Hello all!

I know a family who has a 12 or 13 year old child who wants a gaming PC for Christmas. They'll told him they'll look into it for him and also asked me to help them if possible.

They obviously don't wanna spend a ton and are use to one payment on an Xbox per say, with nothing else really needed. I asked him what games he wanted to use it for, he said mainly to play with friends on games like Garry's Mod and CS:GO.

They would need a copy of Windows too I believe. They were looking online at some prebuilts on Amazon. Or would building him one be a cheaper route (I can do that, just still a little ignorant on the specs of some parts)? So if building one would be the cheaper way to go, what GPU and CPU would you guy's recommend?

Something like a cheaper AMD quadcore (x4 870K) or Intel dual core (i3 6100) should do for the CPU. For the GPU you can go for something like a GTX750Ti, GTX950, R7 370 or RX460, depending on how they are priced in your region. The complete system should cost around $400 in total.

@gundogan: I'd rather crush the kid's dreams than give him something that can hardly run modern games.

@justin258: Why go for something like an i5 6600k + GTX1070 when you're going to play low demanding source engine games with it? Unless the OP has a big(ger) budget and the kid does want to play modern games with it, the recommended parts will do more than fine. The Intel i3 route probably gives you the room to upgrade later on too.

Figure out the budget first before asking for part recommendations.

Well this is timely.

Sorry, yeah $500-$550 max would be the budget. Thanks for the suggestions and link guys.

Building one would likely be cheaper, and given it's a Christmas gift if you can give them links on stuff to look out for they can probably get low-end parts for stupid cheap during Black Friday sales. But also keep in mind that if you're the one doing the building, you'll also be on the hook for tech support in the event something goes wrong.

I agree with others that a Skylake i3 is fine for what he wants. Just get a decent mobo, and he can upgrade to an i5 later if he wants.

Low-end graphics cards are all really good right now. Given the budget you're probably looking at an AMD card, unless you can find a good deal on a 950 or 960. Honestly I would budget for this part last. The jump from an RX 460 to a 470 is huge, for not significantly more. If the budget allows for more than $100 for a GPU, make sure to get one with 4GB of VRAM.

Things that you could cheap out on and really shouldn't; PSU and SSD. PSU should be at least a Bronze level. If that goes bad, it could fry everything, so don't cheap out on it. And SSD reliability is better than what it used to be, but still be sure to get something well reviewed.

Kids these days. Back in my time I lied about my age to get a job pushing carts at a grocery store and sold pot to fellow school kids to afford my gaming hobby. Everyone wants everything handed to them now.

I feel bad for this, but I totally nodded at this is with a stupid smirk on my face. You gotta work for that framerate! Lower those graphical options! I said 640x480! Edit those .ini files based on what someone posted on a forum! Don't you dare utter the v-word in my presence!

@an_ancient: this brings me back to when I was about the same age and also had a relatively weak PC built for me by a relative. Tinkering with stuff like Oldblivion modding and forcing my graphics card to run unsupported games was pretty fun and educational in retrospect.

Have a look at Science Studio on youtube, half his video's are him building things as cheap as he can with different parts and seeing how they end up working with modern games. He does a lot of 'x00 dollar' builds and so forth.

::EDIT:: Actually here he does a $350 build with an RX 480, if you had a budget of 500 I would put the excess into the mobo and cpu but he gets plenty playable FPS in the games mentioned with a $5 amd cpu. Plenty of youtubers have done the legwork and research for these types of builds, just have good look around some of the larger channels, most have made new builds because of all the new low end cards being so good on the bang for buck scale.

No one seems to have mentioned monitors, they can really eat into low budgets builds if you don't have one already.

@rigas: Yeah everyone tends forget all the seemingly small extra things that also add up. He will need a monitor. Keyboard and mouse. Plus since he wants to play with friends, a headset. Don't forget whatever display cable. Ethernet cable or possibly a wifi adapter as I don't think those are standard on mobos yet. Also watch out as most build leave out the like $100 for a copy of windows.

A PC is not a console and is not an out of the box purchase. There is a like $150+ first timer PC builder tax essentially. I would honestly recommend against anybody getting into PC gaming if you are looking at spending under a very strict budget. Sure it is wise to set a hard budget for what is going to be in the box but you need to be willing to get flexible with the rest.

$500-550 for a first time PC build including all the extra necessities is probably unrealistic. It could possibly be doable but probably something you don't want to actually do.

I was just thinking "what if this kid gets a gaming PC and gets into Counter Strike and then goes to buy Battlefield One, only to find out that it doesn't run".

Although, I'll admit, I did learn quite a lot when I was trying to play games on a low-spec laptop that shouldn't have been able to play games. So maybe it will be good for him?

Anyway, it's probably best if you get something that's cheap now, but very scale-able so he can put a more powerful graphics card and processor in there later. I didn't think about that before and others did and have already mentioned it.