Building a Gaming PC

Some of you seem to actually know about this stuff and I can't say I know anything at all. So I figured I'd ask some questions to get a measure of the situation:

1. Is it difficult to do? Got any tutorials you would recommend? Like, I don't know if I'll need to be soldering shit or just slotting things into place or what.

2. Obviously building it myself is better than buying one pre-made since they'll undoubtedly gouge me for lower quality products, but if I am completely clueless would that still be a better option?

3. If I'm not interested in running a behemoth that must be the absolute best at everything and would be willing to make some concessions, what kind of price range would I be looking at? Do note I would be starting from scratch since the only thing I have at the moment is the operating system.

In the interest of a benchmark or two to work towards since I bet my question is super vague and the price range is enormous:

3a. Let's say I want to build a PC that could run Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance with ease just because that's a new game (for PC) but isn't absolutely top of the line.

3b. Let's say I want to build a PC that will see me through the first few years of the next-gen. Again, not necessarily fully optimized, just meeting the recommended specs (even though I know these vary game by game). If that's not all that different from 3a, then great.

4. Do Gaming laptops even exist? Google says they do but I mean are they worth it? Can you build a gaming laptop? How much weaker/inferior are they than PCs?

5. How quickly do optimized PC become obsolete for new releases? How often would I need to upgrade? A couple of times a generation? Once a year?

6. Is being a part of the PC master race all its cracked up to be?

7. Is the DRM for most games completely invasive and terrible?

8. On that topic, how easy is to pirate games? How does this jive with online play?

I can't answer any of your more specific questions, but here are a few.

1. Yes, you literally just slot stuff into place.

2. Yes, because 1.

6. Not really.

8. Very easy, though you might need to be walked through the process at first.

2.

It is usually cheaper to build it yourself, but be aware that some components are simply not compatible with each other. Nothing a little research won't sort out, but something to bear in mind.

4.

I had no interest in spending loads on a gaming rig, but when my old laptop died and I had to buy a new one I bought a relatively high-end laptop with several concessions to gaming in mind (I7 processor, 1440 HD screen, extra RAM, superior graphics card etc). That was three years ago, and my laptop now struggles to run most anything released in the last couple of years. I say struggles; it will run, but most setting need to be on "low" if you want a respectable frame rate. It ends up looking not much - if at all - better than a 360 / PS3 game, only on a much smaller screen with crap speakers. Basically, if you're serious about gaming, and however tempting a gaming laptop may seem, it needs to be a desktop PC.

FYI I'm in the process of fixing up my sleep patterns and am extremely tired at the moment so if any of this is poorly written or I break off a thought or something just ask for clarification and I'll post again in the morning when my brain is working properly.

1: It's expensive Lego. Everything just plugs/screws into a designated slot and 99.99% of things have unique connectors so it's pretty much impossible to put something in the wrong place without deliberately breaking things.
www.logicalincrements.com lists sets of parts at several price ranges and is an excellent starting point, though you can usually do a little better than what they set out if you research and price hunt a bit. There are also links to tutorials and various other resources on the site, it's a one stop shop.

2: Absolutely not. The vast majority of prebuilts cut costs by using shitty parts that, despite looking good on paper to the uninformed (Intel UltraHD Max 9000 Pro Elite Extreme Gamer Edition) will bottleneck your performance in some way. The few that don't have bad parts are extremely overpriced, sometimes by thousands of dollars.
If you really don't want to build it yourself there are companies that let you select all the parts and, for a fee, will assemble the lot for you but honestly putting together a computer is so much easier than most people think I wouldn't suggest you do this unless you have money to burn.

3: See 1. Running 'with ease' really depends on what you're looking to get out of a given game. Do you want 60FPS? What resolution are you going to run the game at? Do you want to be able to use hardcore anti-aliasing or other hardware intensive options?

a: To run MGR at a stable 60FPS at 1080p with the enhanced blade mode (you can cut things into more bits) setting on you're probably looking around the $1100 range on Logical Increments but it's worth noting that the game has rather high requirements for how it looks because of the physics simulation when you turn enemies into sashimi. If, hypothetically, you only wanted to play last gen games you could get away with something around the $700-$900 tier and play just about everything at 'better than console' levels with 60fps.

b: $1100 would be a safe bet. You won't be getting 60fps/max settings on most games in a year or so but if this generation of games is anything like the last you should be able to run anything at 'console levels' or better for a long time without any upgrades. Never try to future proof, given how fast hardware advances what costs $1000 now will have a $500 equivalent in a year.

4: They're a gimmick for people with more money than brains and shouldn't exist. The problem with laptop hardware is that everything has to be as small and tightly packed as possible to fit into the case, which means that everything has to be scaled back to avoid overheating. If you buy a gaming laptop you can expect to pay significantly more for a vastly inferior machine.

5: It obviously depends on the game, Metro 2033 is still extremely difficult to run maxed out and The Witcher 2 is impossible to max without a thousand dollar graphics card, but with current upper-mid range hardware you can expect to get a good year of very high to max settings without having to upgrade. When you DO decide to upgrade, again assuming that this generation is similar to the last, you will probably only have to get a new graphics card - very few recent games have been processor intensive.

6: I think so. Higher resolutions and framerates, mods, a larger library than every other gaming system combined and the ability to customise your experience in pretty much any way you can think of makes consoles only as worthwhile as their exclusives.

7: Depends on the publisher generally. EA is the worst in the industry, all their games require you to use their proprietary Steam clone and they've made a habit of adding always-online requirements to single player games. Ubisoft isn't far behind but they've made progress recently by dropping the more severe online requirements (Asscreed 4 works offline but you can't access Kenway's Fleet, for example). As far as everything else goes DRM is better than it's ever been. Most publishers opt to use arguably non-intrusive DRM like Steam and the closest you get to 'the old days' is a CD key. Nobody uses SecuROM, Tages, Starforce or any of the 'basically a virus' DRM systems anymore.

8: It's usually a matter of running an installer and then replacing a couple of files, unless you're Buu it's about as hard to play PC games illegally as it was with the DS.

my gaming PC is 2 years old, still runs pretty much most of the stuff at best quality or near best quality without much trouble.

but admittedly, I built something in a price range you probably don't wanna venture in.

Thank you for the responses, gonna need to do some research before committing to anything. It looks like it will be a lot cheaper than what I was expecting though.

1,400 pounds if logicalincrements is anything to go by, what it'd actually cost would likely be a bit more or less though.

cool intersting to know

Alienware makes some of the most overpriced shit. It's insane.

Casa wrote:

Some of you seem to actually know about this stuff and I can't say I know anything at all. So I figured I'd ask some questions to get a measure of the situation:

And I can answer some of those for you

Casa wrote:

1. Is it difficult to do? Got any tutorials you would recommend? Like, I don't know if I'll need to be soldering shit or just slotting things into place or what.

It's not that hard to build a gaming PC as soon you get the parts for it.

If you are looking for tutorial to actually build the thing. Here are some youtube videos to show you how.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsyxM_j3Y4U
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zOYdNEHDQo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CY3Nu2iDJgg

If you are looking for the parts to build them and are not trying to get lost of which pieces you have. This is essential to me IMO

http://pcpartpicker.com/parts/partlist/

Casa wrote:

2. Obviously building it myself is better than buying one pre-made since they'll undoubtedly gouge me for lower quality products, but if I am completely clueless would that still be a better option?

Build. Just build one. Don't ever buy one. They will either rip you off with overpricing or give you weak CPU or something in exchange for a cheaper price. Not worth it. Just build your PC

Casa wrote:

3. If I'm not interested in running a behemoth that must be the absolute best at everything and would be willing to make some concessions, what kind of price range would I be looking at? Do note I would be starting from scratch since the only thing I have at the moment is the operating system.

Find the cheapest best. Find something that is cheap but will last you through this generation of gaming (even longer). If you don't know which CPU, graphic cards, etc. are the best for a price, I say do some research or you can visit this reddit page

http://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc

Us PC gamers are like the fashion cops. We want you to look your best. Though if you want to not get a behemoth, I say stick to a $500-700 dollar range. That should be good enough. If you have a disposable income, 1000 should be it. Anything more is overkill imo. But if you can do that, do it.

Casa wrote:

4. Do Gaming laptops even exist? Google says they do but I mean are they worth it? Can you build a gaming laptop? How much weaker/inferior are they than PCs?

No no no no no no no no NO! They don't exist. Gaming on a laptop is like playing game on a mobile phone Inconvenient, a pain in the ass, and the weakest hardware you can get. You can't upgrade and it can break easily. AVOID!

Screw any company that said they can make gaming laptops. They don't exist!

Casa wrote:

5. How quickly do optimized PC become obsolete for new releases? How often would I need to upgrade? A couple of times a generation? Once a year?

This is one of the most annoying and pointless things I always hear about PC. No, you do not to upgrade every goddamn day, month, or year. You can have a PC that can last the entire console generation (and a bit more) and still outperform the PS4, XBone, and Wii U.

Hell, they're already graphic cards for $150 bucks that make the PS4 and XBone obsolete. But I would wait till a cheaper graphic card comes out that can do 4K gaming. (Which shouldn't take too long)

Casa wrote:

6. Is being a part of the PC master race all its cracked up to be?

I can make a list of stuff of why PC is better, but I use one word to describe it. Freedom

Freedom to do whatever the fuck you want with it.

Remember, it is still a PC. You can do more than gaming. Of course you can still have better performing and graphical superior games, but you can also do modding, you play multiplayer FOR FREE! (And imo, a better community), you can buy games on the cheap, you have more variety of games to play (ignore anyone who said we only have indie games. It's call "explore." You have no idea how many games I found that I never though I would enjoy, but enjoy the crap out of).

You want older PC games? Most of them are either free or cheap ass fuck?

Want to play on your TV still? Grab you Xbox 360 (or PS3) controller, hook your PC to a TV, and play like you still own a video game console. BUT BETTER!

Never again you shall pay $60 dollars for a game EVER AGAIN! (Unless you buy everything day one).

Let me say this. You want to save money? GET A PC.

Casa wrote:

7. Is the DRM for most games completely invasive and terrible?

On Steam or GOG? No. GOG doesn't even have DRM. Steam does, but it isn't terrible or invasive.

I said this. Avoid anything made by Ubisoft or EA. Especially Ubisoft.

Casa wrote:

8. On that topic, how easy is to pirate games? How does this jive with online play?

Pretty fucking easy.

BUT I avoid it. Most games are cheap anyways. If you do pirate, don't bother with multiplayer. It will most likely won't work (unless some modders found a way to make it work without you getting banned from sites)