PC Buying These Days - any advice? :)

Hello

I am looking to buy a new gaming PC - my current one is from 2009 (see below, with a few upgrades where I have put the year I purchased those).

Do most people tend to buy parts and build the PC themselves or buy those custom made ones on pcspecialist for example, or buy pre-made configurations these days? Any recommendations of one over the other? (I am based in the UK btw)

My budget is £1000 (ideally not really more than that). I have a monitor (Dell U2412M bought in 2014) and peripherals etc. already.

If you have recommendations for parts I should buy pleaseeee help me out - I haven't looked into this stuff in years so am completely out of date.

Current configuration is:

intel i7-920 2.67GHz

intel DX58SO ?extreme motherboard

Corsair DDR3 6GB RAM

MSI GTX 760 Twin Frozr IV OC 2GB GDDR5 (2013)

WD 500GB HDD

Seagate ST1000DX002 SATA 3 1TB (2019)

Asus Vento Case

XFX Pro 550W Core Edition PSU (2013)

I will be most likely playing on this monitor for now (maybe an upgrade in future) and maybe would like the ability to sometimes stream to my 4K TV for controller friendly games.

Thank youuuu and apologies if I have missed any key pieces of info out

You will want a FE card first, if not, £1000 is not enough.

https://store.nvidia.com/en-gb/geforce/store/gpu/?page=1&limit=9&locale=en-gb&category=GPU&sorting=lp&gpu=RTX%203050,RTX%203050%20Ti,RTX%203060,RTX%203060%20Ti,RTX%203070,RTX%203070%20Ti,RTX%203080,RTX%203080%20Ti,RTX%203090,RTX%203090%20Ti&manufacturer=NVIDIA&manufacturer_filter=NVIDIA~7,3XS%20SYSTEMS~0,ACER~0,ALIENWARE~0,AORUS~1,ASUS~29,EVGA~6,GAINWARD~1,GIGABYTE~23,HP~0,INNO3D~4,LENOVO~0,MSI~19,NOVATECH~0,PALIT~6,PC%20SPECIALIST~0,PNY~2,RAZER~0,ZOTAC~12

3060 Ti in stock now.

If price is an issue you will want to build your own to get the most bang for your buck, however there are some decent options out there for pre-builts and you can always wait for a sale.

I recommend browsing some builds at PC Parts Picker for reference.

Just off the top of my head, though, I'd say (roughly) the following would be decent. Sorry prices are in USD, I think Pounds are like 0.85 per dollar...so almost even but not quite:

• AMD CPU ~175 USD
• Motherboard ~100 USD
• 1 TB SSD hard drive ~110 USD
• 16 GB Memory ~60 USD
• 750 W PSU ~85 USD
• Case ~50
• Misc parts (fans, cables, etc) ~75 USD
• Video card - rest of your budget.

Sadly the UK and EU are not seeing the same GPU price drops other markets are. Retailer are very stubborn on pricing here :(. Also note that next Gen GPUs from AMD and Nvidia are due later this year. So now is not the best time to buy still (also not the worst though in fairness).

If you must build now you would be looking at something like (I put this together on overclockers.):

• CPU: Core I5 12400F - £170
• Motherboard: Gigabyte B660M DDR4 Motherboard - £130 (you could cut back here a bit but i think the lower end chipset prevents getting the best out of your ram.)
• Power Supply: Corsair RM650 - £88 (I wouldn't go any lower than 650W. go higher if you can as it would allow for better upgrades later. PSUs can last a long time and many builds).
• Ram: 16Gb of DDR 4 3200Mhz memory - £50
• Storage: 500GB SSD - £53 (You could re-use your existing hard drives but Hard drives are a painful experience on modern systems. An SSD is strongly recommended).

That leave the GPU side (roughly 500 bucks left) and you can get up to a AMD 6700XT or Nvidia 3060TI roughly. Solid GPUs though and great for your current monitor. But if you want 4K to be a thing they wont really do it very well for the latest games.

This assumes you will re-use the case you have and can re-use your windows license.

Thank you everyone this has been really helpful :)

I remember back at the days I was able to make a 1000$ rig with 2x 290s Crossfire or at 1200$ a rig with 2x 970s SLI

You could pickup at decent prices sometimes a brand pre built gaming PC from Lenovo or Hp for example.

Amazon.com: [Geforce RTX 3060] 2022 HP Pavilion 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD+2TB HDD, Intel i5-10400F

It's around 1150$

I'm still rocking a rig with dual 970s.

I'll upgrade when crypto goes away.?