UKH

I'm looking for a computer for my daughter so she is able to play a specific game. The game has a minimum system requirements are as follows...

Minimum PC specifications: 

OS: Windows 7 (32- or 64-bit), with the latest Service Packs 

CPU: Intel Core i3 or AMD Athlon II (K10) 2.8 GHz 

RAM: 4 GB 

Free Disk Space: 5 GB 

GeForce 2xx Series or AMD Radeon HD 5xxx Series (Excluding Integrated Chipsets) with OpenGL 3.3 

Sound Card: Yes 

Internet Connection: Yes 

I had seen a deal but after paying for the PC and then being told after the delivery date that the tower was now discontinued.

This was for my daughters 9th birthday (Dad fail courtesy of laptops direct)

The PC I had "bought" was just under £250 so I would ideally like to pay similar.

If anyone can point me in the right direction (via links or whatever) to some good deals on what I need I would have a very happy girl again.

TIA

Ps, I'm stuck firmly in the dark ages when it comes to technology especially computers!

In reply to mwr72:

It's worth noting that the minimum specifications for a lot of games are for it to drag along at 10 frames per second in a barely playable fashion. The specified hardware is also VERY old to the extent that finding something at that level of performance is quite hard (specifically thinking of the GPU which is around 7 years old).

You are probably looking at getting something from ebay, Kelsus Information Technology has a machine with a core i5 2400, 8GB DDR3 RAM, 1TB HDD, and an NVVIDIA GT 710 GPU which was the best I could find for the £250 cost presuming you don't need a monitor on top of that.

Limitations of that will be:

Old processor socket so upgrading will be difficult in future.

DDR3 RAM is now either no longer being made or made in small enough quantities that it is getting expensive (they are using refurbished RAM for this).

PSU is probably not going to be up to putting a very power hungry graphics card into the computer (the GT710 will be ok) as the quality of the power output will probably deteriorate a bit as it is more heavily loaded (this would be true for any computer you order at this kind of price unless you were to get an older but more powerful second hand set up).

So it will last a few years, be good for school work, CAD modelling of bits for DT homework if your daughter is that way inclined etc etc.

If she gets more into gaming and wants to play something graphically demanding in a few years time you would be better off ditching the components inside and building something based on the current generation of processors etc, however this would cost more like £500-£600 so is probably not worth doing until she gets older and demonstrates a desire/ need for more power.

In reply to mwr72:

I'd strongly advise against buying a PC based on those specifications.  What you will get is an already obsolete PC which can just about play one undemanding, ancient game.   It's a false economy because once she has the PC she's bound to want to do other things with it and if you get a decent spec then it will last her for four or five years.

In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:

Thanks for the reply, 

Those are the minimum requirements so I guess now it will be Windows 10.

In reply to mwr72:

What game?

Most gaming PC's are massively over spec'd. As mentioned, the ones you quote will be the minimum specs and the game very old. 

Gforce and Radeon are standard graphics card manufacturers, so its likely that newer cards are backwardly compatible. It's similar with OpenGL, it's a standard interface between code and hardware. 

I'd do a little research, people may be playing it on Windows 10, without any issue. Another option is to use virtualbox or vmware to run a low spec virtual machine. Failing that ebay. People will be gladly selling older machines.

In reply to spenser:

Thanks spenser, 

The game she plays is called "star stable".

The reason I want a pc set up as opposed to a laptop is to be able to keep an eye on her, whereas if she had a laptop the would be up in her room locked away. 

I guess that I would be willing to go to £300 if there's room for upgrades at a later date. 

In reply to dread-i:

It's "star stable". 

In reply to mwr72:

I cant vouch for the safety of that link, but it seems to support modern operating systems. And its a free download.

https://www.filehorse.com/download-star-stable/

Windows 7 / Windows 7 64 / Windows 8 / Windows 8 64 / Windows 10 / Windows 10 64

There are also versions for the Mac, ipad and phone as well.

https://planeterlang.org/games/star-stable-horses.html

In reply to dread-i:would it need a decent graphics card? I'm told that there's some lag if the graphics card isn't up to much?

The Mrs keeps banging on about Nvidia but looking at the price of those it's a bit out of my budget

In reply to mwr72:

To echo the others, the spec you give is a list of old and obsolete parts. The specific specification will be hard to find due to age and rarity.  The PC described by Spenser seems to be better in every way. You could also look for an AMD system based on a B320 or B350 motherboard which might be better for future upgrades.

I may be telling you what you already know but: I would also suggest you make sure you fully understand the revenue model of the game you're interested in before buying it. Highly addictive free-to-play pay-to-win games targeting kids are unfortunately common. If the game in question is horse related and has the initials SS, then be aware it has both a monthly subscription and an in-game currency purchased with real money. But I don't if it's possible to play without paying, or only paying a reasonable amount. 

edit: It seems it is the game I was thinking of. But I don't know any more about it.

In reply to mwr72:

Nvidia make GeForce, which is mentioned in your original post.  The first number in the card's model tells you the age (2xx = launched 2008, 3xx=2009, 6xx=2012, 10xx=2016, 20xx=2018 etc) so you can look for something cheaper than a new one but newer than the 2xx in the minimum spec.

In reply to mwr72:

I'd try and install it on whatever machine you have to hand. See how it runs on that.

Graphics cards are a bit like cars, there is always a better, faster, more expensive model.   

In reply to mwr72:

I bought both our kids matching PCs 3 years ago for their 7.5 & 9th xmas. I spent a LOT more than I normally would for xmas presents but with the plan that they'd last for years. Worth it in my opinion, they use them every single day for games, school work, zoom with their mates, youtube. I deliberately didn't buy laptops because they'd just get broken or burnt out on the sofa/bed. I reckon they'll last to sixth form, so less than £100 a year hopefully. 

My daughter plays a lot of star stable. It's a 3d directx game and does need a half decent graphics card to work at a decent frame rate. You should be aware that star stable is effectively a subscription game that requires on-going payment for 'upgrades'. I'd normally be dead set against this, but actually it's helped her learn to budget once she'd been burnt a couple of times wasting her own pocket money. 

Spec : mid-range i5, 8gb ram, 500gb SSD, GTX1050Ti graphics card., 24" monitor, windows 10 license from (softwaregeeks/unitysoft). About £600 at the time, probably faster/cheaper now.

In reply to mwr72:

Given your budget, I would ignore future upgrade potential. Buy something with the intention of binning it in 2-3 years otherwise you're limiting your spending power further by trying to factor in future upgrades that in all honesty you're unlikely to fit yourself.

The kind of machine spencer described seems excellent for that money. I think  you'll only beat it by buying privately second hand.

Plug it into an old flatscreen tv, or look out for a second hand monitor for about £50.

If you find anything local to you (gumtree, Facebook etc) then drop a link here and I'm sure one of us will tell you if it's worth getting. 

In reply to sbc23:

Re the costs of playing, we don't let her buy anything with real world money, we've kind of instilled in her a "if you can't hold it you can't buy it" mentality until she's old enough to fully understand money.

I want a Pc for basically the same reasons as you bought for your children, port's on my old laptop are damaged as well as the charging ports on both my children's tablets, so the logic is that there's less likely to be any damage to a Pc, and she has to be more sociable with us wanting it set up in the family room. 

In reply to chris_r:

You're absolutely bang on the money here, I wouldn't personally replace anything. 

I can read what spenser said, but it's just words to me, nothing at all what he wrote made any sense 😲

I have bought the peripherals already

I will do, thanks. 

In reply to dread-i:

She can play it fine on my laptop without any issues but I bought mine with the intention of learning CAD. 

In reply to mwr72:

When you buy a bottle of wine for £3, the fixed cost of the duty is about £2.50, so you are getting a 50p bottle of wine. When you pay £6, you get 7 times as much wine value for your outlay, which is great. But obviously as you go on up from here the duty rapidly becomes unimportant.

Computers are a bit like this but the cost of materials and manufacturing are the fixed cost and the remaining cost is what is spent on getting the computer to perform. So if you buy at the very bottom of the price range, you are getting very little computer performance for your money. It really is worth paying that bit more to get towards the middle of the range. The middle of the range computer can't touch a superfancy one but it is HUGELY better than a supercheap one.

As others have said, if you buy supercheap now, you will end up wanting to upgrade in, well, probably months. Why not roll birthday and christmas into one present and get something that will still work well for a few years yet?

I'd suggest around £500 but you really need a proper computer nerd geek to guide you here. I'm not sure UKC is the best place to get the best advice on this.

In reply to mwr72:

 

Disclaimer: The below is based specifically on my experience a few years ago:

The idea of upgrading an old computer to get it to perform better is a bit dubious because for most computers all the different bits are fairly balanced when you buy it, so no one component is holding it back, so to get a sudden jump in performance, you need to upgrade several bits... and when you tot up the price on that, it turns out that a new machine would give you more bang for your buck.

Not very environmentally friendly but pretty par for the industry.

For a gaming PC like we're discussing here you're absolutely right. So OP, ignore the following.

One noteworthy exception is your hard drive for standard office use. The £50 upgrade from a mechanical hard disk to a 500Gb SSD is a night and day difference that I would recommend to anyone. Computer load times can drop from 30 secs to 5 secs. Same order of magnitude for loading programs and opening documents.

In reply to henwardian:

On the plus side, mid-range computers do seem to be lasting a lot longer than they did in the 1990s/2000s. Back then, performance was properly doubling every year or so and this performance was really important for real world applications (i.e standard games, early video & even excel etc.). A mid-range became the same as a budget in a few months. 

Nowadays, the 'greed' of the software is less of a driver to hardware upgrades (excluding 3d modelling, 4k video editing, hi-end games & VR). If you install Windows 10 with restrictions to stop old folks/kids/numpties installing loads of bloaty sh1te and malware then it is realistic for a mid-range PC to last for a decade running most apps without changing anything major.

Also, if you do buy 2nd hand bits, make sure to buy a new keyboard+mouse combo (logitech k270 or similar). It's £20 and it makes everything feel new. I built our kid's PC's in some old ATX cases from the office that were 20+ years old. There's less holes for the yoghurt/diet coke to get inside. lol. 

In reply to all:

Thank you to all who replied with advice. 

I posted the same on Facebook a while after posting on here and it seems a friend on there has a hidden talent for building PC's and has offered to build me one to my budget that will run the games that my daughter plays. 

In reply to mwr72:

I am due to get a new graphics card in the post tomorrow. They tried to deliver today but I was at work. When it arrives, then I will have a spare card to gather dust.

Would you be interested in an AMD RX 580 graphic card?

I'm using it at the moment to play Halo on a 4K monitor and just completed Metro 2033. I'm guessing that it will cope with a horsey game. 😀

Its a few years old. I'm not asking the earth for it, and if it goes to a good home then all the better.

In reply to mwr72:

What's the game? The requirements are quite modest but it may struggle if you only just hit them.

Do you need a whole system with peripherals or just the PC box? Laptop or PC? Are you happy with used? Is this game a one off fixation or do you think she'll need room to grow for new games?

There are lots of cheap, reasonably capable office PC's on the used market that can host a modest graphics card, often bundled with cheap peripherals. Search Ebay for 'i5 PC' and click seller refurbished. Make sure it comes with a licenced OS.

I have one of these for work that I've just upgraded. Search Ebay: x1930. I just stuck a used i5-2500 (not the k or s version) CPU in it, 8gB of DDR3 RAM and a new 500gB solid state drive. It's not that far off my brand new stock i5-10600k set-up and a fraction of the price. The CPU and the RAM upgrade are plug and play, the disk migration is a bit of a pain but the difference is night and day, a computer repair place would doubtless do it for you. A 'low profile' 1050ti or better GT 1650* will set you back ~£125-140. It needs to be the low profile model to fit most of these slim business machines. For less a GT 1030 low profile would run your game for maybe £75 but not much beyond.

*The ASUS version runs silent in normal use, the rest are pretty loud at idle.

With a carefully picked used business machine, a few choice upgrades and a plug in GPU, all in you'd have a pretty reasonable gaming computer with no upgrade space for maybe £200-300 depending exactly which bits you bought. Plus hassle and some risk the bits won't play nice together first try.

If you want new I'd be tempted around that budget to forgo the graphics card for now, go for something based around the older AMD Ryzen3 2200G or better, for a little more, the Ryzen5 2400G. Do also check prices on the newer 3200G and 3400G, they may be getting easier to source in volume and therefore cost comparable with the older chips. The onboard Vega 8 GPU (in the Ryzen 3) and especially the better Vega 11 in the (Ryzen 5) should cope as well as most ~£120 graphics cards. You need the G or GE version, the others have more CPU cores but no onboard graphics. In a mini tower case that would be easily upgradable if she got keen, the modern and more powerful AMD chips are backward compatible and can be run on motherboards hosting older Ryzen CPUs with a little (often no) work. Fully built with Win10 these fairly modest 2200G systems seem to be about £350 new from Amazon et al.

Whatever you get make sure it comes with an OS. 'Windows 10' compatible means no windows 10 and some refurb stuff comes with it installed but no licence which is basically a scam. Caveat emptor!

Second hand prices for 'gaming pc' are silly, it's worth a look but don't assume you'll get a bargain.

jk

In reply to mwr72:

My daughter plays star stable on an ancient (at least 10 years old) machine with embedded graphics. So if that's your requirement then pretty much any working PC will do!

In reply to mwr72:

If you need to buy a Windows 10 licence key then I can recommend Kinguin.net.

I have bought 3 Win 10 keys and 2 Microsoft Office keys. All worked and were accepted by Microsoft.

In reply to mwr72:

Many Intel processors have on-chip graphics which are pretty good.  Not as good as a medium/high end graphics card but probably more than good enough for an older game.  So if you want to save money initially maybe you can go without a graphics card and buy one later when you want to play a game that needs it.

If you go that way you will want a power supply with enough in reserve to run a graphics card if you decide to buy one later.

In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:

My last computer had an Intel i5 processor with inbuilt graphics. Initially I was dubious about its abilities but they soon evaporated when I was able to run the original Crysis at a playable frame rate.

I can't remember what my discrete graphics card was called back then but I can confirm that my old i5 CPU was just as powerful and capable.

I have no reason to doubt that modern CPUs with graphics capabilities will be up to the task of the OPs specific game.

In reply to chris_r:

I completely agree, especially with Windows 10 - this simple upgrade made my 5-year-old Lenovo laptop useable again after updating to Windows 10.

In reply to The Lemming:

Integrated graphics have evidently come on a long way since I last bought a whole computer then!

Admittedly I don't play anything more demanding than Destiny 2 so my 12 year old machine (rather like Triggers' Broom!) which I have rebuilt twice seems to cope just fine. As such I am a bit out of date on what recent hardware is good/ not good, but also aware that stuff for old systems is expensive!

In reply to mwr72:

I checked after I posted last night, the x1930 I mentioned on Ebay while a good value base will only take the slimmest of those graphics cards (slim GT 1030 low profile versions), the fan shrouds clash with the case on the GT 1650 LP.

It's worth noting at your budget a legit retail copy of Win10 OEM is nearly half of what you want to spend, doesn't leave much for actual hardware.

jk

In reply to spenser:

At this very moment I am the proud owner of a Gigabyte RTX 3070 graphics card. The nice man in the shop said that they only had 40 in stock. I'm guessing this is the whole stock of RTX 3070 cards in the Northwest. Its the only card in stock and I got one to play chess. 😀

I'm probably one of the first people in the country to have one of these bad boys.

In reply to jkarran:

I paid £20 for a legit Win 10 Licence key.

In reply to The Lemming:

I would suggest changing "Northwest" to "UK" from what I have read over the last couple of weeks!

This thread has however prompted me to buy some more RAM as my modules have been causing blue screens for a while...

In reply to spenser:

I did not want to gloat too much 😁

In reply to chris_r:

Spot on. Unless you're doing stuff like photo/video editing or playing the latest high-frame rate game an SSD is by far the best bang for the buck thing you can do because it eliminates the biggest bottleneck - disk access time.

In reply to The Lemming:

You paid £20 for a working Win10 key.

jk

In reply to jkarran:

Either way, I'm happy and my conscience is clear. Microsoft accept the key and I therefore have a genuine copy, agreed by Microsoft.😀

In reply to The Lemming:

They do seem to be pretty liberal with Windows licenses these days. My Windows 7 Pro license still activates a fresh Windows 10 Pro install without needing an internet connection.