Yet Another Cycling Forum
General Category => The Knowledge => Ctrl-Alt-Del => Topic started by: TPMB12 on 05 November, 2023, 11:20:26 pm
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Can you buy a gaming computer for £700 that's worth having? It would be an upgrade from a Nintendo switch in order to get more and better games for our son.
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Depends on what you want to play, and if you already have a monitor / keyboard / mouse / etc.
I bought a machine from CyberPower during the lockdown for about £700 that certainly plays everything I want to play, though not at 4k.
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I would enquire with your local PC/repair retailers to see if they have any good quality second hand machines available with a six core processor and at least 16GB of DDR 4 memory. Lots of early adopters sell their existing kit so as to be able to buy the latest thing. Graphics cards in particular have become very expensive in the last few years and tend, for most modern pcs, to be the primary barrier to playing modern games at higher resolutions. For a youngster 1080p should be fine however, so running a budget end card should be fine. NVidea GTX 1650 or higher, AMD RX 580 or higher. Steer clear of branded pcs such as Dell due to their propriety construction which often does not lend itself to simple upgrades or generic replacement of bits.
Computer fairs have waned in recent years but if there is one held relativey nearby may well be worth a visit to examine offerings.
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If you want a similar style to a Switch, what about a Steam Deck?
Quite reasonably priced - probably cheapest to buy the 64GB model, then upgrade the SSD yourself.
Most Steam / PC games will run fine on it, though some might need a bit of tweaking. And lots of options for cheap games. Or using emulators for other games.
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He's mostly on fortnite and rocket league I think. He has the Nintendo xbox pass membership which he reckons will give him access to games on n the pc. No idea about that as xhox is a console not pc.
Yes looking at playing forward on it and other games not available n on switch.
I've seen game specific gaming PCs. The company does a £780 pc for fortnite and n£720 for minecraft which was his old game of b choice. Other games are nearer or over £1000. Rocket league the cheapest pc built to play it costs £1040 IIRC.
The thing is cheaper gaming pc setups might only run at 60fps. That's not good enough for gamers. He's fairly good at the games he's played but he knows the limit us switch and the controllers. Apparently gaming jeyboard and mouse allows a decent gamer to play quicker or better. More things you can do.
He's got nothing so keyboard, mouse and monitor is needed. I doubt his mum's old desktop monitor that she no longer uses will be his enough for a gaming pc.also his decent LG smart TV won't be great neither. So any recommendations for that too will be helpful.
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I have been lusting over a gaming PC to play train sim games on but the prices seem very high for a hobby that I would only use in the winter or wet rainy cold times. One day maybe. So I will follow this thread with interest :)
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He's mostly on fortnite and rocket league I think. He has the Nintendo xbox pass membership which he reckons will give him access to games on n the pc. No idea about that as xhox is a console not pc.
Yes looking at playing forward on it and other games not available n on switch.
I've seen game specific gaming PCs. The company does a £780 pc for fortnite and n£720 for minecraft which was his old game of b choice. Other games are nearer or over £1000. Rocket league the cheapest pc built to play it costs £1040 IIRC.
The thing is cheaper gaming pc setups might only run at 60fps. That's not good enough for gamers. He's fairly good at the games he's played but he knows the limit us switch and the controllers. Apparently gaming jeyboard and mouse allows a decent gamer to play quicker or better. More things you can do.
He's got nothing so keyboard, mouse and monitor is needed. I doubt his mum's old desktop monitor that she no longer uses will be his enough for a gaming pc.also his decent LG smart TV won't be great neither. So any recommendations for that too will be helpful.
60fps isn't good enough for gamers?
No it's not good enough for gamers with endless money to spare, everyone else makes do.
Most of the top end stuff is silly money, you have to use what you can afford frankly and if you can't afford 4k graphics and the like then you don't get to play like that.
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This whole thread is terrifying. I don't think I've ever spent £700 on a computer in my life. And I've spent half my life at a computer.
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Numbers above 60 fps exist mostly for willy-waving. Ditto most other demands.
When he gets a paper round / pro-gamer career he can buy himself whatever computer he wants.
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I have been lusting over a gaming PC to play train sim games on but the prices seem very high for a hobby that I would only use in the winter or wet rainy cold times. One day maybe. So I will follow this thread with interest :)
Train Sim Classic doesn't really need high end specs. My PC is several years old now, works fine, maybe with graphics turned down a bit. Can be a bit slow to load sometimes, but OK if you are patient.
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This whole thread is terrifying. I don't think I've ever spent £700 on a computer in my life. And I've spent half my life at a computer.
I usually don't buy them, employers give them to me and I re-purpose them when they give me another one.
But during lock down my hand was forced, as I was stuck at home with a dead workstation.
D.
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I reckon even at £7-800 you'll get better than the overheating switch! Some days lag is bad!
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Keep him away from flight-simming in VR.
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*serious* gamers turn down the resolution to get higher frame rates.
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I'm not a gamer, so don't really 'get' this thing about frame rates.
What's the point of silly high frame rates?
Is it a visual thing?
I mean, filum runs at 24 fps, and analog video was 50fps interleaved. Digital video runs at 50 or 60 fps typically.
Can you actually 'see' these silly high frame rates?
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I'm not a gamer, so don't really 'get' this thing about frame rates.
What's the point of silly high frame rates?
Is it a visual thing?
I mean, filum runs at 24 fps, and analog video was 50fps interleaved. Digital video runs at 50 or 60 fps typically.
Can you actually 'see' these silly high frame rates?
Response and update times.
If you are playing a first person shooter, and updates are shown faster on your screen than on your competitor's, you have an advantage over them.
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Those numbers were chosen to minimise perceptible flicker from movie projectors and cathode ray tubes, they don't represent the limit of human vision perceiving motion, and indeed motion can look slightly smoother at higher fps.
(though you can achieve some of the same affect with motion blur, which live action TV and especially cinema (https://expertphotography.com/photography-180-degree-rule/) have lots of and gamers habitually turn off)
The other thing is games are interactive, and higher frame rates can slightly improve how quickly you can react to fast moving action, since you'll see it very very slightly earlier.
Unfortunately gamers are all petulant 12 years olds, so they'll insist these consequences are massive and that they'll be instantly "fragged" or "bombd" if they don't have 240 fps minimum and dad, daaad you don't understand and I'm going to my room ** slam **
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I get the point at a few tens of fps, but can we actually perceive any benefit at 240 / 360 fps?
I really don't know.
It just sounds a bit like the hi-fi perceived sound quality discussions from the 1980s.
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Also, human reaction time to a visual stimulus is of the order of what, 100ms? That's like 5 frames of video.
ETA: More like double that, apparently.
I accept that higher frame rates make computer-generated images with no motion blur look better on a progressive scan display. But that's about aesthetics.
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It’ll take between 150 to 300 milliseconds for you to react according to a neuroscience article I read. Improved game play is generally through getting better at predicting and doing things rather than seeing then doing things.
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A while ago internet latency was the key. I had ISDN and others didn't, so I won a lot of fights. ;D
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Latency can still a thing, if you've got a crap internet connection.
Hence people who are about 12 talking about using WiFi cables to improve their ping times. :facepalm:
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I'm not a gamer, so don't really 'get' this thing about frame rates.
What's the point of silly high frame rates?
Is it a visual thing?
I mean, filum runs at 24 fps, and analog video was 50fps interleaved. Digital video runs at 50 or 60 fps typically.
Can you actually 'see' these silly high frame rates?
There are plenty of motion artefacts at 24 fps, eg reverse wagon wheels.
It was chosen as the rate you wouldn’t see the dark 1/48 s while the film was moved on to the next frame. It wasn’t possible to go much faster than that with film shot in a studio without literally frying the actors with the lighting.
Interestingly when feature films were first filmed on video some directors didn’t like the more realistic motion and copied to film stock and back to video to get the proper cinematic feel.
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Interestingly when feature films were first filmed on video some directors didn’t like the more realistic motion and copied to film stock and back to video to get the proper cinematic feel.
And then the video people realised they could achieve the same effect by using a computer to throw away every other frame, muck about with the colour curve and add a load of noise... :hand:
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When you are playing a game that involves connecting to a server one of the numbers that matters is how often the game server sends updates. This varies from game to game, and some games have constant rates while others vary according to load. It probably makes sense to use a PC that allows a framerate faster than the server rate, otherwise some server updates will simply not be shown.
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A while ago internet latency was the key. I had ISDN and others didn't, so I won a lot of fights. ;D
Back in the day me and a mate played doom over a nulmodem
The main problem was that one PC was a 486SX running at a stonking 33mhz and the other was a 486DX4 running at iirc 75mhz or maybe 100 cannae mind, anyway this had obvious impact on the ability to respond, who ever drew the SX was in for lots of deth, and we would swap PC if whoever was on the SX killed the ne on the DX, he was also tactically better so usually spent most of the time on the DX, I failed to learn where the spawn location was.
Sent from my IV2201 using Tapatalk
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Back in 8 bit days you could write code that did stuff based on the computer interrupts. One was to code for the keyboard interrupt to enable super human firing in any shoot them up.
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This whole thread is terrifying. I don't think I've ever spent £700 on a computer in my life. And I've spent half my life at a computer.
I have, but it wasn't my money...
J
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My first actual grown-up computer cost somewhere north of $4000. That's what it cost for a laptop willing to run Windows 95 at Pentium 100 speeds. It never agreed with PCMIA cards, but then it turns out no computer ever did.
I did once buy a CT scanner, though not for personal use, and I wasn't even allowed to stick my head in it (because I've had several scans previously and likely exceeded my lifetime recommended dose of radiation).
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I did once buy a CT scanner
This is an excellent strategy, as it allows you to obtain a legal copy of the LTSB release of Microsoft Windows, which has all the crapware stripped-out.
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It was a long time ago, but I have a suspicion the software ran on OS2 Warp.
My first-ever DNA sequencer, which required a ladder to load, also ran its software on OS2 Warp. Took a night to run and another day mapping the contigs which were teeny by today's standards.
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Underappreciated OS, that one.
It stands to reason that any sufficiently expensive piece of scientific/industrial/medical equipment is likely to outlive the service life of the computer you need to run it, to say nothing of the company responsible. You'd think people would be wise to this by now, but I suppose the people buying Shiny! New! equipment aren't the ones tasked with keeping that ancient Solaris box running so the telescope doesn't get bricked.
Not that there's much you can do about it. Open source helps, but that only gets you so far.
On a related note, MS finally gave up on Windows CE this year...
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OS2 was for a while the main OS of ATMs, until XP took over.
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OS2 Warp seemed to be the OS of choice for bigly science machines back in the day. That said in the 90s we had an HPLC machine that still needed an Apple II and a big floppy.
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Silly-high frame rates have become quite an obsession lately but there is more to it than beating 24FPS. If the whole game is running at 60FPS vs 40FPS there's a noticeable increases in what I'm going to call "fluidity" when you waggle the mouse around and aim. I have a 60Hz monitor so I can't comment on 144Hz which is usually the next step up but I strongly suspect there will be diminishing returns as you go up higher. I DO have a VR headset and the difference between the 45FPS and 90 FPS options is very noticeable, VR being very sensitive to Framerate as a poor and/or fluctuating framerate has some grim effects on your stomach. It also requires a boatload more GPU power than "pancake" gaming.
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Ordered an i5 processor with Asus motherboard, rtx 30something gpu with 12gb, 16gb RAM and I think a 1tb ssd. Got it for 800 or so quid. Capable of 1440p at 144hz. It was actually the same price as one with basically the same bit only 8gb for the gpu and 500mb ssd I think.
Now we need a monitor. I assume it's no good being 1440p 244hz pc with 1080p and less than 144hz monitor. I think the cheapest I saw that in a monitor was a Samsung on black Friday dark at £229 not on that deal now.
What monitor would you get with a pc capable of 1440p at 144hz? If you need to cut costs would you get a 1080p at 144hz, 1080p at lower than 144hz or 1440p at lower than 144hz? Any good monitors for sub £200?
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If you need to cut costs would you get a 1080p at 144hz, 1080p at lower than 144hz or 1440p at lower than 144hz?
For me (at least now I've been to the optiquak and invested in some 4k-capable glasses) pixels trump framerate every time. But I'm not a gamer, and spend the vast majority of my time at the computer reading things.
Indeed, the compromise I made with my current primary monitor was that it can't do a clean multiple of 24fps. Which is mildly irksome for watching films.
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Well we chose and ordered a gaming pc with a delivery date well before Xmas in fact this week. Just had email saying its on backorder and delivery will be some time next year. She said we'd been told that at time of order. BS! It told us delivery this week in time for son's birthday!
OK! Plan B - cancel order, place order for computer with 5 day lead time from argos instead. This would be cyberforce gaming pc from argos instead of the ordered stormforce bought direct.
Anyone know anything about cyberforcs and are they as good as stormforce gaming computers?
I think the specs are as close as you can get. This alternative is £25 less than the one we've ordered (the ordered one is now £80 more than the deal n we got).
Really not sure of the best option. Either way son will not be getting the pc for his birthday on Wednesday but we can shift it to n Xmas instead.
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Can you buy a gaming computer for £700 that's worth having?
Minimum spec is surely 48KB. Colour TV, 14". 2-cassette tape deck with tape-to-tape copy (or nobody will do swapsies). Anna Kempston joystick.
A 48K ZX Spectrum was £175 on launch in 1982, which is £724 after RPI inflation.
So, no.
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GPWM!
Similarly, the Amiga 500 Batman Pack is shirley canonical, and £399 in 1989 would be £1,008.88 in today's money. :o
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I was trying to explain to the bright young things in the team that my mental model of a computer is that it is fundamentally a ZX Spectrum, and that I like C because it is the language that tries hardest to let you believe that that is still true. They had not heard of the ZX Spectrum. "But I was born in 2002!"
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GPWM!
Similarly, the Amiga 500 Batman Pack is shirley canonical, and £399 in 1989 would be £1,008.88 in today's money. :o
Mine came with Battle Chess :)
My parents saw that running in the shop window and thought "there's a way to make him learn a proper game!"
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I don't understand the concept of gaming PC's when even the high end consoles will do a better job for about the price of a good (not top end) graphics card.
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When you get good at games it seems gaming computers with gaming mouse and keyboard with right coloured switches give you a competitive advantage vs your console playing mates. Mind you, ps5 isn't cheap at £500 on brand website. Horses for courses anyway. Plus will be good for homework too.
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If the game(s) you use most are amenable to modding a console isn’t going to cut it. Doubly so if you make your own mods.