Lenovo IdeaCentre OK for Moderate Gaming?

Redderneck

Folks, looking to replace a 7 year old Dell desktop. General SOHO use, plus needs to be the family PC for usual webfoolery. My young fella has just started gaming, so needs to be ok for moderate gaming, but nothing serious.

Am not going the self-build route.

Lazy option is to re-up on Dell, but a Lenovo IdeaCentre caught my eye: K450; i5-4430 processor, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 2GB Graphics, 8 GB DDR3 SDRAM & a 1TB HDD.

That spec likely to stand up to moderate gaming? Minecraft is the current favourite for him. Have ThinkPads and love 'em. Fugly but reliable.

Apols if that's a vague question; I'm no gamer.. Any advice appreciated.

Torqay

It will play Minecraft all right but you'll get a similar desktop PC with much better graphics for that money elsewhere.

P.S. Office computer and the "usual webfoolery" is a recipe dor disaster, better keep it separate.

Redderneck

Good advice on keeping them separate. I'm trying to stave off the inevitable I guess! We have a tablet and a few old clunker laptops in the house which have been great for keeping the kids off the desktop so far, but the young fella is getting more and more into gaming...

Was looking at shelling out max €650 - other than self-build, any thoughts on what/where might offer the better graphics?

Torqay

For just under €700 you'll get something like this:



The new Haswell Core i3 desktop processors score around 5000 with CPUMark, faster than a mobile Core i5 processor and good enough for gaming. The HD 7850 is easily twice as fast as the GTX 650. You have the choice between Windows 7 and Windows 8. If you already have an operating system, order without OS and save the "Windows Tax" (€95).

This is just to give you an idea, you can configure the computer to your likings.

Redderneck

Thanks for taking the time Torqay. Much appreciated.