Cheap Gaming PC in late 2018...

So what's the deal these days? My brother is looking to replace his aging computer with something, and fancies playing a few games - most likely some FPS games, pubg, that kind of thing.

I'm pretty out of touch with the low price gear, and I've no idea what to recommend or put together for him. My gaming/general rubbish PC is still my 5820k with 12GB of ram (after the motherboard spat the other 4GB out - should probably re-seat the cpu and try to get it going again, but to be honest I've not noticed a performance change) and a 750ti. It runs everything I play on it, pretty much, so I figured any 3 year newer CPU has to at least match it?! The cheap Ryzen's are obviously appealing - the ryzen 3 1200 is super cheap for example... Or the 2200g, whatever the differences are (apart from onboard video, which wouldn't help me much here). And I imagined a 1050ti would give him a decent bit of longevity? I'd probably couple it with a cheaper nvme m2 drive to make the whole thing snappy. I've heard the i3's are better for gaming, but they're getting on for double the price of a cheap AMD.. What are folks general thoughts?

I'd considered re-purposing my old core2quad machine too.. Get a cheap Q9650 cpu from ebay, pop in a bit of ram and pick up a cheap 1050ti somewhere.. But I doubt it'd be able to do much these days!

Ta!

Do you have an exact budget? That would help.

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I will say though that Ryzen is your best bet here, no justifiable reason for spending much more money on a CPU that gives little more power.

The onboard graphics with the 2200G are okay for esports, but not much else. I'd get a RX 570 instead of a 1050ti.

Really cheap. Really!

I'm not talking about wanting a "last word in detail/fps" machine here, but I do want it to be easily quick enough to run everything new that comes out for the next couple of years, at 1080p, and at as close to 60fps as possible at (say) medium settings.

I'll have a look at the AMD video cards - to be honest I gave up with them after I bought a 270x and it kept stuttering.. But presumably things are better now.

So is there any benefit in taking the 2200 over the 1200? Is the lack of hyperthreading even an issue? Does it actually mean anything in gaming?

I would get the 2200G over the 1200, it runs faster. It's also cheaper, actually, although $1 won't hurt much.

The RX 570 is also a lot more powerful than the 1050ti, and it's also cheaper.


Ryzen is picky with RAM though, make sure you get dual channel ram with a speed of 2666mhz or higher.

I would not get the 2200G if you are getting a dedicated video card. Get a processor that is all cpu and doesn't share with GPU. RX 570 or a GTX 1060 should be fine for FPS games.