out just fine". Magic pixie dust powered PCs are very common. Crysis is still able to tax even the most modern hardware. My definition of playable is 40+fps, and I'm never happy unless I'm sync capped at a solid 60fps. Other people are happy with 20-30fps. It's all a very personal thing. In fact it's the reason I love PC gaming, because there is always something new. Something to aim for. Some improvement in visuals and frame rates. Console gaming is awesome too, but in a different way.

There is also something awesome about the smell of a new power-rig running in for the first few hours/days. A bit like the smell of napalm in the morning, but not as dangerous.

 

[Sparky]

Mouse, keyboard, Monitor and O/S required?

I am convincing microsoft to send me their new arc keyboard, mouse and a copy of windows 8 (so far I only have windows 8) - so I don't need them yet

 

[Ex-User (19928)]

I bought a custom computer from overclockers.co.uk. Had it spec'd with an extra SSD and a slightly better graphics card than the one advertised.

They were massively helpful and it was built on a similar budget. Computer came to about £530. I had in mind that I wanted to spend no more than £750 in total and kept getting tempted by the i5 and i7 builds, but frankly that would have left me with no money for accessories. £120 on a 22" widescreen monitor, £40 on a gaming mouse, £50 on a gaming keyboard, £15 on a mouse mat, £220 on speakers.. It all adds up.. And in all fairness, what's the point in having a nice computer if you have to run it at 1990's resolutions or use lame input hardware.

If you have leftovers you can use from previous systems then great!

 

[G3 NYX]

I bought a custom computer from overclockers.co.uk. Had it spec'd with an extra SSD and a slightly better graphics card than the one advertised.

They were massively helpful and it was built on a similar budget. Computer came to about £530. I had in mind that I wanted to spend no more than £750 in total and kept getting tempted by the i5 and i7 builds, but frankly that would have left me with no money for accessories. £120 on a 22" widescreen monitor, £40 on a gaming mouse, £50 on a gaming keyboard, £15 on a mouse mat, £220 on speakers.. It all adds up.. And in all fairness, what's the point in having a nice computer if you have to run it at 1990's resolutions or use lame input hardware.

If you have leftovers you can use from previous systems then great!

Defiantly spend as much as you can on peripherals, a cheap mouse a keyboard will ruin any game.

 

[STRBramley]

Defiantly spend as much as you can on peripherals, a cheap mouse a keyboard will ruin any game.

I use a £5 pcline keyboard because I like the positive feedback it gives lol.
I have got my eyes on a keyboard in bestbuy though which looks really good but I'm not sure about the ergonomical design. What keyboard do you use and what are the advantages over my budget keyboard?

 

[@Spoonie]

I am convincing microsoft to send me their new arc keyboard, mouse and a copy of windows 8 (so far I only have windows 8) - so I don't need them yet

How are you convincing them to do that? Also Windows 8 is still pre-beta. You will not be getting the best performance and possibly limited hardware support.

 

[Sparky]

How are you convincing them to do that? Also Windows 8 is still pre-beta. You will not be getting the best performance and possibly limited hardware support.

I'm a Microsoft Student Partner,so far I haven't seen it fail on drivers out of everyone I know, if I do come across any issues I'll just install 7 ult x64

 

[@Spoonie]

I'm a Microsoft Student Partner,so far I haven't seen it fail on drivers out of everyone I know, if I do come across any issues I'll just install 7 ult x64

Cool

 

[Silent_Scone]

students partner looking to build a s**t computer lol


Seriously though why would you want an early build of 8? if it's a 'gaming' computer you'll just end up in grief... drivers might work, doesn't mean the games will.

 

[sbridgey]

windows 8 is practically the same as 7 with some metro ui tablet start menu

 

[@Spoonie]

windows 8 is practically the same as 7 with some metro ui tablet start menu

Its not.

 

[sbridgey]

Please inform me of the differences

 

[@Spoonie]

Search the web, I'm not going to go into it here but its a bit like saying the all Clios are the same except the bodyshell. Would you really need an explanation to why they are different?

 

[sbridgey]

I have windows 8 on my laptop and to be honest i dont see the advantages over 7, all i can see is mobile/tablet based apps and interfaces.

i have looked at a pretty good article, here, they seem to be trying to make a big deal about all of thy touchy feely interfaces and ARM support. From what i see the main user stuff on a desktop pc is the same as before just with a built in Anti-virus. So probably alot of low level differences and increased support for tablets is all that has really changed from what i gather.

 

[Munson]

I personally don't give a s**t about Windows anymore. For me, it only serves as a basis for PC gaming.

 

[STRBramley]

I personally don't give a s**t about Windows anymore. For me, it only serves as a basis for PC gaming.

Same here. Only reason I use it is for gaming and Windows specific applications that I can't be bothered to try and get working under another OS.
Saying that. Windows 7 is a huge leap from Vista in terms of driver support and stability.

 

[Sparky]

Windows 8 is just the disk I already have, I'll have to download Windows 7 then Knock £1 off the budget (5x pound land cd's Lol)

 

[Sparky]

Think this setup is most appropriate (given lots of advise and feedback, from CS over clockers, pm, replys, phone calls etc:
Graphics (£187.99)
Asus GeForce GTX 560Ti DirectCU II TOP 1024MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card **Supplied with BattleField 3 & Batman: Arkham City PC game** [ENGTX560 TI DC2 TOP/G/2DI/1GD5]
Processor (£95.99)
Intel Core i3-2120 3.30GHz (Sandybridge) Socket LGA1155 Processor - Retail [BX80623I32120]
Motherboard (£84.98)
Gigabyte Z68AP-D3 Intel Z68 (Socket 1155) DDR3 Motherboard [GA-Z68AP-D3]
PSU (£54.98)
OCZ ZS Series 550W '80 Plus Bronze' Power Supply [OCZ-ZS550W-UK]
RAM (£39.98)
Kingston HyperX Genesis Grey 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit (KHX1600C9D3X2K2/8GX) [KHX1600C9D3X2K2/8GX]


Subtotal £463.93
Shipping £10.00

 

[G3 NYX]

Think this setup is most appropriate (given lots of advise and feedback, from CS over clockers, pm, replys, phone calls etc:
Graphics (£187.99)
Asus GeForce GTX 560Ti DirectCU II TOP 1024MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card **Supplied with BattleField 3 & Batman: Arkham City PC game** [ENGTX560 TI DC2 TOP/G/2DI/1GD5]
Processor (£95.99)
Intel Core i3-2120 3.30GHz (Sandybridge) Socket LGA1155 Processor - Retail [BX80623I32120]
Motherboard (£84.98)
Gigabyte Z68AP-D3 Intel Z68 (Socket 1155) DDR3 Motherboard [GA-Z68AP-D3]
PSU (£54.98)
OCZ ZS Series 550W '80 Plus Bronze' Power Supply [OCZ-ZS550W-UK]
RAM (£39.98)
Kingston HyperX Genesis Grey 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit (KHX1600C9D3X2K2/8GX) [KHX1600C9D3X2K2/8GX]


Subtotal £463.93
Shipping £10.00

Should be perfect

 

[Sparky]

Should be perfect

At last the 4th person to agree on the same build, I would like to thank everyone for all their help and opinions Especially G3 NYX on here and Stulid from Overclockers UK