Basic PC + GeForce Now or Budget Gaming rig?

[dunxd]

My son is going to turn 12 and wants a gaming PC for his birthday.

He's been playing Fortnite and dabbling with streaming on my iMac via GeForce Now (got himself into founders plan). I'd like to stop being evicted from my office, and he'd like to learn a bit about PCs so I figured a self build would be a good birthday present.

Would he be better off getting a low spec PC and continuing with GeForce Now for £7.99 a month, or doing the processing locally on a budget gaming rig. Budget is about £400. We already have a monitor, keyboard and mouse.

I'd put price difference into Steam credits for him.

 

[Sparx]

I've no experience with GeForce Now - I gather it's just Cloud Gaming? But for £400 you don't have much options to buy new, with a good dedicated graphics card at least. You could definitely buy a used rig for that price though.

Or build a decent 'upgradeable' new PC with £400 - it'd be onboard graphics and could run Fortnite low-medium settings with good FPS @ 1080p. Then if you can budget more later for him, you could add a decent GPU and upgrade the CPU possibly if needed.

 

[dunxd]

If we bump it up to £500 does it make much difference?

 

[Sparx]

£550 is the best I could get it down to without compromising on performance too much.

You could scrape £10 off and get a cheaper case, but I thought for £10, the lad would like some RGB? (the case has decent airflow too)

Could also save £20 and get a 240GB SSD instead of 500GB, but at this point he'd only have room to install Windows and a few games and it would be full?

Ideally I'd like to suggest 16GB RAM, but it'd be another £24 - you could always add more later though. However looking at Fortnite benchmarks, 8GB vs 16GB RAM there is very little performance boost anyway so 8GB will be fine to begin with.

The RX 580 is still a great GPU despite being a 3 year old model, brill for a first time 1080p rig. It'll run Fortnite at high/epic settings quite easily too.

Edit: You could try look for a used Ryzen 2600 CPU for ~£70 region if you can, it'd save about £30ish. It's just finding one about. It performs very similar to a 3100 but has more cores/threads, so helps in other aspects.

My basket at Overclockers UK:

• 1 x AMD Ryzen 3 3100 Quad Core 3.9GHz (Socket AM4) Processor - Retail= £99.95
• 1 x MSI B450M Mortar MAX (Socket AM4) DDR4 mATX Motherboard= £99.95
• 1 x Aerocool Aero One Mini Eclipse ARGB Micro- ATX Case - White Tempered Glass= £49.99
• 1 x Asus Radeon RX 580 Arez Dual OC 8192MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card= £158.99
• 1 x Kingston HyperX Fury 8GB (2x4GB) DDR4 PC4-25600C16 3200MHz Dual Channel Kit (HX432C16FB3K2/8)= £44.99
• 1 x Kolink Modular Power 600W 80 Plus Bronze Modular Power Supply= £49.99
• 1 x Gigabyte 480GB SSD 2.5" SATA 6Gbps Solid State Drive= £49.99

Total: £553.85 (includes shipping: £0.00)
​

 

[dunxd]

Thanks so much for this. Do you know if the motherboard you recommend will support an AMD Ryzen 3 3200G with RX Vega 8 Graphics?

A friend has offered an old but good gpu card but we won't be able to test it works right until close to the boy's birthday, so I thought I could get onboard graphics just in case so he has a working pc on his birthday. However I'm not sure this processor will work with the same motherboard.

 

[Grimley]

Thanks so much for this. Do you know if the motherboard you recommend will support an AMD Ryzen 3 3200G with RX Vega 8 Graphics?

Should do out of the box.

 

[dunxd]

@Sparx - thanks so much for your recommendation. I bought nearly everything you recommended, except my friend donated a spare graphics card he had, and I bumped up the memory to 16Gb and a Ryzen 5. We built it all over a couple of evenings with no major problems. The performance for the games he plays is better locally than GeForce Now. He is totally stoked (and more addicted than ever)!

 

[Sparx]

Ahh nice one, happy for your lad mate So he got a Ryzen 3600 and 16GB RAM in the end? That should last him nicely for the future!

What GPU did you get given? Sounds good regardless.

 

[dunxd]

It was an MSI R6950 Twin Frozr, which is pretty old really (released in 2011), but for Dying Light, which my son just discovered, it's great. He can upgrade. Haven't tried the onboard graphics on the Ryzen 3400G - I wonder if this would be better than a 9 year old dedicated card.

 

[Sparx]

Oh you went for the 3400G? Tbh against a 6950, I think it might be slightly better if you used the onboard APU... Think it goes into almost 7850 territory.

Give it a go and find out. Just remove the GPU and plug display into the onboard and check FPS difference.