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[Technology] Help please...Building a budget gaming computer



1066familyman

1066familyman

Radio User
Jan 15, 2008
15,185
Is it possible to build a half decent gaming computer for around £300 ?

Games to be played are mainly Minecraft and Roblox.

After recommendations for the following that will all work together:

Tower case -

Graphics Card -

CPU -

Ram -

Power Supply -

Memory - 500gb SSD possibly?

Anything else I'll need? Peripherals all sorted.

Thanks.

Oh and does, say a 450w power supply, actually use 450w of energy? Bit concerned about the ever increasing electricity bill.
 




happypig

happypig

Staring at the rude boys
May 23, 2009
7,959
Eastbourne
1066familyman said:
Is it possible to build a half decent gaming computer for around £300 ?

Games to be played are mainly Minecraft and Roblox.

After recommendations for the following that will all work together:

Tower case -

Graphics Card -

CPU -

Ram -

Power Supply -

Memory - 500gb SSD possibly?

Anything else I'll need? Peripherals all sorted.

Thanks.

Oh and does, say a 450w power supply, actually use 450w of energy? Bit concerned about the ever increasing electricity bill.
Click to expand...

Have you considered second hand ? I would think £300 would get you a machine with a couple of years old spec.

Power supplies should be over-specced, not run at max, so a 450w psu should supply a machine drawing about 300w. Electricity costs about 15p kWh so a machine drawing 300w will cost about 5p an hour to run (plus the monitor/speakers)
 


beorhthelm

beorhthelm

A. Virgo, Football Genius
Jul 21, 2003
35,300
dont think you need much to run Minecraft. think £300 might be tight, have a look at Nova and Scan for their budget game setups for components (then build self for less).

top advice on PSU, dont skimp, and the cost to run is the same regardless of the power rating.
 


BBassic

BBassic

I changed this.
Jul 28, 2011
12,310
https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/ is a really good resource.

You can pick from Intel / AMD - for those games listed I'd probably plump for Intel personally. Then you can narrow it down to budget. Once it's churned out a budget spec for you, you can then go and search for those parts elsewhere on the internet and see if there's deals to be had.

However, doing it through PC Specialist means it'll come built for you as well.
 








deletebeepbeepbeep

deletebeepbeepbeep

Well-known member
May 12, 2009
20,956
At that price range your best bang for buck would be buying second hand, or a Dell Optiplex and getting the best video card you can fitted into it. The only issue will be ensuring the videocard physically fits and can be driven by the power supply.

Currently all prices are a premium due to Coronavirus, recent release of new game consoles, games, and videocards/processors that have driven demand to crazy levels.
 


1066familyman

1066familyman

Radio User
Jan 15, 2008
15,185
Papak said:
I think you are confusing memory and hard disk capacity.
Click to expand...


Yes, sorry, meant to say Ram (memory) as in possibly 8gb. And storage as in possibly a 500gb SSD. If rather go SSD for storage than HDD.


Thanks all for the advice so far. I'll check out the links etc.
 




1066familyman

1066familyman

Radio User
Jan 15, 2008
15,185
BBassic said:
https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/ is a really good resource.

You can pick from Intel / AMD - for those games listed I'd probably plump for Intel personally. Then you can narrow it down to budget. Once it's churned out a budget spec for you, you can then go and search for those parts elsewhere on the internet and see if there's deals to be had.

However, doing it through PC Specialist means it'll come built for you as well.
Click to expand...

That's an excellent link, thanks :thumbsup:

Perfect for seeing what will go with what and will fit into my budget.

I want to build it ourself as a project with the jnr 1066 in question.
 


happypig

happypig

Staring at the rude boys
May 23, 2009
7,959
Eastbourne
1066familyman said:
Yes, sorry, meant to say Ram (memory) as in possibly 8gb. And storage as in possibly a 500gb SSD. If rather go SSD for storage than HDD.


Thanks all for the advice so far. I'll check out the links etc.
Click to expand...

I think the advised practice these days is a smallish SSD for OS and swap and a larger spinning disk for data. I have a SSD in an older laptop and it boots remarkably fast.
 


neilbard

neilbard

Hedging up
Oct 8, 2013
6,245
Tyringham
1066familyman said:
Is it possible to build a half decent gaming computer for around £300 ?

Games to be played are mainly Minecraft and Roblox.

After recommendations for the following that will all work together:

Tower case -

Graphics Card -

CPU -

Ram -

Power Supply -

Memory - 500gb SSD possibly?

Anything else I'll need? Peripherals all sorted.

Thanks.

Oh and does, say a 450w power supply, actually use 450w of energy? Bit concerned about the ever increasing electricity bill.
Click to expand...

Don't waste your money, you will only have to keep turning it off and on again...:xmas:
 




schmunk

schmunk

"Members"
Jan 19, 2018
9,496
Mid mid mid Sussex
If this is just for playing games, would you not be better off buying an Xbox / PS4 (or 5)?

I get the desire to build it, but frankly PC gaming is generally a lot more of a faff than a console, and if you're starting from scratch that budget is incredibly tight.
 


S

Shropshire Seagull

Well-known member
Nov 5, 2004
8,496
Telford
Apart from being much faster I/O, SSDs also use less power as it has no continuously running motor to spin a disk like HDD do.
I bought a 500Gb SSD from Amazon a few weeks back for £60

8Gb RAM should be your minimum, go for 16Gb if you can afford to.
CPU - so many options - I've always been an Intel man and would never touch AMD - but your choice.

As others have said, the power rating on the power supply is the max grunt [wattage/amperage] it can push out - too much is not an issue as the kit will only draw the power it needs, but too low and things in the PC will stop working, usually causing a system failure [crash].
 












zefarelly

zefarelly

Well-known member
NSC Patron
Jul 7, 2003
21,811
Sussex, by the sea
I'm not into computers or gaming, but my son is, we bartered a deal earlier this year for him to upgrade my PC and he built a minecraft server for himself and his mates.

£300 was the budget ( I use solidworks, hungry cad package)

so my suggestion is, possibly, buy a cheap 2nd hand PC and upgrade.

although from scratch isn't that expensive. agree re PSU's as has been said, my lad saif the same. make it upgradables so you can improive as budget allows.
 








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