Budget gaming PC build
Discussion
After spending altogether too much time around the house, my eleven year old son has decided he’d like to spend his savings on a pc.
We started shopping around, and being tighter than a ducks proverbial, and interested in doing it, we are leaning towards building something.
Our budget allows for something like this:
Ryzen 5 3400g
MSI Tomahawk B450 Max ATX AM4
Corsair Vengeance DDR4 3600 2x8gb
Adata ssd 480gb
Fractal design focus g case
Aero cool integrator 500w psu
Comes out at about £450.
My questions then are,
I’ve not messed around with pc innards for a long time, and the memory speed thing is all a bit hazy to me nowadays. The motherboard says it supports all kinds of memory speeds. Does it matter too much which I go for? Will speeds have to match, when, down the line we want to add more?
On the subject of memory, 16gb as above is coming out at about £75-80. My gut is telling me to spend the extra £40 or so and buy 2x16gb, especially as system ram will be shared initially with the onchip GPU. Should we?
Back in the bad old days, if you built a system with onboard graphics, then wanted to upgrade to a standalone graphics card, it would throw up all sorts of problems recognising which you now wanted to use. When he’s saved up some more and we buy a graphics card, do you reckon it’ll be fairly straightforward to add?
And finally, for now, we’ve got a windows laptop, which I recently upgraded with extra ram and an ssd. To get it all to work right, I reinstalled windows with a usb stick I downloaded an installer on. During it, I’m sure it said you could install that version of windows on up to five separate machines. Is that right, or do I still have to budget for a full version of Windows too?
Is there anything else we’ve forgotten to think about? I haven’t specced a storage drive, or optical drive as I’m certain I’ve got some leftover bits lying around that I can reuse.
Thanks for ploughing through.
We started shopping around, and being tighter than a ducks proverbial, and interested in doing it, we are leaning towards building something.
Our budget allows for something like this:
Ryzen 5 3400g
MSI Tomahawk B450 Max ATX AM4
Corsair Vengeance DDR4 3600 2x8gb
Adata ssd 480gb
Fractal design focus g case
Aero cool integrator 500w psu
Comes out at about £450.
My questions then are,
I’ve not messed around with pc innards for a long time, and the memory speed thing is all a bit hazy to me nowadays. The motherboard says it supports all kinds of memory speeds. Does it matter too much which I go for? Will speeds have to match, when, down the line we want to add more?
On the subject of memory, 16gb as above is coming out at about £75-80. My gut is telling me to spend the extra £40 or so and buy 2x16gb, especially as system ram will be shared initially with the onchip GPU. Should we?
Back in the bad old days, if you built a system with onboard graphics, then wanted to upgrade to a standalone graphics card, it would throw up all sorts of problems recognising which you now wanted to use. When he’s saved up some more and we buy a graphics card, do you reckon it’ll be fairly straightforward to add?
And finally, for now, we’ve got a windows laptop, which I recently upgraded with extra ram and an ssd. To get it all to work right, I reinstalled windows with a usb stick I downloaded an installer on. During it, I’m sure it said you could install that version of windows on up to five separate machines. Is that right, or do I still have to budget for a full version of Windows too?
Is there anything else we’ve forgotten to think about? I haven’t specced a storage drive, or optical drive as I’m certain I’ve got some leftover bits lying around that I can reuse.
Thanks for ploughing through.
Memory speeds definitely matter performance wise, especially with integrated graphics wanting memory bandwidth, so go for faster memory if possible. The board will run at the clock of the slowest memory installed.
16GB should be comfortable for windows and any current game.
Adding a card would be trivial - if in reality he's going to game, look at the games he wants to run and benchmarks on AMD integrated graphics - if in reality he's going to need a GPU to run what he wants, bite the bullet and get a card now, and get a 3300X CPU to start with - later CPU generation, better performance than a 3300g, but no integrated graphics.
I'd be surprised if there is a licence to install on five machines - there are however cheap keys on ebay, some people are perfectly happy with them, some consider them dodgy.
16GB should be comfortable for windows and any current game.
Adding a card would be trivial - if in reality he's going to game, look at the games he wants to run and benchmarks on AMD integrated graphics - if in reality he's going to need a GPU to run what he wants, bite the bullet and get a card now, and get a 3300X CPU to start with - later CPU generation, better performance than a 3300g, but no integrated graphics.
I'd be surprised if there is a licence to install on five machines - there are however cheap keys on ebay, some people are perfectly happy with them, some consider them dodgy.
Went ahead and ordered mostly what’s above today.
Ended up with 16gb of 3200 ram, and couldn’t get the case as out of stock, so ordered a similar looking thing from AvP or some such.
Eagerly waiting now, going to give windows installation a try, but if that doesn’t work, we might download steam os until we’ve had chance to save another £100. I quite like the idea of free team fortress and csgo. Retro gaming!
Ended up with 16gb of 3200 ram, and couldn’t get the case as out of stock, so ordered a similar looking thing from AvP or some such.
Eagerly waiting now, going to give windows installation a try, but if that doesn’t work, we might download steam os until we’ve had chance to save another £100. I quite like the idea of free team fortress and csgo. Retro gaming!
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