PC Gaming

Toms Hardware do some quite good 'Build a PC for ...' guides, useful as a starting point if nothing else.
Got to agree with the "an SSD is worth it's weight in gold", makes a real difference to an old PC. @Benz3ne is right on the OS front as well.

To be honest though I'd just try the games you want to play and see before chucking cash at it, if you are playing at fairly low resolutions you don't need to get too fancy. Gaming performance is a bit like wet shaving et al, you can get a perfectly good experience for a reasonable amount of cash or you can spend a fortune chasing the 'ultimate' experience.

As for adding a discrete GPU this might be helpful: Desktop GPU Performance Hierarchy Table
As the chap says you would want to go at least three tiers higher than the 4000 to see a noticeable difference. An R7 240 is five tiers higher and can be found for around the £50 mark. I haven't seen/tried all the GPUs on the list of course but I've always found them to be quite accurate.
 
Another place to have a look before building a PC for yourself is LinusTechTips on youtube - Linus is a little annoying with his sharp, high-pitched voice, americanisms and 'humour' but the older videos are excellent for learning how to put a computer together.

@Count of Undolpho I was trying to think what cheap graphics cards would be good for just putting into a system. I've a friend who's running Nvidia 950's in SLI and has done for many years and they've never once failed on him. In fact, he built a GTX 1080 rig earlier this year and the 950's are still on his 'backup computer'. They can be had cheap and are good for low-level, low-res gaming.
 
Oh dear....I feel that I've somewhat hijacked this thread....apologies, but this middle aged member has learned more about his PC and it's spec over the last 10 posts or so than he did prior to this. Thanks for the advice. I don't think that I will be updating the spec of my current PC just so I can play a decent flight sim but at least now I appreciate what a beefed up system can do. Thanks all.
 
@Benz3ne Until a couple of years ago I was still running a 5770 and gaming quite happily on a 22" 16:10 monitor.
I did a new build (saved for 5 years - kids take a lot of cash to raise) and upgraded to a 960 on a 24" 16:10 and am still gaming quite happily. I've not found anything it struggles with at the resolutions and detail I'm happy to play at. I've played around with overclocking the CPU and GPU but only for individual titles to see if it made any difference. Mostly I found the difference showed up more in benchmarks than in the subjective experience.
Striped SSDs help though!
 
I can't be hooped with the PC master race thing. Lol. I'm a happy xbox one console peasant. Much less hassle but if I were to buy another PC I would be building my own for less than the ready made crap from PC world or other good electronic stores.
 
Oh dear....I feel that I've somewhat hijacked this thread....apologies, but this middle aged member has learned more about his PC and it's spec over the last 10 posts or so than he did prior to this. Thanks for the advice. I don't think that I will be updating the spec of my current PC just so I can play a decent flight sim but at least now I appreciate what a beefed up system can do. Thanks all.
Our pleasure, as a middle aged gamer I often sit and have a half hour 'ooh what would I build if I had the cash and space and time...' daydream. Then I sit back down in the corner at my tiny little computer desk and kill some stuff.
 
I can't be hooped with the PC master race thing. Lol. I'm a happy xbox one console peasant. Much less hassle but if I were to buy another PC I would be building my own for less than the ready made crap from PC world or other good electronic stores.
I'm ok with my 360. I just fancied a nice flying experience. I kind of get that with a few 360 flight games.....but I'm rubbish at dogfights and evading missiles.
 
I'm ok with my 360. I just fancied a nice flying experience. I kind of get that with a few 360 flight games.....but I'm rubbish at dogfights and evading missiles.
Only flying game I liked for the 360 was Tom Clancy's Hawx. It was basically all dogfights and missile evading tho. Lol. Every time I played it tho I got the top gun theme tune in my head. YEE HAA. JESTERS DEAD. Lol.
 
Lost Sunday night to STALKER, Shadow of Chernobyl with Complete 2009 mod applied.
Excellent stuff, some genuinely spooky tension filled moments and the game play (controls, guns etc.) is still great.
 
The last time I was into gaming was probably back in the early to mid-2000s ...

I'd enjoyed the usual stuff beforehand, Doom, Quake, then onto Q3A, Unreal Tournament and so on. Half-Life, 2, Counter Strike. FPS is my kinda thing.

I was given a PS3 a few months ago and it sat there as a BD players as I'm not much into gaming today, but curiosity got the better of me and before I knew it, I'd bagged the COD back catalogue, MW/2/3, Black Ops/2/3, Battlefield/2/3/4, Bad Company/2, Killzone 2/3 and was proper back in my groove!

I resurrected Steam on my Mac and found my Orange Box physical purchase could be honoured and so Half-Life 2/Team Fortress 2/Portal all sorted ... and fired it up on her Windows laptop to muck about with Crysis and so on.

That led to installing Steam OS on an old Dell E6440 which isn't actually a bad machine. With 8GB RAM and an SSD drive, those little speed improvements translate to HUGE gains in FPS for CS:GO. I'm running 1280x720 with most set to low, but it's entirely playable.

I am hankering after a significantly better laptop for gaming now ...

I don't want a desktop PC. I've been iMac since the end of the '90s and just don't have the desire for another box and another monitor. Laptop will do just fine.

I'm rather hoping eGPU or Graphics Accelerator boxes really take off as a concept, once a unified and high-bandwidth connection is landed upon by the industry. I rather like the idea of a light(er) laptop, which I can click into a box at home that does all the graphics grunt.

From the virtual world, this is a well established concept - when scaling for ESX, you talk in terms of IOPS, boxes of compute, memory and storage. I don't see why the concept couldn't slide over to the desktop where all that extra processing grunt, cpu, gpu, storage, even memory could be sitting in an external box to beef up any system.

So, gaming ...

FPS for me! Very much enjoying CS:GO which I was delighted to find has all the maps I was used to under CS Source some 15 years ago. What fun! Now I also see Quake Champions (Q3A reboot) and Unreal Tournament about to have a re-issue.
 
I've found it hard to sustain interest in FPS games since the kids came along - I get too into them and having a sleepy daughter suddenly appear next to you mid fight can be unnerving. Things you can play with one headphone on and pause without losing your place/mojo tend to be the ones I put the time into. Every now and then though I dip in for some serious bloodshed.
 
I never got into PC gaming, but did regularly play the original Xbox and Xbox 360 between 2003-2012 (my first child was born in 2013, and after that it was game over for certain pastimes).

Many hours of fun were had with Half Life 2, Hitman 2, Splinter Cell, Rainbow Six series and Grand Theft Auto 3.

FPS was always the most satisfying, and the undisputed king for Xbox was the Halo series. Single/co-op campaign, or multiplayer - it was all brilliant. Best fun ever were the all-nighter multiplayer home LAN parties. Epic.
 
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