How do I start a gaming PC set up?

[bucketofg]

Hiya,

I'm interested in setting up a gaming PC, but I'm in over my head a bit. I'm usually a console gamer, so I have no clue what I'm looking at in terms of budgets or finer details of RAM/CPUs/other abbreviations I'm yet to learn!

Would love someone to explain things to me in layman's terms, so I don't spend stupid amounts of money on a rubbish set up I can't use.

Thanks for any help!

 

[Oussebon]

You want to have a rough idea of what you want to achieve.

e.g. what games, what sort of settings, what sort of framerates. Do you want to play Fortnite competitively? So you mainly want to play immersive open world single player games?

And you want the system to be balanced, above all. Outside of quite specific use cases there's no point buying a top of the range CPU for £500 / USD etc only to pair it with a £200 graphics card. Or there's no point buying a £1000 GPU only to pair it with a low-end (low resolution and refresh rate) monitor.

There's also the question of budget. You could buy a solid 1080p gaming setup (so the PC, and the monitor) for ~£1000 / USD. You could buy a very nice 1440p gaming PC + monitor for £1500 / USD or less. So it depends what sort of price range you're aiming at.

If you suggest what you're aiming for, and what sort of budget range you have (plus country and currency) people can suggest options and explains why X + Y + Z components,

 

[MangoPop]

- Gamers play at different display resolutions. Your console was likely 1080p @ 60 Hz.
The higher the Resolution and associated frequency the more $$$ you will spend
on hardware (usually lots more compared to 1080p)
- 1080p (1920x1080 @ 60 Hz) was the standard until the last year or three and is still the most
common Resolution for PC gaming in use today (because of the lower cost for the hardware no doubt)

You can go online and read up on the following basic settings if you want too:

CPU's for gaming
texture
anisotropic
Tessellation
Ambient Occlusion
v-sync

check out this website: https://pcpartpicker.com/

there's mainly two CPU brands to chose from: Intel and AMD

As of today AMD has better price to performance than Intel (which for gaming has been way over-priced the past few years). Also, it seems every time Intel released a new gaming CPU you had to buy a new motherboard as well due to CPU socket design changes (so they said). With AMD you won't run into that near as often.

So to sum it all up, go online and read about PC gaming builds others have done and see the games they play and what they have to say about building PC's, the costs, etc.

Sorry, but there's not many shortcuts when it comes to acquiring knowledge

 

[BCNX2]

- Gamers play at different display resolutions. Your console was likely 1080p @ 60 Hz.
The higher the Resolution and associated frequency the more $$$ you will spend
on hardware (usually lots more compared to 1080p)
- 1080p (1920x1080 @ 60 Hz) was the standard until the last year or three and is still the most
common Resolution for PC gaming in use today (because of the lower cost for the hardware no doubt)

You can go online and read up on the following basic settings if you want too:

CPU's for gaming
texture
anisotropic
Tessellation
Ambient Occlusion
v-sync

check out this website: https://pcpartpicker.com/

there's mainly two CPU brands to chose from: Intel and AMD

As of today AMD has better price to performance than Intel (which for gaming has been way over-priced the past few years). Also, it seems every time Intel released a new gaming CPU you had to buy a new motherboard as well due to CPU socket design changes (so they said). With AMD you won't run into that near as often.

So to sum it all up, go online and read about PC gaming builds others have done and see the games they play and what they have to say about building PC's, the costs, etc.

Sorry, but there's not many shortcuts when it comes to acquiring knowledge

Please for the love of christ do not listen to this do not go and google all of these things just yet if you dont know the basics of computers then this will baffle your mind beyond belief, start slow think of what you want to play, how long you will spend playing it, budget? Do you need something thats extra quiet ? the basic building/buying is so easy to learn why someone would tel you to google and learn these things just yet is beyond me, most websites you can filter pcs to the games you play to get a rough idea if you know what games your looking to play let us know and we can assist you more

 

[Inspireless Llama]

First things first: For the best price for performace you'd best skip on RGB.

Some parts will have RGB without the prices being much higher than a non-RGB component but I'd skip over looking at like 'RGB fans' because you'll be paying a premium. Other than that, it does depend on what you want. Like @Oussebon said, it needs to be in balance, but we could give the best advice based on some basic things you want.

Do you know what resolution you want to play on? Or just a monitor size? (A 24" monitor usually will be 1080p, a 27-32" monitor 1440p, and 32 or bigger may be 4k).
Do you know what grahpics you want to play on? When playing games do you care alot about how good a game looks?

A game that can run Read Dead 2 perfeclty fine or a game that can run "Prison Architect" perfectly fine are 2 entirely different PC's with different budgets. I think it will be easier for us to explain some choices if we know what we're (or mostly you) are aiming for

 

[bucketofg]

You want to have a rough idea of what you want to achieve.

e.g. what games, what sort of settings, what sort of framerates. Do you want to play Fortnite competitively? So you mainly want to play immersive open world single player games?

And you want the system to be balanced, above all. Outside of quite specific use cases there's no point buying a top of the range CPU for £500 / USD etc only to pair it with a £200 graphics card. Or there's no point buying a £1000 GPU only to pair it with a low-end (low resolution and refresh rate) monitor.

There's also the question of budget. You could buy a solid 1080p gaming setup (so the PC, and the monitor) for ~£1000 / USD. You could buy a very nice 1440p gaming PC + monitor for £1500 / USD or less. So it depends what sort of price range you're aiming at.

If you suggest what you're aiming for, and what sort of budget range you have (plus country and currency) people can suggest options and explains why X + Y + Z components,

Thanks very much for responding to this!

in terms of what I’m looking to do on the pc, I’m looking for quite broad specs. I’d like to be able to look at any game and it be feasible for my pc to run it smoothly. (Which I know is very broad spectrum!) On a more day to day basis I’d be looking to run First Person Shooter type games such as CoD, but I’m not sure what else is available for pc in that genre.
Frame rates and such, again I’m not sure. Is it a higher is better scenario?
I’d be gaming online mostly.

My budget is around £1000 if that’s reasonable for what I’m wanting!

 

[Oussebon]

Availability of monitors right now is really bad thanks to the pandemic.

I posted this spec in another topic that was also asking for a COD:MW + general gaming spec.

Maybe take it as a starting point and add/trim as desired:

PCPartPicker Part List

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600 3.6 GHz 6-Core Processor (£155.58 @ Aria PC)
Motherboard: ASRock Fatal1ty B450 GAMING K4 ATX AM4 Motherboard (£89.57 @ Aria PC)
Memory: Corsair Vengeance LPX 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-3200 CL16 Memory (£76.73 @ Amazon UK)
Storage: Western Digital Blue 1 TB 2.5" Solid State Drive (£105.94 @ CCL Computers)
Video Card: Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER 6 GB OC Video Card (£219.98 @ Amazon UK)
Case: Fractal Design Focus G ATX Mid Tower Case (£46.99 @ Amazon UK)
Power Supply: SeaSonic CORE GM 500 W 80+ Gold Certified Semi-modular ATX Power Supply (£70.47 @ Scan.co.uk)
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 10 Home OEM 64-bit (£99.97 @ Laptops Direct)
Monitor: AOC C24G1 24.0" 1920x1080 144 Hz Monitor (£180.00)
Total: £1045.23
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2020-05-28 17:33 BST+0100

For some performance reviews of COD:MW:

Call of Duty Modern Warfare Benchmark Test, RTX & Performance Analysis

Modern Warfare is the latest iteration in the Call of Duty series. It pairs amazing graphics with captivating gameplay and has NVIDIA RTX support from day one. We take a closer look at performance, comparing 23 graphics cards at three resolutions. In a separate section, we compare RTX on vs. off...

www.techpowerup.com

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare PC Performance Review and Optimisation Guide - OC3D

Introduction – Preparing for the calls of next-gen The pst two iterations of Call of Duty have been doing a lot of exciting things on the hardware side. Black Ops 4 focused on delivering a “Battle Royale” experience through the game’s Blackout mode, which targeted the development team’s...

www.overclock3d.net

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare PC settings guide, system requirements, benchmarks, ray tracing, and more

A return to form for both Call of Duty and Intel, though the ray tracing effects and Ryzen performance are lacking.

www.pcgamer.com

Any modern mid-range CPU will do fine for it. And the R5 3600 is a pretty solid performer in gaming across the board. The R3 3300x can offer similar performance for a lower price, but has 2 fewer cores so may not be quite as strong in future games as we see 6 cores become mainstream. Intel's alternatives struggle to be competitive at this price point.
The B450 mobo has USB 3.1 Gen 2 - not overly relevant right now but I guess you'll be keeping the platform a few years. And a reasonable feature set (expansion slots etc) inside.
The RAM - 3200MHz, 2 x 8gb - is pretty standard, the only real question being if you wanted to spend more / get lucky in finding a cheap 3600MHz set without too high latency (the C or CL number).
GPU is very capable for 1080p gaming, and I expect you'd be aiming for a 144hz monitor for shooters - if you can ever find one that hasn't been price gouged.
Decent budget case (i.e. decent airflow to cool things), a decent bang for buck SSD, and a decent quality power supply without being too expensive.