I want to get a gaming PC but I know nothing about them, advice thread

I want to play

And

And the upcoming Starship Troopers extermination game



I want it to run smoothly but I don't know what sort of good custom PC to buy. My dad told me the ones on BuildRedux are a massive rip off and I can get a "good" one that is on par with the BuildRedux PC's for half the price of their cheapest option.

Any male relations aged about 20?
They should know something ...

Buba said:

Any male relations aged about 20?

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Wut?

Hmmm @Vyor might know stuff about this. Hope he doesn't mind the pinging.

When I need PC advice I turn to my Sweet Little Chickadee, i.e. my 22 y/o son

If you want to build a new computer, I would advise driving down to your local Microcenter. The people there are up to date on the specifics of computer hardware. Tell them what you're hoping to accomplish and your price range and they're going to try to suggest different options. As for actually assembling your computer, you can watch various Youtube channels like Linus Tech Tips. Turn off the computer, unplug everything, put computer on a table, unscrew and remove cover, shine a light into the computer, unscrew and unplug the GPU, take old GPU out of computer, put new one in, screw in new GPU, plug in everything, screw the cover back on, take computer back to desk and plug it back into the monitor and wall outlet, should work. The only part that you can really botch is replacing the processor, as you need to apply a gooey substance to it (forgot the name of it), and you don't want to spill it on to the other parts of the computer.

The games listed in the OP are not graphically intense by today's standards. The Steam pages recommend using Nvidia 1080 cards, which are so old that IIRC Nvidia doesn't even produce them anymore and are thus pretty cheap. You might be able to acquire one for $100 or under. However, dealing with used graphics cards can be a hassle and they don't come with warranties, so it might be better to just buy a new card. The way PC hardware works is that the very latest stuff costs exorbitant amounts of money (Nvidia 40XX series), while stuff that is just a few years old is dramatically lower in prince (Nvidia 30XX series), and the stuff older than that is relatively cheap (Nvidia 10XX and 20XX series).

If you intend to record gameplay footage, you will want to buy at least a couple terabytes of SSD space. 4k OBS footage accumulates very quickly (1.1 gigabytes per minute for me, a 3 hour recording can take up 210 gigs). Record as .mkv files, not .mp4 files (you can remux the files later into mp4 for easier editing), so if you crash while recording, your file isn't corrupted.

Buba said:

When I need PC advice I turn to my Sweet Little Chickadee, i.e. my 22 y/o son

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I just ask our IT guy to build me a "work"-from-home Revit box. If it meets the high performance recs for that hardware hog it'll run just about any game my daughters want to play.

I wish I could afford a new gaming personal computer. If I weren't planning to move in the near future I would get to build one but I am planning to leave Italy in the next 2 years so it would be a bad investment in my opinion.

Scooby Doo said:

I want to play

And

And the upcoming Starship Troopers extermination game



I want it to run smoothly but I don't know what sort of good custom PC to buy. My dad told me the ones on BuildRedux are a massive rip off and I can get a "good" one that is on par with the BuildRedux PC's for half the price of their cheapest option.

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Well first we have to know budget and if you plan to do anything but game on it. If not, do you want the PC to last for a good amount of years or do you mind upgrading it at some point in the future?

I will recommend that you build it yourself instead of buying a prebuilt as well, you get more options and it will be cheaper overall.

Vyor said:

Well first we have to know budget and if you plan to do anything but game on it. If not, do you want the PC to last for a good amount of years or do you mind upgrading it at some point in the future?

I will recommend that you build it yourself instead of buying a prebuilt as well, you get more options and it will be cheaper overall.

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Well my budget is $1200

I don't really want to upgrade it per say I'll be fine with it being able to just run those listed games and games of those caliber.

I do want it to last tho.

Anything GTX 1660Ti and up will play those games with ease, some AMD GPU's are very very affordable within that level of power.


This build is pretty good but there might be other options you'd prefer, and don't skimp out on the cooling, you want a beefy air cooler (or AIO if you like those) and enough case fans to ventilate the case.

ThatZenoGuy said:

Anything GTX 1660Ti and up will play those games with ease, some AMD GPU's are very very affordable within that level of power.

How I built a couch gaming PC that puts the PS5 to shame | Digital Trends

You haven't been able to beat the PS5 with a custom PC for a couple of years, but now is the time for PCs to make a comeback. Here's the build you need.

www.digitaltrends.com

This build is pretty good but there might be other options you'd prefer, and don't skimp out on the cooling, you want a beefy air cooler (or AIO if you like those) and enough case fans to ventilate the case.

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Asus ROG Strix G10 desktop PC with Intel Core i7-11700 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 gets a 41 percent Amazon discount

What about this? Is this any good? I found it for a discounted price

Scooby Doo said:

Asus ROG Strix G10 desktop PC with Intel Core i7-11700 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 gets a 41 percent Amazon discount

What about this? Is this any good? I found it for a discounted price

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The issue with prebuilds is you never know how competently they are put together, if you get one you really need to look over it to ensure nothing is wrong or set up incorrectly.
But that is a very competent build, 3060 is a good card, intel CPU beats a 3600 Ryzen pretty handily, and so on.
But due to it being a prebuild it's a little expensive, I'm sure you can get a cheaper PC with similar (maybe even better) parts if you build it yourself.

If you know anybody who can assemble computer for you, then Logical Increments PC Buying Guide is a good guide on what are best components for your budget. It's not even that hard if you have no experience, there are tutorials on youtube... just be sure to ground yourself so you don't build up a big enough static charge to damage any components (never happened to me though).

Scooby Doo said:

Well my budget is $1200

I don't really want to upgrade it per say I'll be fine with it being able to just run those listed games and games of those caliber.

I do want it to last tho.

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1200? Easy, let me just go to PC part picker and I can spec something out for you in a jiffy...


Done, you can save money on the storage and RAM pretty easily, but I wouldn't recommend changing that second one. You could also drop the aftermarket cooler to save money there, but it will run hotter and louder if you go with the stock box cooler.

If you want to go this path, there are plenty of tutorials on youtube for how to put it all together, as an example:

Vyor said:

1200? Easy, let me just go to PC part picker and I can spec something out for you in a jiffy...

https://pcpartpicker.com/user/Vyor/saved/xBv4gs

Done, you can save money on the storage and RAM pretty easily, but I wouldn't recommend changing that second one. You could also drop the aftermarket cooler to save money there, but it will run hotter and louder if you go with the stock box cooler.

If you want to go this path, there are plenty of tutorials on youtube for how to put it all together, as an example:

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My dude, that build only has 2 inbuilt case fans. That's like spending 80 grand on a new car and it has wallmart tires.

Scooby Doo said:

I want to play

And

And the upcoming Starship Troopers extermination game



I want it to run smoothly but I don't know what sort of good custom PC to buy. My dad told me the ones on BuildRedux are a massive rip off and I can get a "good" one that is on par with the BuildRedux PC's for half the price of their cheapest option.

Click to expand...

Ugh, both are kinda crap and their resource requirements are not that high.

I could run Grey Goo on a pretty old desktop years back, 2GB 270X ATI card and an AMD 8350.

And Terran Command is not that good looking and I don't think you'd need more than a low end to average videocard.

Make sure you get at least 4GB of GPU RAM with all the latest fancy shit and a decent AMD cpu, 6-8 cores, I think the more recent midrange Ryzen.


I would recommend at least 16Gb of ram and don't be stingy for where the PSU is concerned, Corsair produces both and the ones I bought back when I cared about building my own PC rather than buying a gaming laptop were decent.
There are classes of PSUs btw, look at sliver, but bronze which is budget is OK, too.


Cooling, make sure to get some decent cooling, I like CoolerMaster.

Mobo - very important to not disregard this, I'd go with AsRock, since they are a decent, performance brand and not that expensive vs, Gygabyte IIRC.


Just make sure it can handle your RAM and CPU at optimal speeds and that your PSU can provide enough power for everything, also, usually the Gaming models are more expensive and come at a premium, so look at the more budget ones first.

Once upon a time there were a few calculators that would give you PSU spec recommendations on the basis of your other hardware and peripherals and then tell you what Wattage PSU to get.


And most importantly, I/O make sure to get a decent SSD or NVMe drive or several, load times are significantly better, RN they are not that expansive, but get a reliable brand that doesn't defect as much.

I'd look into WD, hynix(my current laptop's NVMe), and maybe Seagata, I am still salty at Seagate for one HDD I had that crapped out back in the day.

Since you will have the sace you can put in one good quality NVMe(128 to 256 Gb) for the OS and the essentials plus a few regular SSDs of the cheap ass 90$ or below variety for stuff you can afford to lose, like game installs and the like, prrovided it is not something that has to load huge amounts of data very fast, like the truly massive games, yu can also look into an HDD for bulk stuff, like photos, 7 seas bounty, older games.


Truth be told, I play most of my games off of a chinese SSD in an USB enclosure and I rarely feel the difference, but I have 32 Gb of Ram, too, so ocne shit gets cached there is little problem.

The case - get something BIG!


My old one was iirc thermaltake, just make sure you have enough fans and it does not make problems with airflow.

ThatZenoGuy said:

My dude, that build only has 2 inbuilt case fans. That's like spending 80 grand on a new car and it has wallmart tires.

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You don't need that many case fans for such low end parts. The CPU barely hits its TDP and the lower power GPU will be getting directly fed by the bottom fan, where the CPU will have hot air exhausted out the back thanks to the fan placed there. It's not like I recommended a 4090 and 13900k with that case or something(though even then, at that point you'd have the money for more fans).

Worst case? Just take off the side panel.

Vyor said:

You don't need that many case fans for such low end parts. The CPU barely hits its TDP and the lower power GPU will be getting directly fed by the bottom fan, where the CPU will have hot air exhausted out the back thanks to the fan placed there. It's not like I recommended a 4090 and 13900k with that case or something(though even then, at that point you'd have the money for more fans).

Worst case? Just take off the side panel.

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More fans=run them at lower RPM=less noise
Sure you're unlikely to overheat the thing, but it's going to sound pretty loud when they rev up to high speed.

ThatZenoGuy said:

More fans=run them at lower RPM=less noise
Sure you're unlikely to overheat the thing, but it's going to sound pretty loud when they rev up to high speed.

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It really won't get loud at all. The cooler is massive overkill for the CPU already and the GPU is, uh, a 6700 XT, a 230w card, and it has a fan pointed right at it for that case. It's fine. Worst comes to work, he can buy an extra fan or two for like 20 bucks.