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Suitable gaming PC for skyrim around £500?

Viridian112

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Posted August 25, 2012 at 9:58PM

I'm in the market for a new gaming PC, somewhere around £500. I've seen several options, and can't decide if any of these would be good or not (I'm a complete newbie at PC equipment and specs). I play some light FPS games based on the Cube and Cube 2 game engines, and the only graphically intensive game I'll want to play is Skyrim, which I will be running on a 1920x1080 monitor.

I've heard that AMD drivers suck for Skyrim (although I'm not sure what this means, I'm assuming it means Nvidia cards are preferential). I've also heard Intel processors would be better for Skyrim, as the game is more reliant on CPU than GPU. Is any of this true, and if so could you recommend me anything good for around this price bracket?

I've already seen a PC with an Intel i5 3570k and a GTX550Ti within my budget, and another with the i5 3570k and an ATI 7770. Finally there was also one with an AMD FX4100 processor and an ATI 6870 (which is a superior graphics card, so I'm told). So I have no idea which of these would be best, or if any of them would even be able to run Skyrim.

Thanks.

-Viridan112

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KRONOS the First

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Posted August 27, 2012 at 10:51AM

Out of the three I would probably go for your third selection as it has the better graphics card but the other two have the faster processor. So a difficult choice.

This is worth a look, little more expensive but better all round. Or this one,though not quite as good as the first.

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Viridian112

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Posted August 27, 2012 at 7:15PM

I really like your first recommendation, thankyou - I'm very impressed for the spec at that price, and considering the CPU is overclocked as well I think it's well worth it. It's over my budget atm but I'll have the money in a month and it's well worth waiting for.

Apologies for not answering your question fully, I was a bit hungover from the night before and sort of skim-read your post; and I also left my answer similarly devoid of attention.

As for an OS, I'd like Windows 7 to be included. Despite being a total newbie I can install one if it doesn't come included, however just for ease I'd prefer to have the two as a package (which I see your recommendation has). A monitor isn't required, as I've already bought a 1920x1080 one that I intend to use.

I can buy a keyboard separately, and I've recently purchased a SteelSeries Sensei and 4HD so I'm set as far as peripherals are concerned.

I presume a PC of this spec can run Skyrim, so thankyou for your reply :)

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KRONOS the First

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Posted August 27, 2012 at 8:29PM

It will easily handle Skyrim, a game I found after a while very boring. Fight your way through tunnels kill boss rinse and repeat. I gave up on it after one play through. At the moment I am playing loads of Portal 2 mods, plus I am trying to get into Max Payne 3, Saints Row the Third, Payday: The Heist and one or two others.

As I said this is a good PC from a decent company. It is certainly better value than the Ebay ones which do not tell you exactly all the components they are using. A crap power supply can blow and take most the other components with it. Cheap RAM will slow a PC down, at least with Chillblast you are getting decent kit.

If you have any further questions fire away.

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Viridian112

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Posted August 31, 2012 at 2:17PM

Actually now you mention it, there is one!

The CPU that comes as standard on the Fusion Elixir is an Intel i5 2500K OC @ 4.6GHz. But I've also seen that, for the same money, you can get an Intel i5 3570K OC @ 4.5GHz.

Which one of these would be better do you think? I've heard the 3570K's are slightly better than the 2500K's. The clocking is virtually the same on both processors, and they're the same price - I was just wondering if you had a recommendation as to which one would be a more suitable purchase? I don't expect a great deal of difference as far as speed is concerned - but in terms of reliability and such.

Btw, I love Skyrim, and all the Elder Scrolls games. On my current PC I have Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim installed (although Morrowind is the only one that runs smoothly, Oblivion is semi-decent in some areas and is "playable" but laggy, and Skyrim is just unplayable, I would estimate about 10 frames a second). I'll be using the PC for other games too, but I'm not into very high-tech FPS games, I'm more of an RPG guy myself, and TES games will be primarily what I'll be playing.

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KRONOS the First

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Posted August 31, 2012 at 5:15PM

Go for the 357 if your budget will allow, Both CPU's would work fine. Most people would say go for the latest tech which would be the 3570K but for gaming you're not going to notice any difference between the 2 chips.

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Viridian112

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Posted August 31, 2012 at 10:09PM

Alright, thanks for your advice!

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KRONOS the First

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Posted August 26, 2012 at 8:44AM

Useful if you could have posted links to the PC's you mentioned that allows us to look at the overall specs. Also you do not mention whether you will need an operating system or need peripherals, monitor,keyboard,mouse etc.

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Viridian112

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Posted August 26, 2012 at 6:47PM

Alrighty.

Here were the three I was looking at: http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Intel-I5-3450-Quad-Core-Gaming-Pc-Windows7-500Gb-4Gb-ATI-HD-7770-1Gb-Galaxy-3-/140750775396?pt=UKComputingDesktopPCs&hash=item20c5666464

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Intel-I5-3450-Quad-Core-Gaming-Pc-Windows7-500Gb-4Gb-Nvidia-GTX-550Ti-1Gb-Galaxy-/120911705852?pt=UKComputingDesktopPCs&hash=item1c26e636fc#ht5893wt1265

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/AMD-FX-4100-3-6GHZ-QUAD-CORE-8GB-RAM-DDR3-1TB-HD-PC-GAMING-COMPUTER-1GB-ATI-6870-/251119966215?pt=UKComputingDesktopPCs&hash=item3a77ea9807#ht6923wt1139

As I said not sure if any of these will be suitable, if not I'd wait a bit longer until my budget gave me a bit more freedom over what to buy - or I'd perhaps look into refurbished PCs or laptops, if they'd be better value.

Thanks for your reply.

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KRONOS the First

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Posted August 26, 2012 at 7:21PM

Not at my desktop now and will not be able to look at your links till tomorrow. Hopefully then I will be able answer my own questions about what exactly what you need as you did not. Questions about OS and peripherals.

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