PC/laptop for coding and gaming?

[CissOff]

Evening all

My DS will be 13 soon and loves gaming (PS5 mostly).

He’s a proper little geek 🥰 and has recently really got in to coding with school. It’s really lit a fire in him.

I have zero clue of where to start with getting him a set up that is both reasonable but has enough RAM and memory to do what he needs to do.

I haven’t had a desktop computer since my 1999 Compaq Presario 😂 so have no clue what I would be looking for, or even if a desktop is needed (I feel it probably is 🤷🏼‍♀️!).

Budget is around £500/600 - we have plenty of HD monitors etc. so it’s just the base unit needed.

Any advice would be gratefully received. I feel very old suddenly!

Hey there! Not an expert at all. 16gb of RAM is good. You need to invest in a great graphics card in order to run most worthy games. I’m afraid I don’t know any more than this but this is what I’ve heard computer nerds that I know saying. Graphics cards can be 100s of pounds in themselves and this may reduce the memory and RAM you are able to get within your budget. It’s something to watch out for.

I would have said to ask in PC World or something but tbh, having worked in retail, the poor salespeople do not get any training on this kind of thing so they often don’t really know what they’re talking about. If you live anywhere near Bolton though, there’s a shop called Scan and the staff actually are tech experts there.

If he just wants a machine for coding then any reasonably up to date laptop or desktop will do, but if he's also into gaming then a desktop is the way to go. You'll get more for your money on a £ for £ basis with a desktop than a laptop, and if he's really into the geeky side then a desktop offers far greater capacity for future hardware upgrades.

Echo what is said above about avoiding PC World and so on. Their stuff is invariably over-priced for what it is, and the staff will sell you whatever they want to sell, not necessarily what you actually need. "I don't really know what I'm looking for" is an invitation for them to take advantage. Scan are great online for components, but I've never bought anything prebuilt from them and I don't even know if they do prebuilt stuff.

Ok, so it turns out they do, but to get anything worthwhile prebuilt you'll have to up your budget a bit -

https://www.scan.co.uk/shop/computer-hardware/gaming-pcs/radeon-rx-7800-xt-16gb-mid-range-gaming-pcs

You could probably do it for a bit less ordering components individually, shopping around, substituting a few things you can skimp a bit on, but unless you have some experience of building PC's I wouldn't recommend it. You'd also have to think about an Operating System.

Ok, here is Scan's "Entry Level" stuff, which is a good bit closer to your budget. It may be that these are more than adequate for what DS wants to do, but they will not run the latest games on higher settings without hugely struggling, and some of the hardware is getting up there in age and will soon be obsolete. One option would be to buy one of these and then perhaps look at replacing the Graphics Card with a more capable model as a birthday present or something?

https://www.scan.co.uk/shop/computer-hardware/gaming-pcs/2879/3552

This is the absolute bare minimum I would suggest for anyone wanting to play games, and even still, it's likely to need constant upgrading to stay viable for more than a couple of years -

https://www.scan.co.uk/products/scan-gamer-rtx-amd-ryzen-3-4100-16gb-ddr4-8gb-nvidia-rtx-3050-1tb-m2-ssd-win-11

Thank you both so much - I’ve never heard of Scan so I will take a look. He’s never gamed on a PC but suspect he would want to if he got one for coding.

Happy to pay a bit more if it saves faff with graphics cards later down the line.

Thank you again!

As @XDownwiththissortofthingX says, Scan do an online service. I think you can look on their website and they can then advise you via phone or email about what might be best. It is decent prices there too although computer chips and graphics cards went up loads in the pandemic so it will still seem expensive.

My DS is the same, 13 and a gamer who's into coding. We thought the best option was to go to our local computer repairs guy and tell him what kind of set up we wanted and what DS would use it for - then he's basically ordering in custom parts and building it for us. DH is very tech savvy but doesn't have time and isn't up to date with the latest builds, so he's very happy to let a local expert put a computer together for us.
I think your budget might be a bit light to have a great graphics card and decent configuration. If you can possibly go a bit higher you'd get an exponentially better experience.

DS and I built a gaming PC when he was about that age. Neither of us had any experience but we used pc part picker website to check everything (they also have lots of sample builds) and had to resort to support forums a few times too.

We both really enjoyed it and he's gone on to upgrade his many times and built pcs for his brother and friends and did computer science at uni.

If you have the time and inclination it can be a great experience and also gives them the skills and knowledge to upgrade as they go.

Meant to add that it took a while doing the first one and a lot of trial and error over about a week. But he can build one from scratch to up and running in under 2 hours nowadays.

As above, I highly rate Scan. We have bought several ready made and custom PC's from them over the years. They are also used by my workplace (high-end graphics software for events).

Agree with pp that anything will do coding but I don't think £600 will get you very far with gaming.

Desktop PC will have better longevity as you can swap the components out as they become obsolete and as money allows. It's also better for your posture (neck/back/shoulders/wrists) to use a desktop rather than a laptop for gaming.

Another website you can look at is Chillblast, their PC builds tend to be rather expensive but you can play around with their custom build planner to get an idea of how different components contribute to the overall cost of a PC, without committing to buy anything.

If you know someone who can spec and build a pc, that will be cheaper than buying one prebuilt.

I saw someone mentioned Scan, they're a good company to buy from! I've never had any issues

Sorry for the delayed response! Thank you for all your suggestions. Scan have been really helpful with answering questions so I will be going with them.

I’d love to build one but I have zero patience and am ham fisted! 😂