Please help a retard buy an ok PC

Bravefart

Bravefart

kiwifarms.net
Joined
Jul 10, 2019
I need to buy a new PC and I have absolutely no idea what to get.
It just needs to be able to play and stream videos at 1080p, do general Internet stuff and play mostly retro games with some GTA and the like occasionally.
It doesn't need a big hard drive, everything is already on an external one.
My budget is £200 to £300ish. THIS GEEKOM ONE seems to play up to Dreamcast and PS2 games pretty well. It happens to be a miniPC but it doesn't have to be.
And yes, it has to use windows.

Is there anything better out there for the money?

Thanks!
 
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May as well go for a mini PC/NUC, even older 2nd hand ones will do what you described.
But: be careful, most are barebones - you have to buy and add memory, hard drive, OS, etc

Edit: noticed the one you linked is ready to go. It's more than enough for those uses and I like mini PCs for their space saving, option to VESA mount
 
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Alder Lake packs a pretty good punch, even with the 4 cores and limited memory bandwidth of the machine you linked. It's amazing what this new wave of little shitboxes can do.

It shouldn't have a problem with emulators, especially considering those don't tend to take full advantage of multiple cores anyway.

GTA on the other hand, that might struggle.
 
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Bidding price starts at $50. DM me for details.
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If you're willing to build your own I'd recommend building it around the Ryzen 5 8600g, as the previous gen were able to emulate up to the wii upscaled to 1080 and would have more graphics horsepower then any current desktop intel processor
 
An Anglo should help OP with finding a good £ price, but cheap used/refurbished mini PCs with Intel Core quad-cores or better should be sufficient for video, very old games, and some emulators. 8th gen (e.g. Core i5-8500T) should have "official" support for Windows 11. You can get autistic with the video support here, but even if an old generation lacks hardware decoding it probably doesn't matter.

If you want new, that GEEKOM with the Intel Processor N100 is good. Maybe you can get the price lower with a coupon or different brand. You can get shit like that for $150 in the US, not even barebones. Consider wiping the Chinese spyware off when it arrives. I guess GEEKOM doesn't have that problem because it's Taiwanese.
 
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Joe Swanson said:
If you're willing to build your own I'd recommend building it around the Ryzen 5 8600g, as the previous gen were able to emulate up to the wii upscaled to 1080 and would have more graphics horsepower then any current desktop intel processor
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Not up for building one. I am, after all, a retard when it comes to all this stuff. That said, 1080p is sounding tempting.

Thanks for the replies everybody. I will have a look at refurbs as well. I hadn't even thought about that to be honest.
 
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Bravefart said:
Not up for building one. I am, after all, a retard when it comes to all this stuff. That said, 1080p is sounding tempting.

Thanks for the replies everybody. I will have a look at refurbs as well. I hadn't even thought about that to be honest.
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remember if your only gaming concern is like playing vice city or san andreas again on occasion
PCSX2 + roms will be way easier to run than those garbage remasters
theyre better versions anyways
 
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Bravefart said:
My budget is £200 to £300ish. THIS GEEKOM ONE
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Seconding a used office PC, as I’m pretty sure those smaller form factor PCs are lacking in performance, especially for 5th gen console emulation.

If you do happen to go the route of buying a used office PC, there’s only really a couple of things you need to know:

1. Upgrade the power supply if you want a graphics card. If it’s a standard minitower, then usually it’s a drop-in replacement with an ATX PSU. Some companies like Dell have proprietary motherboard power connectors, but IIRC you can buy adapters.

2. Make sure the case can accommodate the graphics card. Basically just look up how long it is and see how much space you have around your PCIe slot. Graphics cards are larger than they seem.

Edit:

I’m impressed by the N100 after looking up some benchmarks vs older Intel processors. Of course, the cpu isnt the bottleneck usually, so I feel my advice still stands. Especially emulating something like the GameCube, where everything is tied to frame rate. Anything less than 30/60 (whichever the game is set for) makes it unplayable.
 
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Using emulation as a metric is dumb as shit. The games i wanted to emulate always run like shit and are the least supported. Rx 6600 and r7 5800x here
 
Build your own, it's not hard. The worst you can do is buy parts that do not match. You can go to some store that sells the components and they will guide you about which motherboard fits the processor and memory to go with what you are about to build.

Mine is nothing fancy but I take pride that I built it with some help on a shoestring budget.
 
Doppelmonger said:
Build your own, it's not hard. The worst you can do is buy parts that do not match. You can go to some store that sells the components and they will guide you about which motherboard fits the processor and memory to go with what you are about to build.

Mine is nothing fancy but I take pride that I built it with some help on a shoestring budget.
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What parts do you have
 
seri0us said:
What parts do you have
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At the time I bought a Ryzen 5 4600g, an Asus motherboard (which model I can not remember) that came bundled with a Samsung 250 gb M2 drive, 16gb of ram from the value line of Kingston,

This could be cheating but I will add them too: the power supply was a refurbished 500w bronze from a brand that I also can't remember (ocean something? idk, their logo was blue), and my graphics card is a used sapphire rx580 I got for cheap (like $30 cheap on facebook because a display port output is busted). I had already a case laying around from my pc at college. I spent like $250 on all the parts around this time last year.

Nowadays I doubled the ram, added a card reader and two more storage drives for work and personal stuff respectively

Not the best computer but I am happy that I did my very own fist build with what I had at that moment. The only help I received was from my husband to apply the thermal compound and to do some cable management
 
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Battlefield42 said:
Using emulation as a metric is dumb as shit. The games i wanted to emulate always run like shit and are the least supported. Rx 6600 and r7 5800x here
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lol its not a metric im saying he shouldnt sweat it
if all he wants to do is play old GTA and browse the internet he'll probably be okay no matter what he gets
 
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