Buying a Gaming PC

[mfnick]

My partner is after a new laptop as hers is getting very tired - she’s playing that Inzoi thing and has to use GeForce Now to play since the laptop can’t hack it.

 

Thinking of getting a good one for me to use too. Been looking for a while now and this seems like a (relatively) good deal - £825. I want a 4060 for ideal future proofing. Not sure if the RAM is a bit small though? I have no idea what the CPU is like too. What do people think? Should I wait out a bit longer? 

 

 

[one-armed dwarf]

I don't feel like future proofing is easy now with how high VRAM requirements go up, I thought I was set with my 3070 a few years ago but it got left in the dust by stuff pretty quick, which I haven't really gotten over tbh cause it was trucking along great until then.

 

The big issue with laptops is overheating, which cause them to throttle and you don't get to maintain performance. imo I think the budget goes farther with a desktop, if gaming is the main reason for the purchase. It's very hard to know how to judge laptop components tbh cause the numbers might match the desktop variant but the power limits often mean they are completely different beasts.

[mfnick]

Definitely needs to be a laptop. This isn’t its only use and she likes playing on the sofa while I’m on the TV - and vice versa. The current one we have we kept plugged in which helped with performance and heat (plus batteries are shit on them) and did us well until about a year ago and that’s only a 1060. 

[spatular]

from a quick look the cpu looks good but power hungry so guess the battery life won't be great

 

edit - also it's intel 13/14th gen so make sure to check/update the bios if you get it

[mfnick]

Battery life isn’t a massive issue as it’ll be plugged in 95% of the time.

 

Good to hear. The CPU was the main thing I didn’t know about. 

[Snaggletooth]

Cant say I know a lot about laptops. And gpus but i do think the 4060 for modern gaming is very limited. 

8gb vram by modern standards isnt enough if you are pushing anything over a 1080p resolution.

 

But then at 1080p no rt features it would do a few years. 

 

 

[DANGERMAN]

I'm not sure how much to read in to this, but my laptop (that I'm still using because the motherboard I bought is faulty 😩) has a RTX 3050 and I've played through all of South of Midnight on Very High settings and it ran great. It's a 1080p screen which helps, but yeah, the inherent limitation of the laptop will help it for a while

[mfnick]

But from what I’ve seen the 50 series isn’t much better than the 40? I definitely can’t afford one above that anyway. 4060 performance is the very max my budget will allow. 
 

It’d only be played on the laptop screen so resolution doesn’t matter really. 1080p is more than enough. 

[one-armed dwarf]

Vid is 11 months old but on VRAM DF say to aim for 12 minimum, regardless of power tier or GPU generation. The thing with VRAM is that if there isn't enough, it just fails to load textures or crashes. Forspoken did the former for my on 3070, mixture of detailed textures and N64 looking surfaces and geometry that couldn't be fixed by lowering settings or resolution. So there is this issue it seems where it doesn't scale super well, though Forspoken isn't an illustrative example admittedly cause it's a pile of cack

 

I wouldn't dismiss AMD but I don't know a lot about their cards necessarily. You will lose DLSS tho which is significant, but they always give more than enough VRAM. Even back to the 970 days when Nvidia were fucking people around then as well

 

 

[mfnick]

On 20/04/2025 at 16:18, one-armed dwarf said:

DF say

Thanks for the vid. Interesting. 
 

Guess I’m fucked then. Going to 12 on laptops even the 40 series takes them to £2000 Loooolllll. Not happening. AMD are near non existent in the Laptop space it seems. So this’ll just be used for older and indie games. Good enough for the games my partner wants too. Big flashy shit I’d rather play on TV through PS5 anyway but was going to use it as a starting point to transition more to PC. Nevermind. 
 

Still it’s given me pause. Going to hold off for a bit longer now to be sure. 

[one-armed dwarf]

I mean, I would still consider the AMD option. You lose Nvidia's better upscaling, but there's an argument to be made it's a double edged sword at certain screen resolutions anyway and it's mostly needed for ray tracing anyhow, which can usually be turned off (putting aside Indiana Jones and Doom Dark Ages)

 

I've no idea what kind of presence AMD have on laptops mind, beyond CPU. They must have something tho

[mfnick]

I’ve only really checked for AMD’s on Ebuyer and eBay for price reference but could barely find anything. Ebuyer only had shitty Integrated AMD graphics. 

[Snaggletooth]

If your not going for cutting edge gaming, and aren’t fussed about Ultra settings and RT then you’ll be fine, for context PS5 runs on roughly the equivalent of a 2070, a 4060 would see you better than that.

 

 

[spatular]

i'm not sure where is good for laptop stuff/reviews but if you put something like "4060 mobile benchmark" into youtube you can get an idea of the performance, for example this is one of the first to come up:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=choGgv_3Rno

 

[DANGERMAN]

Computer update because it wasn't even built last time I posted 

 

It is now built! Once I actually had a collection of non broken parts it wasn't too bad a build. One snag I ran in to that Spatular helped me with was that I was using a splitter power cable on my last card, I assumed that would work on this one but it doesn't. So once everything was built I had to put my old card in to work out why it wasn't displaying 

 

Anyway, finally all done, other than just making sure the ram is set to the fastest setting in the bios. It also doesn't seem to want to recognise that the monitor is VRR but I think that's because it's freesync 

 

My one regret with it, other than doing it in the first place and seeing a better version of my card £30 cheaper the other day, is the storage. I wanted to put a 2tb Nvme in there. I have my old 1tb Nvme and a couple of my old SSD, one has my music on and the other is what I'll capture video to or just store videos.

 

Anyway, the motherboard I bought is really good, stupidly good in fact, Wi-Fi 6 built in, loads of fast usb ports, and like 4 Nvme slots. One of which, possibly 2, is this fancy new Gen 5 version, so I treated myself to one of those. Unfortunately they're twice the price of the previous gen so 2tb became 1tb. My regret is, as I'll never make use out of this ridiculous drive speed I could have got a 2tb gen 4 as my windows drive and used one of the other slots