New Machine for the Nephew

Kintarō Hattori

Hi Chaps,

My nephew (15) is looking to build his first PC, he's had a laptop for the last few years but wants to build something. He's not entirely sure what he'll use it for other than gaming. He's the sort of kid who plays Minecraft and such- wouldn't be a Call of Duty player, though this may give him the opportunity to do so. I only mention it as he doesn't have a clear gaming goal in mind.

He has a monitor, keyboard & mouse. I'm going to give him my old EVGA PSU (think it's about 900W), an old Antec ATX case and a Kingston SSD for the OS. He'll need everything else though.

With a budget of €1000 can you throw out some recommendations?

Many thanks.

TheValeyard

Tbh,
It's a dark time for PC building in my opinion.

GPU, PSU, memory and certain chips are hard to come by or paying a premium for it.


If you're happy to buy some second hand parts then you might have better look

Citrus_8

Prices are unfortunately skyrocketing now. Either buying second hand or saving more and waiting but also checking prices from time to time is the only options.

Kintarō Hattori

I spoke to my nephew and he's keen to build something and is happy with a mixture of new and used. Is AMD still currently trumping Intel?

minitrue

It's all about the graphics card, it's virtually impossible to get one for a sane price. As in you will be doing well to "only" pay about double the MSRP!

It's so bad the only easy approach is to buy something like a Dell and just forget about the parts you can supply.

AMD beats Intel on power consumption and trounces it if you are looking at more than gaming where you need a high core count. If you don't care about power consumption a i5-11400 is probably slightly cheaper and quicker than a R5-3600 and vaguely similar for a i5-11600K Vs an R5-5600X. AMD also has a wide range though so boards that take a 6-core R5-3600 now could get a 16 core R9-5950X down the road while Intel only goes to 8 (or maybe 10) cores. Again the power consumption though is stupidly better for AMD.

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600 3.6 GHz 6-Core Processor (€205.47 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Motherboard: MSI B450M MORTAR MAX Micro ATX AM4 Motherboard (€69.90 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Memory: Crucial Ballistix 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-3600 CL16 Memory (€91.90 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Total: €367.27

That's an example, you could add your parts and a graphics card and then whatever you have left over goes to whatever bigger hard disk or SSD you can squeeze into the budget. Really though it's find a graphics card first for €500ish (or less) and then decide how much of the rest of the budget to spend on what.

Alternatively https://www.dell.com/en-ie/shop/gaming-and-games/new-g5-gaming-desktop/spd/g-series-5000-desktop/cd500001 and add another 8GB stick of ram. Or you could put something together from https://www.pcspecialist.ie/computers/amd-am4-gen3-pc/ or https://www.pcspecialist.ie/computers/intel-home-office-pc-III/ with a 1650 Super or 1660 Ti.

Kintarō Hattori

Hi Folks,

I'll most likely go with the above for the nephew. Can you recommend any storage options?

Should I go with something below for Windows:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Black-SN750-High-Performance-Internal-Gaming/dp/B07MH2P5ZD

or

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Kingston-A400-Solid-State-Drive/dp/B01N0TQPQB

minitrue

The SN750 is a whole different league than the A400 and probably a good looking choice at that price.

BloodBath

100% the NVME although 500gb is not that big for the single NVME slot but it's fine for your windows drive.

You can always add more sata ssd's for games later. They see very little benefit with NVME atm.