gaming pc's

[david1987]

Id first of all like to start by saying i have absolutely no knowledge of pc's at all.

I currently have an xbox 360 which im looking to upgrade. I was ready to just go and buy an xbox one for the 400 odd quid they are selling for, when a colleague mentioned buying/building a gaming pc.

If i was to go down the pc route, id use it mostly for gaming and internet browsing among other things.

My question to anyone in the know is what are the advantages of a gaming pc over an xbox one and how much would a decent one cost me to buy/build.

Ive had a look on the net and they seem to rang from about 400 quid to well into the thousands.

ANY advice would be appreciated.

 

[rdoxenham]

Is 400 quid your absolute maximum budget? You'd be able to buy a reasonable system for that but for peripherals on-top, e.g. a monitor, it may push the budget.

 

[Paul.M]

I can't help with specs etc but try having a quick flick through: http://www.cliosport.net/forum/showthread.php?691585-The-Power-PC-Thread-f*ck-off-consoles/page58

May be worth an ask in that thread too

 

[david1987]

Is 400 quid your absolute maximum budget? You'd be able to buy a reasonable system for that but for peripherals on-top, e.g. a monitor, it may push the budget.

The main reason i was considering a pc is that i was told for the money i could buy an xbox one, i could buy/build a better spec pc.

if it was going to cost say 500 or more for a decent pc, i'd more than likely just buy the xbox.

 

[david1987]

I can't help with specs etc but try having a quick flick through: http://www.cliosport.net/forum/showthread.php?691585-The-Power-PC-Thread-f*ck-off-consoles/page58

May be worth an ask in that thread too

thanks

 

[benhiggs]

a pc would be the better alternative to the xbox one, you can upgrade and optimize it instead of having to switch to a new system completely, and for the lower prices stick to the amd route, much cheaper compared to intel processors.

Also, hardware seems to depreciate in price quickly, i managed to get a great price for my 7950 graphics card on ebay

i build pcs all the time, for myself and friends(most with a budget) so if you need any help, id be more than happy

only thing is, youll have to separate some money for peripherals and stuff

i curently run :
i7 2600k overclocked at 4.6ghz
xfx 7950 3gb
8gb corsair dominator ram
ocz ssd
1tb hdd
all in a nzxt phantom with sidepanel and lit up with a nzxt hue system

 

[david1987]

a pc would be the better alternative to the xbox one, you can upgrade and optimize it instead of having to switch to a new system completely, and for the lower prices stick to the amd route, much cheaper compared to intel processors.

Also, hardware seems to depreciate in price quickly, i managed to get a great price for my 7950 graphics card on ebay

i build pcs all the time, for myself and friends(most with a budget) so if you need any help, id be more than happy

only thing is, youll have to separate some money for peripherals and stuff

i curently run :
i7 2600k overclocked at 4.6ghz
xfx 7950 3gb
8gb corsair dominator ram
ocz ssd
1tb hdd
all in a nzxt phantom with sidepanel and lit up with a nzxt hue system

Thanks

I do realy like the idea of having a go at building my own. My biggest problem is i know nothing about them. The spec list you wrote of yours might as well have been in french.

wheres the best place to look to gather info and learn about taking on such a feat?

Thanks again

 

[benhiggs]

Well, to start off I would check YouTube
There are some great videos out there from people such as linustechtips

There are also a few good sub reddits on the topic

And if you do choose to go for a PC, you can research what you want and where to buy from

But if you don't wanna build it, sites like Dino PC and PC specialist are good and sometimes have good offers

 

[Munson]

No chance. You won't build a competing PC for that money. Just buy one of the new consoles. Buy a PS4 and you'll save even more money. In fact, considering there's nothing worth playing on either of the new machines, buy a PS3 super-slim for a fraction of the cost. IMO PC gaming is only worthwhile if you have a hefty budget to play with.

 

[Steven103]

I'm a PC gamer, but this thread is too one-sided:

Some types of games (e.g. racing or football) work much better on a gamepad whilst lying on a sofa. Admittedly with some perseverance you can hook up a 360 controller to a PC. Likewise some games (e.g. shooters) work much better with a mouse.

Consider the "whole" experience vs "half" the experience. At its best, PC gaming will blow consoles away in terms of immersing you in the experience, but as Roy says getting the most out of the PC platform is not cheap. You do not have to spend thousands and thousands, but if you spend less than *in my personal opinion* in the region of £1000 you're missing out on a lot. Whilst it is not necessary, in the same way a 182 isn't necessary over a DCI, a huge improvement can be had if you have a decent gaming mouse, properly good speakers/headphones and a lovely big monitor. Snag is, that all adds circa £250 absolute min to the cost of the whole build. Not strictly necessary, but very strongly recommended. Leading to the question of are you happy doing it (PC gaming) by halves? (given your quoted budget).

£400 could very quickly go out the window. Ben's spec is nice, but the hard drives, case and power supply alone are getting on for half your budget. Something as simple as Windows is circa £100 if you're not a pikey/don't have a copy lying around. £100 on a £1000 build is fine. £100 out of a £400 budget is a very big chunk. Do you have a desktop PC at the moment? Could you reuse items like the DVD drive and hard drive? Perhaps even consider buying parts second hand (massive second hand market as new stuff is released yearly and plenty of high rollers upgrade purely for sake of it). Depending on shat you have currently and if you want to buy new, £400 could turn out to be somewhere between challenging and an April fools joke.

Playing with friends. Lets be honest here, you have XYZ real-life friends on XBL and probably have far less real life friends who game on PC. That said the PC community tends to be "more serious" so if you do get a bunch of mates online chances are they'll love getting tactical and using comms for epic teamwork. Contrast this to just hearing a 13yr old screaming on XBL.

If you want to continue to play brand new releases on the highest settings then you will need to spend a couple of £ every few years for the best experience. PC games constantly move on, whereas consoles are outdated when released and therefore all the games for the next 5 years will still have circa 2013 quality graphics. But consoles cost you zero. Apart from breaking & XBL subscriptions etc.


I don't mean to put you off at all. Just trying to make you aware of some of the not-so-great aspects of PC gaming. Since you're in this thread I assume you're aware of lots of the advantages so won't mention those.

 

[Keydogg]

What Steven is saying is mostly true, but I will just put my 2p in anyway:

The whole PC gaming world is for me worth the initial investment to begin with, then you can essentially "drip feed" upgrades over time into your computer (as said above). Take my example:

In 2007 I built the following PC:

Intel Q6600 Quad Core 2.4ghz CPU (This is your processor)
Gigabyte Motherboard (this is the main board which your processor, RAM, graphics, hard drives etc plug into)
4GB DDR2 1066 RAM (This is your RAM, or system memory as it's also known. Not to be confused with your hard drive, which is where you store everything)
500GB Hard Drive (this is where everything is stored including your windows operating system, games, microsoft office, pictures, music, movies etc)
Nvidia 8800GT 512MB Graphics Card (this is what runs your graphics in games and on the desktop)

Now this cost me at the time about £500 (not including monitor/keyboard/mouse which you could buy now all in for £100), I had a copy of Windows from work also.

This is the timeline over the last few years, and due to having other priorities I haven't spent a great deal:

2010 - Bought 1TB Hard drive for more storage (£70)
2012 - Corsair HS1 Headset (£40) (my old headset broke)
2012 - Upgraded Graphics card to AMD 6870 1GB (£120), this roughly increased gaming performance by around 100% at the same settings (by gaming performance we mean frames per second, ideally you need to be looking at 60+, but bare in mind the Xbox 360 runs at 30fps!)
2012 - Bought a 120GB SSD (£130) to put windows and a few games on (this is a Solid State Drive, basically these are A LOT quicker than hard drives so load up windows and games in about 1/3rd of the time, it doesn't change gaming performance per-se)
2012 - Asus Xonar Sound Card (£30) (The motherboard already had onboard sound but I wanted Dolby Heaphone for gaming)
2013 - New Case (£70) (I upgraded my case to a bigger, more practical case so that when I upgrade next I can fit in more fans etc)
2014 - Before the Spring I will be buying the following: i5 4750k CPU, new motherboard, AMD 7870 2GB Graphics, 8GB DDR3 RAM (approx £400).

At the moment, (before the 2014 upgrade) I regularly play Battlefield 4 on low/medium settings and achieve around 40-45 average FPS. This is on a system that is essentially 7 years old apart from the graphics which are two years old. Compare my PC performance to an Xbox 360 and my PC is quite a bit better, however it will be behind the performance of an Xbox One.

After my 2014 upgrade I expect to play BF4 on high and average 60+ FPS (which will appear smooth), and on ultra probably 45-50fps. This will be better than an Xbox One.

This for me is the big advantage of PC's; since 2007 I've been enjoying better graphical performance and an Xbox 360, and soon I will be doing better than an Xbox One. But, I could also quite happily stick with my current system and still play BF4 with all my mates who have high end systems, it's my choice. It's nice knowing that when I do my 2014 upgrade my system will pretty much run most things I throw at it for the next few years, and if I really want to push my system to the next level all I would need to do is chuck in a second graphics card and it will eat every game for a long time.

I love knowing that much of the time I don't HAVE to upgrade, and if I do it's usually out of want than need and I can gain instant results without having to do things like re-install windows (unless we're changing a lot of stuff) as I keep my operating system very clean anyway.

For what it's worth I also own an Xbox 360, the only game I play on that at the moment is GTA5, once it comes out on PC it will be redundant on the 360.