Advice on a new kids gaming PC with decent graphics and no lagging

Kaley from the UK is interested in building a gaming PC for her daughter and wants our advice on what to build.

Question by Kaley from United Kingdom (Great Britain) | Answered by in Computer Systems on

Hi,

I am looking to buy my daughter a gaming PC, but I have no idea where to begin! I am hoping you can help me and tell me exactly what specs I need within the tower to allow the following games to run with decent graphics, no lagging - and run as a PC, where she can do homework, stream, etc.

  • Minecraft
  • GTA
  • Rainbow 6 Siege
  • CS GO
  • Rocket League
  • Phasmophobia
  • Overwatch
  • Cyberpunk 2077
  • Apex
  • Call of Duty
  • SIMS

Thank you in advance, Kaley!

Hi Kaley,

No problem! First, another bit of info is needed; will you or perhaps your daughter be building this system ground up? Or do you want to take the prebuilt approach?

Advice on a new kids gaming PC with decent graphics and no lagging 1

Either way, we can pick of few of the more demanding titles from the list above to get an idea of what you will want to build this PC around. For this task, I will choose Cyberpunk 2077, Call of Duty (Cold War), and perhaps between Rainbow 6 Siege or GTA as the third most demanding title.

From here, we are going to hit the system requirements lab on the web to see what the vendors are recommending for these titles. This will give us both a baseline to work from when you are building or buying the machine. Cyberpunk 2077, for starters, wants a Core i7-4790 or Ryzen 3 3200G and at least a GTX 1060 6GB for the GPU. Storage needs equal about 70GB, and you will want an SSD for sure.

Moving to Call of Duty, both Warzone and Cold War have similar needs. Activision wants a Core i7 8700K or Ryzen 7 1800X paired with a GTX 1080 or RTX 3070 if you want better visuals with RT. Rainbow Six will run fine with this same hardware as well, so we are down to GTA.

GTA likes large amounts of memory, both system and for the GPU. The GTX 1080 Ti would work great here with its 11GB, and as I said before, 16GB of system memory is the minimum if you are building or buying now.

Taking all of this into account, your base build at a minimum will look something like this;

  • CPU: Core i7 10700K or Ryzen 7 3700X/5800X
  • GPU: RTX 2070 Super / RTX 3070 or Radeon 5700XT / 6800
  • Storage: at least 1TB NVMe; Sabrent Rocket or similar
  • PSU: 650-750W At least Gold rated. Seasonic, Corsair, EVGA, ASUS are good brands

Motherboards, chassis, and cooling will need to be looked at according to what you choose to build. If you decide to go the prebuilt route, it will likely be more expensive, but you do get support and a warranty. Good brands for prebuilt include OriginPC Neuron and Alienware, to name a few.

Last updated: Dec 19, 2020 at 09:53 am CST

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