Gaming PC- Help Please (UK)

Hey guys. I'm looking into buying a gaming pc and am in need of some help. I've been on www.pcspecialist.co.uk, they offer finance which is what need. I want a pc that will run games on pretty much, top settings. I can spend at most, £1000. Is this do-able? If someone could go to the site and configure me something on it would help me. They have pre set gaming ones and I was looking at this for £999 http://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/view/MW3-Xtreme-PC/

Will this run most games high end, if so is there anything cheaper that could be done? For all I know, theres are things on it that I'll never need!

Thanks.

While not specifically pertaining to the type of help you're asking for, I just wanted to share some salient points you may want to consider for your gaming PC.

• Will this computer be only used as a gaming PC? If so, multi-core processors really aren't necessary. Very few games take advantage of 2 or 4 or 8 cores and those that do don't take great advantage of them in my experience. While you'll be hard-pressed to find a CPU without at least 2 cores, don't spend extra money on a quad-core. Same goes for HT (Hyper-threading) versions of Intel CPU's, if you're just using this for gaming, you don't have to pony-up the money for HT

• At the most get 4GB's of RAM if, again, this is only for gaming. It's all you'll need now, and if you need more RAM for games down the road, flash memory is already so cheap now, let alone in the future, that it's best to cross that bridge when you get to it

• Be sure to know ahead of time how you want to organize your system's hard drives. A lot of people like to go the route of buying a smaller SSD for installing Windows and for common applications, and then having a second, larger and cheaper hard drive for everything else, including games. While this is great for boot speeds and launching oft-used programs, it's not necessary and avoiding the appeal of SSD's can save you a good chunk of change

• While they may look nice, fancier and more expensive cases aren't often necessary. A good case should be utilitarian, have plenty of room for expansion and to move around in with your hands, and of course have great airflow. Everything else like if it comes preinstalled with fancy LED's and if it has a bunch of external fan controls aren't really important and you can usually do all of those things yourself for a lot cheaper

Yes it will. You could also throw in another 570 in 6 months or a year and get significantly more life out of it. The i5 2500k is the second best processor at the moment. It's more than enough for gaming.

It's a solid setup and will play most things (mostly) maxed out at 1920x1200. Exceptions being things like super sampling etc, but for general gaming you will be fine.
 
I have no experience with pcspecialist.co.uk though - report back if you pull the trigger on it.
 
Edit -

@Rolyatkcinmai

Yes it will. You could also throw in another 570 in 6 months or a year and get significantly more life out of it. The i5 2500k is the second best processor at the moment. It's more than enough for gaming.

@Adamsons said:

It's an i5 2500 instead of 2500k, iirc the only difference is a locked multiplier, so it really shouldn't make much of a difference.

You're right, sorry. I've just gotten used to saying 2500k since the price difference is almost nothing and no one ever gets the regular 2500 lol. Not a big deal though if you don't plan on overclocking.

@HB said:

Hey guys. I'm looking into buying a gaming pc and am in need of some help. I've been on www.pcspecialist.co.uk, they offer finance which is what need. I want a pc that will run games on pretty much, top settings. I can spend at most, £1000. Is this do-able? If someone could go to the site and configure me something on it would help me. They have pre set gaming ones and I was looking at this for £999 http://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/view/MW3-Xtreme-PC/

Will this run most games high end, if so is there anything cheaper that could be done? For all I know, theres are things on it that I'll never need!

Thanks.

Yeah, I built a similar PC a month or so ago and it runs anything I throw at it on the highest settings. It came to around £900 but that was with a monitor/new mouse as well.

I'd consider upgrading that 570 to a 580. Looking over benchmark numbers, the 580 statistically outperforms the 570 significantly enough to justify its higher price tag. Unless you plan on throwing another 570 into your computer in the next 6 months or so as suggested by Rolyatkcinmai, I think you could easily get about 3-6+ months of life out of your rig if you went with a 580. It's actually what I run in my rig and it's a beast, especially after upping its clock speed.

honestly, you can build a cheaper and better PC. i managed to make a PC with a GTX 570 and core i7 for £840.

@Progn0sticator said:

I'd consider upgrading that 570 to a 580. Looking over benchmark numbers, the 580 statistically outperforms the 570 significantly enough to justify its higher price tag. Unless you plan on throwing another 570 into your computer in the next 6 months or so as suggested by Rolyatkcinmai, I think you could easily get about 3-6+ months of life out of your rig if you went with a 580. It's actually what I run in my rig and it's a beast, especially after upping its clock speed.

The differences in the 580 and 570 are marginal, but the price difference is huge. While it's true it's slightly more future proof, just barely. I would definitely suggest getting the rig mentioned above (up the power supply to 850 from 650 though). That way you can get another 570 in SLI in a year or so on the cheap.

@Rolyatkcinmai said:

@Progn0sticator said:

I'd consider upgrading that 570 to a 580. Looking over benchmark numbers, the 580 statistically outperforms the 570 significantly enough to justify its higher price tag. Unless you plan on throwing another 570 into your computer in the next 6 months or so as suggested by Rolyatkcinmai, I think you could easily get about 3-6+ months of life out of your rig if you went with a 580. It's actually what I run in my rig and it's a beast, especially after upping its clock speed.

The differences in the 580 and 570 are marginal, but the price difference is huge. While it's true it's slightly more future proof, just barely. I would definitely suggest getting the rig mentioned above (up the power supply to 850 from 650 though). That way you can get another 570 in SLI in a year or so on the cheap.

Didn't bother to look at current prices on the 570. I seem to remember the difference between the two cards to be around $50-$70 when I bought my 580, but it seems the 570 has substantially dropped since then. Much better value, clearly.

It's fine, but the cost you pay for buying a built PC is too high in my opinion. It's much cheaper to buy the parts separately yourself. 
 
If the only high performance computing you want to do is gaming, then an Intel Core i5 2500 is a good processor. Most expensive graphics cards will do (buying the most powerful ones will just alow you to crank up AA and increase longevity of the card, you should check out some benchmarks that show framerates of popular games, that's the best and easiest way to choose). 4GB of RAM should be enough, although some games may start to require 6GB in the future. It doesn't really matter though, since it's very easy and cheap to put an extra 2GB of RAM into a new PC. In general, the more applications you like to run at the same time, the more RAM you need. 
 
My current gaming PC cost 550GBP, I could have spent ~600-650 and gotten a more powerful graphics card, but other than that it's more than enough, Crysis 2 still runs on high settings at 1920x1200.

Thanks for all the replies. It's all so technical I have no idea what most of it is!

I want the pc to run all the games on high but the other main thing I would use it for is internet browsing and downloading and playing movies and music. The 570 to 580 upgrade is like another £180 on top and a few people say it isn't worth that. This is what I'm thinking.

Intel® Core™i5-2500 Quad Core (3.30GHz, 6MB Cache) + HD Graphics

ASUS® P8Z68-V: USB 3.0, SATA 6GBs, NVIDIA®SLI™, ATI®CrossFireX

8GB KINGSTON HYPER-X GENESIS DUAL-DDR3 1600MHz, X.M.P (2 x 4GB KIT)

1.25GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 570 - 2 DVI, HDMI, DP - 3D Vision Ready

1TB WD CAVIAR BLACK WD1002FAEX, SATA 6 Gb/s, 64MB CACHE (7200rpm)

24x DUAL LAYER DVD WRITER ±R/±RW/RAM

CORSAIR 650W ENTHUSIAST SERIES™ TX650 V2-80 PLUS® BRONZE

SUPER QUIET 22dBA TRIPLE COPPER HEATPIPE CPU COOLER

Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit - inc DVD & Licence (Or is it worth getting Ultimate?)

Comes to just over £1000 including fast build which is 3 days. Everything seem okay?

Thanks again.

@HB said:

Thanks for all the replies. It's all so technical I have no idea what most of it is!

I want the pc to run all the games on high but the other main thing I would use it for is internet browsing and downloading and playing movies and music. The 570 to 580 upgrade is like another £180 on top and a few people say it isn't worth that. This is what I'm thinking.

Intel® Core™i5-2500 Quad Core (3.30GHz, 6MB Cache) + HD Graphics

ASUS® P8Z68-V: USB 3.0, SATA 6GBs, NVIDIA®SLI™, ATI®CrossFireX

8GB KINGSTON HYPER-X GENESIS DUAL-DDR3 1600MHz, X.M.P (2 x 4GB KIT)

1.25GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 570 - 2 DVI, HDMI, DP - 3D Vision Ready

1TB WD CAVIAR BLACK WD1002FAEX, SATA 6 Gb/s, 64MB CACHE (7200rpm)

24x DUAL LAYER DVD WRITER ±R/±RW/RAM

CORSAIR 650W ENTHUSIAST SERIES™ TX650 V2-80 PLUS® BRONZE

SUPER QUIET 22dBA TRIPLE COPPER HEATPIPE CPU COOLER

Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit - inc DVD & Licence (Or is it worth getting Ultimate?)

Comes to just over £1000 including fast build which is 3 days. Everything seem okay?

Thanks again.

Unless you plan on having a bunch of programs running in the background when playing games, 8GB's is still considered overkill these days. It's futureproofing to be sure, but you'd be better off going with 4GB's and replacing/adding to it later on for a lot less than buying from a "build-it-for-you" company.

Also, no Ultimate is not worth the money. Home Premium is all you need.

Everything else there is pretty sound and should last you quite awhile, especially if you tack on another 570 down the road.

Visit this thread.

£1057 inc. VAT

imho.