Gaming PC Advice

Joined
Apr 5, 2007
Messages
864
Location
virginia
My son has asked for a gaming PC for Xmas and I have zero experience in them. Budget is around $800. Any suggestions?
 
Does he already have a PC setup and does he explicitly need a gaming PC?

For a under $1000 budget stick with console. Pricing a PC build with a mid to high end graphics card for gaming gets expensive fast.
 
I'm seeing Cyberpower PC for around $800 and other brands. We don't need ultra power, just a good basis for which we can upgrade in the future if needed
 
Last edited:
I'm seeing Cyberpower PC for around $800 and other brands. We don't need ultra power, just a good basis for which we can upgrade in the future if needed
I'm not actually a gamer but buy gamer PC's for my Engineering business because they are the cheapest way to get the most powerful machine.
I have never used Cyberpower but they look similar to the company I use.
I had a look on their website, I'm not up with AMD so will only comment on Intel.
I picked out the machine which in my view is the minimum which doesn't make many compromises and it's the beginning point for higher power machines:
https://www.cyberpowerpc.com/system/Prebuilt-Gaming-PC-GLX-99614#config-spec
I would personally like to see an extra 16 GB of DDR ram buts that's cheap and easy to fix.
I had a quick look at the $799 machine. That will get the job done and actually looks reasonable but you will be finding the limitations much sooner. But it can easily be upgraded as well.
Compare the CPU's. The i5-14600k has many more cores than a poverty pack i3 or even i5, and isn't far off an i7 or even i9. It is a real beast.
If you can swing a little extra you won't regret it but the $800 one looks pretty reasonable and decent here and your son will be stocked with it.
 
Do you or your son prefer a pre-built one or building one yourselves?
 
Whatever you buy make sure you either have an RTX4060 in it or a Radeon RX4600XT and your PC will not have any trouble playing any game at 1080p or even at 1440p, with reduced visual settings.

Another option, and that’s what I’ve done with my son, is to build your own if you’re or your son are into that sort of thing. My son liked the experience of building his own PC.
 
Whatever you buy make sure you either have an RTX4060 in it or a Radeon RX4600XT and your PC will not have any trouble playing any game at 1080p or even at 1440p, with reduced visual settings.
This will make or break a gaming build.
avoid the RTX3050, it's a detuned 3060 and more a replacement for the discontinued RTX2030.
Even a 3060 is a lot better.
If you can get a 3060 Ti or 3070 Ti they are great value.
A 4060 Ti is the newer model and still reasonable, but after that costs get crazy.
NVIDIA has kinda stopped dramatically increasing performance with each generation so a 3050 is basically a 2030 replacement, same for 3060 and 4060, 3070 Ti and 4070Ti.
There are improvements but the primary difference is greatly increased cost.
EG I would take a 3060 Ti over a standard base 4060.
 
This will make or break a gaming build.
avoid the RTX3050, it's a detuned 3060 and more a replacement for the discontinued RTX2030.
Even a 3060 is a lot better.
If you can get a 3060 Ti or 3070 Ti they are great value.
A 4060 Ti is the newer model and still reasonable, but after that costs get crazy.
NVIDIA has kinda stopped dramatically increasing performance with each generation so a 3050 is basically a 2030 replacement, same for 3060 and 4060, 3070 Ti and 4070Ti.
There are improvements but the primary difference is greatly increased cost.
EG I would take a 3060 Ti over a standard base 4060.
A 4060 will do just fine. And will be better with the upscaling tech than the 3060ti.

I had an RX5600XT that played RDR2 without any issues at 50-60fps or Elder Ring.
This GPU is now in my son’s PC and he has no trouble playing his games.
 
I found a local guy building gaming computers in his basement, I told him what my son plays and the budget and he built a system with some new and used parts for $500 in a full size tower with a glass side panel, with push pull fans and the all important cool blinky lights on the video card. It seems to run everything well enough, and he plays mostly War Thunder and minecraft with his buddies which seem to take nearly nothing to run. He runs War Thunder pretty much max'd(removing some detail is better for playing) at 1080p and gets over ~200fps with a GTX1060 6gb
The idea was to get my son the basics and then he could upgrade it, but so far it hasn't needed anything.
Red Dead redemption seems to take very little to run either I read, so if you aren't going to play the games that need the newer GPU's, the old GPU's seem to play many games very very well.
 
I found a local guy building gaming computers in his basement, I told him what my son plays and the budget and he built a system with some new and used parts for $500 in a full size tower with a glass side panel, with push pull fans and the all important cool blinky lights on the video card. It seems to run everything well enough, and he plays mostly War Thunder and minecraft with his buddies which seem to take nearly nothing to run. He runs War Thunder pretty much max'd(removing some detail is better for playing) at 1080p and gets over ~200fps with a GTX1060 6gb
The idea was to get my son the basics and then he could upgrade it, but so far it hasn't needed anything.
Red Dead redemption seems to take very little to run either I read, so if you aren't going to play the games that need the newer GPU's, the old GPU's seem to play many games very very well.
Since we're talking about GPU's I found a good website which has comparative performance based on many reviews and bench testing:
https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/geforce-rtx-3050-8-gb.c3858

If you go down the page you can scroll through the list. There were truly some heavy hitters amongst older generations. Maybe some bargains to be had.
 
A 4060 will do just fine. And will be better with the upscaling tech than the 3060ti.

I had an RX5600XT that played RDR2 without any issues at 50-60fps or Elder Ring.
This GPU is now in my son’s PC and he has no trouble playing his games.
A 4060 is a great GPU.
From memory what I didn't like was something along the lines of the data transfer bandwidth was halved or something. A 3060 Ti can shift data faster with the motherboard. It was over a year ago. At the time the 3070 Ti were being dumped $500 off and were around same price as a 4060.
 
Back
Top Bottom