Is there such thing as a cheap gaming PC around £500

jouster

8i think I know the answer to this but as the tech person in my group of friends, I tend to be the person asked about all things tech.

A friend wants to get their oldest (13) a gaming PC for Christmas but wants to keep cost around £500.

Now I know that they won’t get all singing and dancing (after all a top tier GPU can cost the same amount) but is there anything worth looking at. Or is it a bit of a pipe dream to get anything for that price.  

I’ll say they can update bits at anytime so a good base machine is a good place to start.

So what would everyone say is a decent base spec for that price.

TIA

jouster

Also worth staying I don’t think they’ll be interested in building there own sonthey are going to want a ready built on

Would something like this be worth looking at (yes it’s a bit above budget)

jouster

Apparently their son has seen this one

I’m quite shocked that for £465 it includes everything needed to start off including a monitor.

Personally I wouldn’t touch game with a barge pole but that’s just me

Thoughts?

EndlessWaves

It's fitted with an old CPU and it's integrated graphics:
Fierce EXILE Gaming PC, Fast AMD A-Series 9600 3.4GHz, 1TB HDD, 8GB RAM, R7 Series

At £350 it'd be acceptable, at £450 you'd expect the latest 2200G/2400G if you were going down the route of integrated graphics (which are pretty decent these days). Game actually do a 2200G base unit for cheap enough to pair it with a freesync monitor and cheap and cheerful mouse/keyboard/headset for the same price.
Fierce Alpha Gaming PC, Fast AMD Ryzen 3 2200G 3.7GHz, 1TB HDD, 8GB RAM, Radeon Vega 8

I believe Fierce are ones of those newish companies that do a lot of business through ebay/amazon marketplace so you can likely find it elsewhere.

The next step up would be an RX560 and Pentium Gold (G4560 ), Athlon 200GE or Ryzen but I'm not sure if that'd be in budget. A lot of the traditional sources of low end gaming machines have moved out of that area so I'm not sure who the best of the current offerings are.

BOFH_UK

Appreciate that they're thinking PC rather than console but in terms of value at that price point the Xbox One X is head and shoulders above pretty much everything else at the moment. Obviously if they're after PC only games it's a non-starter but if not that £500 would get the console, a pack in game or two, a year of Gold (4 free games a month plus online) and a year of Game Pass (every first party game released that year plus a ton more catalogue titles). With black Friday deals you'd probably be able to afford an additional game or two on top by the time you're done (or a monitor with HDMI port if there's no TV handy to connect to).

If they're set on the PC it's certainly possible to get something okay around that price but expectations should be set accordingly. It's not going to be running new release AAA titles at high quality settings and you're not likely to be benefiting from high framerates either. Doubly so if they need to set money aside from the budget for a monitor etc. My worry with budget rigs is always how long you're going to go before wanting to upgrade, realistic expectations going in can really help with that! Probably the best bet is to do some research on previous gen stuff (mostly graphics cards and CPU) then see what ends up reduced around Black Friday. Seem to remember some of Curry's deals last year were pretty damn good...

EntryLevel

Gaming PC is such a vague term. At 13, he may just be after something that can play Minecraft and Fortnite, which have low requirements, or he could be after the AAA titles with steeper requirements.

If the former, Scan.co.uk has an entry level offering with a Ryzen 3 2200g that is probably a good deal for a prebuilt (AVforums still get free delivery?): 3XS Gamer Vega

This build has "fast" RAM (3000Mhz), which is really needed to get the most from the integrated GPU, and is something that other builders may skimp on (e.g. the link given by @EndlessWaves) .

That would be a "pick up and play" configuration for about £500, but if they already had a windows key they could save some money and get it without an OS (or run an unactivated Windows 10 for nearly no downside). The config could then be tweaked (SSD added perhaps) within the budget to get more capable hardware.

This approach would provide an easy upgrade path with a dedicated GPU at a later date, as the 2200g is a relatively capable CPU for 1080p (search youtube to see).

Goodmane

I think it would be a good idea to know what sort of games they are hoping to play but I think they should buy a used PC for that money. Focus on choosing something that has not been overclocked or run hot if possible.

Then buy a nice new keyboard and mouse as those are the parts you interract with.

EndlessWaves

While faster memory helps with minimum frame times (general smoothness) it's maybe 5-15% improvement. Spending an extra couple of hundred on it is absurd. For that sort of cash you could get a 200% improvement by buying a graphics card (which would also boost system memory bandwidth by at least as much as faster memory by eliminating integrated graphics traffic).

EntryLevel

I agree, but my recommendation for this build wasn't just based on the ram.

Drop Win 10 (which the Fierce doesn't have either) and you're down to £80 difference. Still significant, but all the components in the scan build are branded ones that I would have confidence using if building myself. The Fierce components may be fine, but either they are not listed or I don't recognise them, so couldn't personally recommend (not saying there is anything wrong, but I would want to research the PSU). The scan build also has a higher rated PSU, which gives overhead for the graphics card to be added later.

1080 jawbreaker

forget the monitor if you can hook it up to just about any tv these days via hdmi.
as for graphics I would recommend something like a nvidia gtx 1060 3gb card as a minimum