Buying a gaming computer

[Deleted]

Hello,

I am planning on buying a gaming computer for the first time, I will not be building it. The computer will be bought from Cyberpower PC and I just wanted you guys to look over the specification and see what you think of it. I will want to play games such as Battlefield 4/hardline, modded Minecraft, Diablo, World of Warcraft all of these games on ultra setting with around sixty plus frames per second. My budget is £750.

•CPU: INTEL® Core™ i5-4690K Quad Core 3.50 GHz 6MB Cache LGA1150 + HD Graphics ***Overclockable XXX***
•HDD: 1TB SATA-III 6.0Gb/s Cache 7200RPM Hard Drive (Single Hard Drive)
•MEMORY: 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3/1866mhz Dual Channel Memory (Kingston HyperX Fury Blue w/Heat Spreader)
•MOTHERBOARD: MSI Z97-G43 INTEL Z97 Chipset, ATX Mainboard w/ 4 RAM slots, 7.1 HD Audio, HDMI, GbLAN, USB 3.0, SATA-III, 2x Gen2 PCIe x16, 2x PCIe x 1 & 3x PCI
•VIDEO: AMD Radeon R9 280X 3GB 16X PCIe Video Card [+117] (Single Card)

Grand Total: £764.40 including VAT

Thanks for your feedback,
Nathan.

[Deleted]

Hello Nathan

In my opinion it looks solid. Its not a high end gaming system, but defenetly capable of current games like the nones you listed on highest settings. This is the kind of setup that will be capable of all current games, but may lack a bit behind in a few years, as games get more demanding.

You may be looking at spending a few bucks on some minor upgrades as time goes on. For instance, upgrading to 16 gb of RAM may be a good choice for making sure future games keep running smoothly. Also you could replace the harddrive to an SSD one for better loading times, and general quality of life.

Sources: I work in the IT field and i have a general interest in computers.

Sincerely

Jeppi

[Deleted]

Hello Nathan

In my opinion it looks solid. Its not a high end gaming system, but defenetly capable of current games like the nones you listed on highest settings. This is the kind of setup that will be capable of all current games, but may lack a bit behind in a few years, as games get more demanding.

You may be looking at spending a few bucks on some minor upgrades as time goes on. For instance, upgrading to 16 gb of RAM may be a good choice for making sure future games keep running smoothly. Also you could replace the harddrive to an SSD one for better loading times, and general quality of life.

Sources: I work in the IT field and i have a general interest in computers.

Sincerely

Jeppi

Thank you so much for your feedback; I will definitely look into buying some more RAM and an SSD in the future but at the moment I am tight on funds. Again thanks.

Nathan.

[Deleted]

Not a problem.

The RAM will not really become important for another good while anyway. And one could argue that the SSD is purely quality of life, since it doesnt directly affect your game once it's loaded.

An SSD is one of those things where, when you've first tried one, non-SSD harddrives annoy you. But if you've never used one, it's not really an issue.

Sincerely

Jeppi

[Deleted]

Not a problem.

The RAM will not really become important for another good while anyway. And one could argue that the SSD is purely quality of life, since it doesnt directly affect your game once it's loaded.

An SSD is one of those things where, when you've first tried one, non-SSD harddrives annoy you. But if you've never used one, it's not really an issue.

Sincerely

Jeppi

I'll definitely upgrade the RAM now, but the SSD will have to wait a while.

[Xs]

Might be worth waiting a month or two if you can, the ripples from the new GTX900 series haven't hit the lower price brackets much yet, so you might be able to get a bit more bang for your buck on the graphics front. If you can't wait though, thats a pretty solid build that doesn't have anything that stands out as a problem.

I'd also recommend holding off on the RAM if you can, and buy it in a year or two's time with another upgrade like an SSD or a graphics upgrade.

[Deleted]

Congratulations on your new computer then.

Sincerely

Jeppi

[Eroginous]

Hello,

I am planning on buying a gaming computer for the first time, I will not be building it. The computer will be bought from Cyberpower PC and I just wanted you guys to look over the specification and see what you think of it. I will want to play games such as Battlefield 4/hardline, modded Minecraft, Diablo, World of Warcraft all of these games on ultra setting with around sixty plus frames per second. My budget is £750.

•CPU: INTEL® Core™ i5-4690K Quad Core 3.50 GHz 6MB Cache LGA1150 + HD Graphics ***Overclockable XXX***
•HDD: 1TB SATA-III 6.0Gb/s Cache 7200RPM Hard Drive (Single Hard Drive)
•MEMORY: 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3/1866mhz Dual Channel Memory (Kingston HyperX Fury Blue w/Heat Spreader)
•MOTHERBOARD: MSI Z97-G43 INTEL Z97 Chipset, ATX Mainboard w/ 4 RAM slots, 7.1 HD Audio, HDMI, GbLAN, USB 3.0, SATA-III, 2x Gen2 PCIe x16, 2x PCIe x 1 & 3x PCI
•VIDEO: AMD Radeon R9 280X 3GB 16X PCIe Video Card [+117] (Single Card)

Grand Total: £764.40 including VAT

Thanks for your feedback,
Nathan.

In my experience with those sorts of sites that build your PC for you, a person looking for a gaming rig will always be better off buying the parts and building it themselves. It's not nearly as daunting a task as it used to be, there are tons of guides all over the internet on everything from basic installs to custom mods to overclocking/getting the most out of your rig. You have to realize that a fully assembled PC weighs significantly more than individually packaged parts, and that the shipping process involves drops of up to 6ft. Dropping a box 6ft (especially one that contains @ 30lb PC), is going to spell problems no matter how well it's packaged. You don't want anything DoA or broken from shipping, you'd end up having to tear apart your PC and diagnose/fix the problem yourself anyway. Might as well just buy the parts yourself.

Then there's the fact that a lot of these sites limit what you can build with, forcing you to choose potentially more expensive parts for very little gain over equivalent parts for cheaper from a different vendor. One time I couldn't even order current gen parts (everything was 2 generations old) for some strange reason. The entire rig ended up being more expensive than a better rig of current parts, and my friend bought it anyway because he refused to put it together and it was the only site that would ship to his address. Needless to say, he ended up having to send back the ram because it was DoA (despite being tested before shipping), and he had spent several hours trying to diagnose the problem the day the PC arrived. He should have just bought better, newer parts and put it together himself.

Three of the four games you listed run better with Nvidia cards/lower end systems, and BF4 is probably never going to run @ 60fps on ultra with any card you can find to fit your budget. You're going to have to lower settings/resolution to play BF4 @ 60fps, and you might as well stick with a card that better supports the other games you want to play.

Getting more ram now is not a good idea, 8gb is more than enough to play any game on the market with max settings. You would see a performance increase if you picked up an SSD instead of getting more ram. People use the extra ram for non gaming tasks such as video rendering, editing, and other productivity. The only way a gamer would actually use 16gb of ram while gaming is if he were running a multiboxing setup or had multiple high load games running at once. Even then, you'd still probably not max out 16gb.

An SSD, on the other hand, will give you significantly faster boot up/loading times in games, making such a purchase for gaming much more important in the long term.

[Deleted]

Might be worth waiting a month or two if you can, the ripples from the new GTX900 series haven't hit the lower price brackets much yet, so you might be able to get a bit more bang for your buck on the graphics front. If you can't wait though, thats a pretty solid build that doesn't have anything that stands out as a problem.

I'd also recommend holding off on the RAM if you can, and buy it in a year or two's time with another upgrade like an SSD or a graphics upgrade.

I'm probably going to be getting this computer around Christmas time so I'll definitely check if the 900 series have lowered their prices; and I think I'll just get the RAM as it's £86 more which is kind of a good price, but I'm defiantly going to be holding off on the SSD as I'll just buy a 1TB SSD from Amazon. I'll probably just be playing games such as modded Minecraft anyway. Thanks for your feedback.

Nathan.

[Eroginous]

I'm probably going to be getting this computer around Christmas time so I'll definitely check if the 900 series have lowered their prices; and I think I'll just get the RAM as it's £86 more which is kind of a good price, but I'm defiantly going to be holding off on the SSD as I'll just buy a 1TB SSD from Amazon. I'll probably just be playing games such as modded Minecraft anyway. Thanks for your feedback.

Nathan.

Unless the 1TB SSD is comparable in price to a 1TB HDD + a 120GB SSD (which it won't be), you're just throwing money away on storage. People buy HDDs still because when it comes to personal storage, read/write speeds aren't a significant enough factor to buy a large SSD. Again with the ram, you'd be much better off just sticking with 8GB (because you won't need more than that for YEARS), and putting that money into a 120GB SSD for your OS/Games.

Also, unless you're looking to buy a 970/980, you will probably have to wait until spring/summer to get a lower end 9xx card (one that will fit your budget). The 7xx series are still amazing cards and will keep up with the 9xx in everything except power consumption and heat.

[Deleted]

Unless the 1TB SSD is comparable in price to a 1TB HDD + a 120GB SSD (which it won't be), you're just throwing money away on storage.

This.

I'm using a 250 gb SSD. Dual-booting Linux & Windows, playing many different games, and still storage isint an issue. All my other data is Cloud (where it should be).

[Xs]

I'm probably going to be getting this computer around Christmas time so I'll definitely check if the 900 series have lowered their prices; and I think I'll just get the RAM as it's £86 more which is kind of a good price

You'd be far better off investing that money to step your graphics card up to the next tier, for that money you can increase your graphical power by ~20% in the current generation (GTX 700 series, 770 specifically). If you can grab a GTX 900 series instead (970 specifically), I can't give you a reliable percentage increase, but judging by how well the 980 is doing for performance/$, you should be getting a pretty serious upgrade in power over the 280X in your current build. All of these should be around the £250 region compared to the 280X being in the ~£170 range.

Example build, all be it a little over priced compared to your builder:
http://i.imgur.com/UvWvEE1.png?1
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showpr...odid=FS-001-OG