PC buying/building help

holnrew

I want to get a PC for learning coding, getting to grips with the basics of Blender, making phone apps and some gaming, being able to play GTA V would be nice, but if not possible I'm happy with skyrim.

Budget of around £300, is it possible?

ThePrettyDamned

Probably, although gta v may be tricky. 

You can get some amazing computers second hand or from Dell outlet that might fit the bill. 

In before Sporky and the awesome lenovo yoga pro 2. Though that's a bit over budget, it has a screen included. 

Sporky

I'm all about the mini ITX these days.

crunchman

For £300 you are probably best looking second hand.

If you are going new, if you get the latest generation of Intel CPUs the onboard graphics are should be good enough for Skyrim so you could save on the cost of a graphics card.  The passmark score for the onboard GPU is slightly better than the GeForce GTX 260 recommended as the minimum for Skyrim.  You might be able to squeeze in around £300 that way.  If you want a separate Graphics card to get better performance than the onboard GPU you would need to spend another £60 or £70 and I don't think there would be any chance of coming in around £300.

RedRabbit

I'm looking at building a similar machine after not having a desktop PC for a few years.

For £300 you're almost certainly looking at second hand components and probably CPUs and graphics cards from a couple of years ago.  You might not be able to run GTA V on high at 1080p but you should be able to get decent results from lower settings.

Might be worth watching these

Details on $375 gaming PC build


Above PC running GTA V and comparison to PS4

Axe_meister

Consoles only run at 720p (upscaled to 1080p) so any PC with a CPU with built in GPU wil compete. So i5/i3. I won't recommend AMD just yet as the current run of APUs no longer have any shelf live as they will be superceded in a few months.

notanon

Me thinks yes. I can recommend Qt. Mature and lots of tutorials and cross platform (Mac, Linux, web, mobile, . . ). 

holnrew

I'm thinking buying a refurbished business machine and bunging in a graphics card. There are some i5s on Facebook marketplace for 160

crunchman

holnrew said:

I'm thinking buying a refurbished business machine and bunging in a graphics card. There are some i5s on Facebook marketplace for 160

Check what the spec of the power supply is.  Because processors have got less power hungry in recent years, some modern PCs are only coming with 250W power supplies.

Newer graphics cards are better on energy consumption, but if you go second hand with the graphics card and get a proper gaming card that's a few years old it could well use around 200W which will cause trouble with a weedy power supply.

Bidley

holnrew said:

I'm thinking buying a refurbished business machine and bunging in a graphics card. There are some i5s on Facebook marketplace for 160

Sounds like a good idea. You should be able to get a GTX750ti and a decent PSU (if needed) used for about £150.

holnrew

The case is slimmer than a normal one, does that affect the card I can get?

holnrew

Does this seem like a decent deal? I've decided I can't be arsed building it myself

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/152519103714

Heartfeltdawn

Personally I wouldn't because there's nothing listed about the actual parts used. 

I've just built a PC for a friend's kid, came in at a really good price. Swapped out some parts with mine. In the end, young chap has got an AMD FX6300 with 8gb, Gigabyte motherboard, hard drive, GTX750Ti graphics card, 23" flatscreen, speakers, and the whole thing was £290 including £30 to deliver all the stuff to him. 

Look on Ebay for stuff close to you that is collection only. Here in Bristol there's a big student market, meaning it's easy to pick up parts for peanuts. The monitor (Samsung) I picked up for a tenner (Ebay collection only) plus £4 for the bus fare. 

holnrew

Unlikely to be able to do that way out west wales. Think I'm gonna have to buy a system and upgrade.