PC build for my 14 year old

[McNasty 260]

Sup fellas

 

I got a $500 gift card from some work stuff, and spent a few days looking for crap to buy and couldn't come with anything that wasn't just spending to spend.  My son is pretty into PC gaming and has a bunch of friends on discord that play together.  Currently our setup is a rig that I built about 10 years ago - i7-2600k, GTX 480, 8gb, a few SSDs and SATA drives, Sabertooth p67 board, dual monitors.  Not anything fancy in today's terms but it was a big chunk of money 10 years ago and thankfully it's still working really well.  I had the store build it for me originally but I've taken it apart and cleaned it a couple of times so I'm not opposed to buying everything separate and building it with my son so he can learn.  

 

Given all he knows is that 10 year old rig, I don't see any reason to go crazy on budget and buy top of the line stuff so I'm thinking a max budget of like $1k USD.  I would think I could get at least the same specs as my current setup 10 years later for that budget amount.  I think I spent around $2500 for the original setup and hopefully Moores law gets me better than that for this budget.  I do want to future proof this a little bit but I don't know how much is too much in terms of device specs and I don't want to go overboard for no reason.  He can use his own money later on to upgrade this as he wants.

 

I don't know anything about todays current standards for gaming requirements, so just looking for advice on what you would buy if I handed you $1k.  Everything he plays now has zero issues on our current setup but thats mostly minecraft and he's getting into mods and fancy stuff.  If the budget needs to go up that's fine, I just figured this was a good starting point and with the gift card it would only cost me $500.  I'm not including monitors in this, I have a bunch of good ones collecting dust and we can make that birthday presents or he can buy them if he wants.

 

Appreciate any suggestions!

 

[GazzaGarratt 11,037]

@phil bottle @Diddums @RenFengge @TurboR56Mini  @Greboth @Tar-Eruntalion  and any other PC people that have some better knowledge than myself where to spend his money?

[Diddums 4,346]

I'm so far out of the hardware loop that I couldn't even tell you whether to go AMD or Intel anymore.

So to that end I'll suggest selling the kid and pooling the money for his PC and going to Vegas instead. 

[phil bottle 9,742]

I'd consider going for a SteamDeck, as building a PC has become pretty expensive.

 

It really depends on the type of games you'll expect it to be able to run though to be able to recommend anything.

[Greboth 2,721]

Intel or AMD for a CPU is a little from column A and a little column B.  On the top end, AMD releae a new chip and tale the lead, then Intel release a new chip and take the lead then rinse and repeat.  More mid-range it gets a bit murkier as I’m not sure on the price to performance.

 

I’m also not certain of prices in USD but for a similar budget here you could get something like a Ryzen 5600x or Intel 12400 with appropriate motherboard.  I’d recommend 16Gb RAM with as fast as you can get, probably 3200MHz at minimum.  I’d also recommend getting an M2 SSD as they’re super fast and you could re-use your existing drives as additional storage.

 

PSU it depends what you end up speccing and future proofing you want to do.  Once you have a rough idea of spec there’s plenty of PSU calculators online.  I’d guess you’ll only probably need 500-600W at most.  Though depending on how long you expect the PC to go for and if it will see futude GPU upgrades, it’s cheaper to spec  higher watt one now than have to change in the future.  Corsair, Seasonic and SuperFlower are generally the top brands but it does depend on specific models.

 

Case, I’m sure you could re-use the existing one as not much really changes in cases design except for the addition of tempered glass and generally a reduction in hdd bays.  So up to you on if you want to switch cases.

 

GPU, I’d imagine you could get a RTX3060.  Dependong on USD pricing and if you don’t want a case, you might be able to go for a 3070.  Though even a 3060 is 4x or 5x faster than a 480 so would be a massive improvement.

 

If you go on PC part picker you can spec a PC and share a link for us to look at.  For some reason, on my phone, it defaults to UK so can’t put a US build together.

 

 

[Luseth 1,933]

14 hours ago, phil bottle said:

I'd consider going for a SteamDeck, as building a PC has become pretty expensive.

 

It really depends on the type of games you'll expect it to be able to run though to be able to recommend anything.

 

I would second this, it gives you the console aspect, it's portable but if you wanted to, could also get a dock up and running to use it as an actual computer as well.

 

 

[McNasty 260]

I went to Micro Center yesterday and impulse bought this guy.  I did some more reading and ultimately decided something that was pre-built was the way to go.  It's been 10 years since I built the other one and I just went with convenience this time around.  I'm already enjoying not feeling the need to spend hours upon hours researching every stupid little thing, which is basically what I do any time I buy anything. 

 

If my son really gets into gaming/PC stuff he can always build his own later on, so I figured this would be a solid intermediate step that would be a good replacement for our house PC if it bites the dust.  Or a good hand me down to son #2 and then son #3.  The guy at the store was pretty helpful with narrowing down the stuff I needed vs the stuff that doesn't really matter.  It's a smaller frame and not much room to add anything else but I don't see myself doing that anyway.  

 

I priced out the parts individually this morning and overall it seems like a good deal especially with OS included and a 1 year warranty.  Will hopefully seem like a major upgrade in graphics/performance for my son.  I don't expect it to blow anyone away but given what he currently plays on is over 10 years old I think he should see a noticeable improvement.  I'm starting to look at monitors now.  

 

 

PowerSpec G232 Gaming PC; Intel Core i5 12th Gen 12400F 2.5GHz Processor; AMD Radeon RX 6650XT 8GB GDDR6; 16GB DDR4-2666 - Micro Center

WWW.MICROCENTER.COM

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Get it now! The PowerSpec G232 desktop computer is a step-up level gaming machine featuring the Intel Core i5 12400F processor, an...

 

 

[McNasty 260]

@Greboth Looks like I ended up with specs that were really similar to what you were suggesting, which is quite encouraging given I just took the sales guys word for it and bought his recommendation.  I normally don't do that at all lol.  Also cool to hear the graphics card is that much more of an improvement over the 480 I didn't research this stuff at all but I'd imagine he's going to see a huge improvement.  Personally I think GTA V and Witcher 3 look incredible on what I have now so I'm excited to see what 4x improvement looks like.  

 

Couple of other questions though.  I can always take out the 6650XT from that system to replace the 480, and buy a much nicer card if he wants it.  Are there considerations with how the GPU "fits" with the CPU?  The 12400F that this new setup comes with isn't very expensive, so will I not get much bang for the buck with an expensive GPU and limited CPU?  I don't know if you're supposed to keep CPU and GPU at similar price/performance levels or if it doesn't matter at all.