PC for my son for xmas

corkscott

I am looking to build a budget PC for my 9 year old son mainly to play minecraft for the moment. I have been looking at the Gigabyte GA-Z87 board and an Intel i3 Haswell 4150 CPU. Putting in 4gb of RAM but not picked a case out yet.
Would this play minecraft at a highish settings without a graphics card at the moment then when he starts to get a bit older and wants to play more demanding games a GPU could be added.
I want to make sure that the basic foundations are there and better parts can be upgraded when required.

Thanks for any help.

Serephucus

If it's not until Christmas, come back around late November/early December. There's no point advising you on anything now, as prices and components will change by then.

That said, you should be ok with the i3, but I'd want a dedicated GPU in there anyway. On larger scenes, or if he wants custom texture packs, it can get demanding.

That said, he's nine, so you could just tell him to shut up and be happy. :P

corkscott

Cheers mate he is 9 going on 29 so I suppose I bet factor in a graphics card as well, maybe a second hand one for now,

TerrorFirmer

Instead of having to increase your budget or buy second hand, just drop the CPU from that i3-4150 to the Pentium G3220, less than half the price and perfect for Minecraft and 90% of any other games he might play. Use the money saved to buy something like a Radeon r7 250x for €60 and you're set.

Not sure what specific motherboard you're looking at, but a basic €45-50 euro mAtx board will suffice in this case.

What's your budget in total?

corkscott

Looking to spend around €300ish but I have Windows 7 licence a 64gb SSD and a 1tb WD drive already

BloodBath

Something like this should do nicely. Good base performance for the price, good upgradability and that cpu can be overclocked for a lot of extra performance.

corkscott

Cheers Bloodbath love the case which shop is your list from ?

TerrorFirmer

Great that you already have those parts, and Bloodbath's build around that is spot on. The site is www.hardwareversand.de.

Shiminay

Try for 8GB of RAM, it's the only thing I'd say might be an issue and it's really not too expensive to get it now rather than upgrading later.

BloodBath

No problem. I used geizhals.de for discounts on hardwareversand.

Agree with upgrading to 8gb of ram as well. It won't cost much more doing it now. Get a single stick so you have room to expand to 16gb if necessary in future.

TerrorFirmer

A single 4GB stick will be OK for now. I'm always chopping and changing my build, and while I have to admit that Battlefield 4 online appreciated 8GB ram, most other titles, including Far Cry 3, Wolfenstein New World Order, Battlefield 4 Single Player, Dishonored, Arkham City, Resident Evil 6, Call of Duty Ghosts, Sniper Elite 3, and many others ran perfectly fine on 4GB - so it's pretty feasible to have 4GB as a starting point to upgrade in the future, particularly for a kid like you've described.

corkscott

Thanks guys you have all been a great help, one thing that confuses me slightly is the motherboard. Everyone seems to spec a mobo around €40/50 on here and other forums, if I'm going to change out the parts to faster more powerful ones in the future shouldn't the motherboard be better spec'd because it's the main stay of the PC.

Lu Tze

With the motherboard its a tradeoff of features versus price and you have a pretty tight budget. To be fair, most of the additional features arent used by most users, and your board will still accept everything up to a i7 4790 in the future should you want to upgrade the processor in the future, so you arent limited in that regard.

The main difference is you wont be able to overclock down the line if you get an unlocked processor (denoted by a "k" at the end of the model number), but i wouldnt be too bothered by that.

You will still be able to upgrade ram, hard drives etc.

BloodBath

You can overclock on that board.

corkscott

Thanks everyone you have been a great help

EoinHef

Id go for 8gb ram like some of the lads have suggested if you can squeeze it into your budget.

Minecraft uses a lot of ram with texture packs and mods installed. Currently using the yogpack with 128-bit texture pack and using up to 6.5gb of of the 8gb i have installed. Just something to note if the main game he will be playing is minecraft