Could someone cast a beady eye over this and let me know if remotely good value/worth considering please?
https://www.amazon.co.uk/ADMI-Gaming-PC-Package-Illuminated/dp/B018GTOCYG
my godson apparently wants a gaming pc for chrimbo (he's just turned 13), his parents have turned to me for expert advice which is kind of laughable these days (i stopped following pc parts around the time of voodoo 2 graphics cards!),and sent a screenshot of a package that looked similar to that but for £600.
i know a package is prob not best for price/perf, but if there's not much in it then prob worth it for keeping it simple for them. if building your own would be much better than i could help them with that. he'd need a monitor too as never had a pc before. he's got an xbox one, so i'm guessing would be expecting an improvement over that, but not sure how much better you can get for £600 with a monitor. i don't believe that flashy led cases are essential for him either!
any help or advice would be much appreciated.

RamSteelwood wrote:

Could someone cast a beady eye over this and let me know if remotely good value/worth considering please? https://www.amazon.co.uk/ADMI-Gaming-PC-Package-Illuminated/dp/B018GTOCYG my godson apparently wants a gaming pc for chrimbo (he's just turned 13), his parents have turned to me for expert advice which is kind of laughable these days (i stopped following pc parts around the time of voodoo 2 graphics cards!),and sent a screenshot of a package that looked similar to that but for £600. i know a package is prob not best for price/perf, but if there's not much in it then prob worth it for keeping it simple for them. if building your own would be much better than i could help them with that. he'd need a monitor too as never had a pc before. he's got an xbox one, so i'm guessing would be expecting an improvement over that, but not sure how much better you can get for £600 with a monitor. i don't believe that flashy led cases are essential for him either! any help or advice would be much appreciated.

There's quite a few options, is there a particular place they really want to purchase from? A full DIY build is generally the best and most fun, but does require a little time investment if yourself or someone else can spare it. You can get decent prices at that budget though, I'm just having a look now.

Yes, this is the biggest problem with going prebuilt. I certainly wouldn't recommend buying anything that doesn't tell you what model of PSU it has for example.

Ehh here's a little budget build that I probably where I would start if you wanted to get into PC gaming right now -

PCPartPicker Part List

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 2600 3.4 GHz 6-Core Processor  (£101.97 @ Aria PC)
Motherboard: MSI B450 TOMAHAWK MAX ATX AM4 Motherboard  (£89.98 @ Amazon UK)
Memory: Corsair Vengeance LPX 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-3200 Memory  (£61.98 @ Aria PC)
Storage: Crucial P1 500 GB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive  (£57.49 @ Amazon UK)
Video Card: PowerColor Radeon RX 590 8 GB RED DRAGON Video Card  (£154.99 @ Overclockers.co.uk)
Case: Phanteks Eclipse P400A ATX Mid Tower Case  (£64.17 @ CCL Computers)
Power Supply: EVGA SuperNOVA G3 (EU) 550 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply  (£78.63 @ Amazon UK)
Total: £609.21
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2019-11-29 17:01 GMT+0000

You can probably cut £80-£100 off that for similar performance, but I wouldn't recommend it.

I'm looking about to see if there's a budget prebuilt bundle that I would feel comfortable in recommending. When I got into this I started off buying cheap stuff, and it really is false economy usually.

GooberTheHat wrote:

Would you not need a new motherboard if you're switching from Intel to amd?

I'm taking the plunge too. The AMD line up is too good.

What is annoying is the things they go cheap on are the things that you otherwise would often be able to take over into a new build down the line.

SpaceGazelle wrote:

I'm not sure how Amazon stack up but I have seen that pre-built PCs from non-specialists sometimes skimp on component quality where they hope you wouldn't notice. Stuff like the power supply, cooling or cheapo ram.

They really do. What looks good value is rarely. When I was Redditimg my Index problem, the amount of things that were going setting with people's setups that turned out to be a dodgy PSU. It's madness not to build when it's so easy.

Yeah very cheap PSUs are one of the biggest issues with budget machines, at best they'll be noisy as fuck and can cause problems with high power scenarios, overclocking, and future upgrades. At worst they can be a fucking fire hazard.

LivDiv wrote:

What is annoying is the things they go cheap on are the things that you otherwise would often be able to take over into a new build down the line.

Yeah this is why I'm always trying my best to include good cases and power supplies in my lists, as those will last the longest out of all the parts and can be used across many builds. A good power supply should last a decade or more, most that I recommend have a 7 or 10 year warranty.

Another factor that I think is quite important is peripheral and interface device quality. I never really enjoyed PC gaming that much until I got a decent mechanical keyboard, it was shocking just how much more comfortable it was and how much more in control I felt once I could WASD with some nice linear keys. Prior to that using a typical cheap membrane 'gaming' board I never really liked using KB+M that much.

The mouse is super important too, more so than the keyboard if competitive FPS is a priority. Most good gaming mice have good sensors now, but plenty out there still have naff ones. Back when I was using the shit keyboard I had a mouse that I thought was pretty good, but I later realised that it had all kinds of nasty negative acceleration that made precision aim really difficult. This contributed towards me disliking using a M+KB, though I didn't know it at the time. Now I use mice that I know have good sensors, with acceleration (pointer precision in Windows) turned off, and it's the way it's supposed be. Using cheap shit keyboard and mouse for PC gaming is like using a dodgy 3rd party pad for a console and not realising there's an official one out there.

There are pretty cheap decent mechanical keyboards out there, £25-50ish, but the models come and go so I've been trying to find one or two I can really recommend you all go buy if you don't already have one. For mice I like the newer Steelseries stuff with the x10 series being the best, the Rival 110 is a great budget small mouse, the Rival and Sensei 310 are good for larger hands, I really like my Sensei 310. The Logitech G305 is superb little wireless mouse with mega battery life, and actually works with my lanky hands surprisingly well, I like it a lot for fast FPS stuff. Many places still recommend large heavy mice for some reason, a good mouse should really be under 100g...

@Ram  There are some decent custom prebuilt places out there, like PCSpecialist and Chillblast where you can select the parts you want, but there is a premium over getting it all yourself. You do get warranties, support and such however.

Most of the prebuilt package places I've seen have systems that might be alright generally but have something really letting them down. Like I'm looking at overclockers.uk that might be good, but then they don't tell you what the PSU is, it just says "1000W 80Plus Rated PSU", which sounds dubious as fuck.

I dunno whether that ADMI system that you linked is any good, I mean it will probably work, but it doesn't say what the PSU is so...

Yeah my general recommendation is still a DIY build, or a prebuilt from a good specialist that tells you what all the parts are and gives you some options but might cost a little extra.

SpaceGazelle wrote:

Is the Ryzen 7 2700X any good? It's half price on Amazon.

Yep, it's what I have, great CPU. It's not the latest in terms of single core perf, so if you are into 144 FPS super competitive gaming then one of the newer ones like the 3600 might be better. But for 16 good threads that's a fucking great price. The 2700 non X is £140 actually, if you already have a good cooler to put on it (check mounting brackets, you can sometimes get the manufacturer to send you AM4 brackets free, Noctua will) then it might be even better value if you like to overclock. The 2700X has better clockspeeds out of the box however, and has a good beefy stock cooler.

If you have need of the threads, for video/3D stuff, or do streaming/OBS stuff then the 2700X will be great. For general gaming the 2600 is still a good deal considering you'll be able to get a 3700X for cheap later on. The 2700X is kind of in between the 2600 and 3600, so it's up to you, they're all good. For VR stuff perhaps the newer chips might be better for those higher refresh rates, the 3600. But then again I think most VR games should be pretty well optimised. Worth looking into if that's a factor though.

Cheers Gurt, yeah went for the 3600 exactly fit the reasons you stated, what with VR and all.

Unless you are really short of time or there's some other reason I would always recommend building it yourself, means you can handpick the parts, and have a better idea of what to mess around with in there if you need to upgrade or there's issues.

I don't know which i9 you are referring to, I'll assume the 9900K. Unless there's some specific need for the highest single core clockspeed (latest Ryzen has very comparable single core scores in many instances) or there's a program or game that you use a lot that runs that much better on Intel chips, then for pretty much every price point I would recommend Ryzen at the moment. The 3700X is a cracking CPU, and you can put the money you've saved over the 9900K towards a nicer graphics card, or a bigger and better SSD.

I'm really liking how cheap AMD's chips are getting, they consistently cut the prices over time after release. The 2700X for example is over £100 less than when I got it, just incredible.

Intel for a long long time never did price drops, and they still aren't doing it very well... There was talk a few months ago that the prices were going to drop, and they have gone down a little bit, but only like £30-50 for the 9900K, not very good for a processor that started off around £500..

Even the latest gen of Intel's HEDT chips, which are essentially the same as the previous gen but with a massive drop in price, are still not really as good value as what AMD offers, and I would expect the same trend of price cuts to continue.

Lord_Griff wrote:

Gurt ryzen or i9?

Are you say i should get the components as they are listed on chillblast and plonk it together myself?

As Liv pointed out, you get quality parts when you build your own that can be reused for other builds. A quality PSU can last decades. As importantly imo, you can build a nice and quiet PC. Don't underestimate this, loud PCs can be very loud at full load and you will notice this, particularly with the Index with it's (fucking ace) off-ear headphones.

Rather typically, my Ryzen 5 and DDR memory arrived today but the mobo could take up to a month so I've ordered the same model from not-Amazon.

GurtTractor wrote:

@Ram  There are some decent custom prebuilt places out there, like PCSpecialist and Chillblast where you can select the parts you want, but there is a premium over getting it all yourself. You do get warranties, support and such however. Most of the prebuilt package places I've seen have systems that might be alright generally but have something really letting them down. Like I'm looking at overclockers.uk that might be good, but then they don't tell you what the PSU is, it just says "1000W 80Plus Rated PSU", which sounds dubious as fuck. I dunno whether that ADMI system that you linked is any good, I mean it will probably work, but it doesn't say what the PSU is so... Yeah my general recommendation is still a DIY build, or a prebuilt from a good specialist that tells you what all the parts are and gives you some options but might cost a little extra.

cheers for the help and feedback, apologies for not acknowledging earlier!