Looking for confirmation on this build!

[Valnoressa]

I was hoping someone could shed some light on if these gaming pc specs would be good enough for what my son wants to do with it. He's asked for a gaming pc for his graduation gift but we're not exactly made of money so I asked him for a few details on what he hopes to do with his PC gaming wise!

Now he wants to be able to play games such as Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, World of Warcraft, Mass Effect 3, Guild Wars 2 and most of all the upcoming Elder Scrolls Online game on high settings with a smooth frame rate. We've spotted a reasonably priced PC that is custom built for £400-500 with the following specs:

AMD FX4100 Quad Core 4x3.6GHz
Asus Motherboard
500GB HDD
8GB DDR3 (1333 MHz)
GeForce GT630 (1024MB DDR3-VGA-DVI-HDMI-DirectX 11)
Windows7 Home Premium 64Bit

My question is of course... will this be sufficient for what he wants? Any reply from those knowledgeable about this kind of stuff would be very much appreciated!

[vesseblah]

Sadly, no... That graphics card is not gonna cut it. GT630 is meant for watching movies from netflix and playing farmville, it will never run any real games at acceptable framerate on high settings. With smaller monitor like 1440x900 or 1680x1050 resolution GT550 or 650 would be enough for the job and cost maybe $50 more but at 1920x1080 screen even those cards will have hard time with new games.

[Deleted]

If you know someone who can build pc's I'd suggest going to aria.co.uk and ordering parts from then. I built a pretty beastly pc a year ago for around £600 (more than what you're after) but with a few cuts you could diffently get something a lot better than the above.

[chazus]

If someone can build the system, this would be a very respectable gaming system within that budget. It's better than what I was using just a few months ago, and that system is still pretty good.

PCPartPicker part list
CPU: Intel Core i5-3350P 3.1GHz Quad-Core Processor (£136.52 @ Dabs)
Motherboard: MSI B75MA-E33 Micro ATX LGA1155 Motherboard (£42.98 @ Novatech)
Memory: GeIL Enhance CORSA 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory (£30.23 @ CCL Computers)
Storage: Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive (£42.12 @ CCL Computers)
Video Card: Gigabyte GeForce GTX 650 Ti 1GB Video Card (£114.78 @ Scan.co.uk)
Case: Fractal Design Core 1000 MicroATX Mini Tower Case (£31.14 @ Aria PC)
Power Supply: XFX ProSeries 450W 80 PLUS Bronze Certified ATX12V / EPS12V Power Supply (£36.98 @ Novatech)
Optical Drive: Lite-On iHAS124-04 DVD/CD Writer (£11.40 @ Aria PC)
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 (OEM) (64-bit) (£65.99 @ Aria PC)
Total: £512.14

[BruceG87]

+1 to Chazus recommended build. It will handle all of those games at a respectable level.

If you do not know anyone who can assemble the computer, it's actually quite simple to do it yourself. Pieces fit only where they are meant to fit, there are tons of recently updated guides all over the internet.

However I wonder, for the price of £400-500 did you need that to include a monitor, mouse and keyboard?