Gaming PC

[Fuckenstein]

My son wants a gaming PC for Christmas, there are a lot out there with various prices, can someone give me a hint as to what I am looking for. He plays Fortnite, COD and Fifa.

My understanding so far is it needs to be i5 as a minmum but higher = better?

at least 2 processors but 4 would be optimum?

Graphics card - The higher the number after Nvedia GForce the better?

It needs 1 or 2TB of something?

Am I on the right tack at all here?

www.logicalincrements.com/ has example builds at all price points. If you're buying you won't get an exact match but it gives you a general idea.

The AMD Ryzen CPUs are really popular now but the Intel CPUs are also good. Fanboys will argue all day but really AMD and Intel are as good as each other at the moment, though AMD are usually a bit better value for money.

Graphics cards, generally the first number is the generation and the two or three numbers after than that the level within the generation as it were.

For storage a common approach is an SSD and a regular hard drive. SSDs are fast and I would insist a new PC nowadays has one, but they're expensive per gigabyte. The regular hard drive is optional but gives you extra storage cheap.

I would buy from one of the smaller independent PC builders such as PCSpecialist, Cyberpower, or Scan. You get a lot more choice than the big makers and they use standard components making future upgrades more practical.

You might be best off getting your son involved in the configuration, just be sure to set a price.

What is your budget?

What screen resolution?

What screen refresh rate.

Before buying a gaming PC you need to decide what it will be outputting. It’s very easy to under or over spec a PC.

Budget is the most important thing. Nail down a price and you can find somewhere with an appropriate build.

For playing those games you'll need at least -
i5 CPU (i7/i9 definitely not needed; I don't know the AMD equivalents)
nVidia GTX 1060, but actually for the same price get the 1660 ("Super" or "Ti" after the model means its the turbo version; numbers don't just go up unfortunately so here's a useful chart: www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2019-09-27-gpu-power-ladder-all-graphics-cards-tested )
8 gigabytes RAM (but more always better)
500 gig SSD (more always better, but make sure it's SSD and not HDD)

If he is dedicated to his game, and is interested in computers, it might be worth getting him an intel i5 with the letter 'k' at the end, which would allow him to overclock, but an I5 would be good enough for what you have said.

8 GBs of RAM would be optimal.

NvME SSDs are usually the best for terms of speed, 500 GBs would be good enough, but if you have money to spend get 1 TB.

As for graphics a GTX 1080 would suffice for high quality on the machine, but again if you can splash out get a GeForce RTX 2060.