With proper saving and wise spending anything is within reason my grandpa used to say tell me! Although voice attack and hotas is a must for me long-term. VR is not something I see me using as I wish to build a SIM pod in the future a curved screen would be ideal.
Alert! Please help this PC noob
- Thread starter Cpt.DarrionMarrow
- Start date
Everything hinges on your budget and what your expectations are for the system you want to buy.
Set your budget & post it, pretty certain decent suggestions will follow.
Set your budget & post it, pretty certain decent suggestions will follow.
Yep, budget is the defining characteristic here. There's no point in us designing a dream system for you if your budget won't allow it, but at the same time the higher the initial spec of your machine, the longer it'll be before you have to upgrade, which is a lot less hassle and my even save you some money in the long run. You tend to get what you pay for!
Some general points, though. A boutique PC, such as Alienware, Razer and the like manufacture, is going to cost more than it's spec justifies. At the same time main stream manufacturers label poorly speced machines as 'gaming PCs' as a matter of course. A little research on what the various components inside are and what they're worth will go a long way.
I'm not knocking the Boutique approach. My rig is based around a Chillblast gaming PC I bought seven years ago (I live in the UK). It still runs triple A titles on max settings, using an Ivy Bridge I7 and 16GB of DDR 3 memory. The geeks on here will tell you how much of a dinosaur it is!
I've migrated my files onto SSDs, which speeds things up enormously and when my graphics card finally died I had a moment of madness and bought a Titan to replace it. That sound you can hear is my fellow geeks shrieks of outrage! Don't buy a Titan! It's not a gaming card, it's not designed to be a gaming card. (But it's a very nice card... 
)
The rig was massively overpowered when I bought it, but I'd be on my second or third high street PC if I'd gone with an off the shelf system. If I'd done the sensible thing and bought a 10 series card rather than the Titan, I'd have a system still running the latest titles for significantly less cost and aggravation than constantly replacing my kit with high street machines.
It stung a bit initially, but it worked out over time.
If you're confident you can assemble a PC, then building your own rig is absolutely the best way to go about it. You'll get exactly the performance you want for considerably less than the cost of a 'gaming PC'. I built both of my sons' PCs, one's a dedicated gaming rig, the other's a video editing/streaming machine (he's a console peasant! where did I go wrong?
). The cost saving is enormous and it's a lot of fun putting it together.
Tl;dr. Where do you stay and how much are you prepared to spend?
Some general points, though. A boutique PC, such as Alienware, Razer and the like manufacture, is going to cost more than it's spec justifies. At the same time main stream manufacturers label poorly speced machines as 'gaming PCs' as a matter of course. A little research on what the various components inside are and what they're worth will go a long way.
I'm not knocking the Boutique approach. My rig is based around a Chillblast gaming PC I bought seven years ago (I live in the UK). It still runs triple A titles on max settings, using an Ivy Bridge I7 and 16GB of DDR 3 memory. The geeks on here will tell you how much of a dinosaur it is!
I've migrated my files onto SSDs, which speeds things up enormously and when my graphics card finally died I had a moment of madness and bought a Titan to replace it. That sound you can hear is my fellow geeks shrieks of outrage! Don't buy a Titan! It's not a gaming card, it's not designed to be a gaming card. (But it's a very nice card... )The rig was massively overpowered when I bought it, but I'd be on my second or third high street PC if I'd gone with an off the shelf system. If I'd done the sensible thing and bought a 10 series card rather than the Titan, I'd have a system still running the latest titles for significantly less cost and aggravation than constantly replacing my kit with high street machines.
It stung a bit initially, but it worked out over time.
If you're confident you can assemble a PC, then building your own rig is absolutely the best way to go about it. You'll get exactly the performance you want for considerably less than the cost of a 'gaming PC'. I built both of my sons' PCs, one's a dedicated gaming rig, the other's a video editing/streaming machine (he's a console peasant! where did I go wrong?
). The cost saving is enormous and it's a lot of fun putting it together.Tl;dr. Where do you stay and how much are you prepared to spend?
