BML wants to buy her son a gaming PC that will also be good for school work, but doesn’t want to pay over the odds

My son has an Xbox but would like a gaming computer. I would like a PC that he can use for his school work. He is starting his GCSEs this year. I don’t want to spend more than £1,000. Could you recommend something which will do both jobs? BML

PC manufacturers love the gaming market, which is growing strongly and worth more than $30bn a year. Most PCs outperform their users, and the processor goes to sleep between keystrokes. Gamers, by contrast, never have enough power, and will pay more for better performance. This translates into higher prices and better profit margins. They also like cases that look like props from science-fiction movies.

In the UK, prices range from around £1,000 to £2,500. You can pay less, but that requires compromises. You can also pay more. PC World stocks a 17.3in Razer Blade Pro laptop at £3,999.99 while Argos has a Stormforce Prism gaming desktop for £4,349.99.

The market extends well beyond PCs. Gamers also buy specialised mechanical keyboards, high-performance mice, headsets with microphones, and monitors.

You will also need to buy a monitor, but your son will be able to use it with his games PC and his Xbox, liberating the family TV set. He will also be able to use it for schoolwork, and for many other purposes including VR and movie editing.

Laptop or desktop?

There are lots of good gaming laptops, led by the Asus ROG (Republic of Gamers) range and MSI (Micro-Star International), with Gigabyte among the interesting challengers. The main drawbacks are that gaming laptops are expensive and most of them are not really portable.

Desktops have several advantages over laptops. First, you get more power for less money, partly because they can run hotter, faster processors. Second, they are easier to upgrade. If you don’t have the budget for a top-of-the-range PC, you can add more memory and – most importantly – a faster graphics card later. Third, as I never tire of repeating, desktops have better ergonomics and are better for your health.

Custom-built or off-the-shelf?

Many gaming enthusiasts build their own PCs, which isn’t that hard if you use PC Part Picker. Others will opt for a custom build from a small British supplier such as Chillblast, Stormforce, Cyberpower, and Fierce. That’s fine, too, but people can who can do that don’t ask my advice.

Fortunately, all the largest Windows PC manufacturers now offer off-the shelf gaming PCs at reasonable prices. HP and Dell got into the market early by taking over specialist suppliers. Dell bought Alienware in March 2006. HP responded by buying Voodoo in September 2006. Lenovo belatedly entered the market in 2015 with its Y Series laptops and desktops, adding Razer Editions to get the attention of serious gamers.

HP, Dell and Lenovo are now the world’s three largest PC suppliers. They have huge buying power, economies of scale, and wide distribution. You can probably find at least one of their systems locally at John Lewis, Currys PC World or Argos. In fact, Argos offers 106 gaming PCs – half of them desktops – which illustrates the strength of the market

There’s not a lot to choose between them, as you’ll get much the same parts. Your son may have a preference, based on appearance or street cred, while you should look at service and support options.

Target specs for gaming

Until recently, the quad-core Intel Core i7-7700 was the processor of choice for gaming, with the Core i5-7400 as the less powerful but cheaper option. They have now been replaced by two six-core chips, the i7-8700 and the i5-8400. Any of these four should be fine.

The minimum memory requirement is 8GB, and it’s generally enough. However, 16GB is popular and 32GB is usually an option.

Serious graphics cards start with Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1050Ti, which has its own 3GB or 4GB of fast memory. After that you can climb through the 1060, 1070 and 1080 models with 6GB or 8GB of memory, before getting into dual graphics cards that cost more than most PCs. AMD’s Radeon RX 570 and RX 580 are also good upgrades, but not as common.

My current desktop PC has an i5-8400 with 8GB and a GTX 1050Ti, and it’s not a games machine. If I played games I’d have gone for GTX 1060 or better, but then, I don’t have to think about the cost.

When it comes to storage, my recommended minimum is a 128GB M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD for the boot disk plus a 1TB traditional hard drive for storage. Serious gamers usually want bigger SSDs, from 256GB to 1TB.

One money-saving alternative is a Seagate FireCuda (PDF), which packages some Flash memory with a traditional hard drive. Another is adding 16GB of Intel Optane memory. Both are better than having a solitary hard drive.

If there’s a choice of power supply, 400W-500W is good, with 850W and similar options for high-end and dual graphics cards.

If you shop around, get as close to this spec as you can …

Remember, you can play games on almost any PC. When you buy a games machine, you’re paying extra for things like high-resolution graphics, shadows and lighting effects, a high frame-rate, and fast response times. You can tune different games to your PC’s performance or use quick settings such as low, medium, high and ultra. Higher settings provide more realistic images but lower frame-rates. There’s an excellent YouTube video that uses Deus Ex: Mankind Divided to illustrate the differences.

Possible options

My current “best buy” is the HP Omen 880-100na desktop, which ticks all the right spec-boxes. It has an i5-8400, 8GB, a GTX 1060, 128GB/1TB of storage and a 400W power supply for £836.10 if you use the e-voucher SUMMER10 to get 10% off. Add the three-year pick up and return service for £49.

Currys PC World retails the same model for £899.99 but without the cheap support option. Argos has the old model with an i5-7400 on its clearance list at £749.99.

While I like Dell’s Alienware Aurora – I even ordered one of the previous model – the current version may be over your budget. Prices start at £898.99 but that’s without an SSD. It costs £60 to add a 256GB SSD and £150 to upgrade the GTX 1050Ti graphics card to a 1060. However, using the code AW12 will reduce the price of an upgraded model by £133.08 (12%) to £975.91, if you buy before 19 August. (If you don’t, there will probably be some other discount available.)

Lenovo’s website is still offering Y720-34 gaming desktops with seventh-generation chips but the prices are not competitive. The cheapest £799.99 model (£300 off) compensates for the old i5-7400 by including a GTX 1070 with its own 8GB of memory, so it should handle 4K gaming. Unfortunately it lacks an SSD and I can’t see a way to add one to the order. However, Lenovo is offering three-years of on-site support for £26.40, which is amazing.

Lenovo has updated the small, cube-shaped Legion C530 19 to the Core i5-8400 for £799.99, but it lacks an SSD and the power supply is a weedy 280W.

It’s probably a good sign of a competitive market that I couldn’t find any real bargains, even at Argos. Lower prices generally turned out to involve compromises such as shipping a slower SSD or none at all, fitting a FireCuda drive, or reducing the graphics card’s memory and so on.

The easiest way to reduce the cost of a gaming PC is to install a cheaper processor than the i5-8400, with the Intel Core i3-8100 being a good option. However, at retail, the price difference is marginal – £149.99 vs £95.99 – in a PC that you would hope will last five years.

I spent my own money on an i5-8400 when it came out last year, and I still can’t see a better alternative for gaming at less than £1,000.

Have you got a question? Email it to Ask.Jack@theguardian.com

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