Hello experts.
I am helping my friend build a gaming PC for his brother, so I need your help to pick some parts.
The budget is $1000 (aiming for <900), and we have until Christmas.
No OS/peripherals required.
I think he's about 10ish years old and only plays Minecraft and Fortnite at this stage of his career.
But at that age, gaming needs grow fast…
So I want to build a PC with an APU that has the possibility of adding a decent (or beast) graphics card down the line.
This could be next year, or in a few years. I know a few years down the line isn't ideal due to possible CPU bottlenecking, but I want to make it scalable as he ages.
If you already think this is a bad idea, let me know.
So far I've already snapped up:
$359 - Ryzen 5600G
$69 - Asus 750W TUF Gaming 80+ Bronze Power Supply (Went overkill on the Wattage for a future GPU. Also, great price)
The remaining parts that I need help with:
Motherboard - I struggle a lot here, all I know is B550m and wifi. It needs to be able to support a graphics card in future, decent ports, and have ample fan and RGB connectors. Should I be looking ATX or mATX? Does it matter and what do you recommend?
Case - Every kid needs a cool (pun lol) case with a side window and some RGB. PCCG has the Aerocool CS-107 Mini mATX ($45). Would a full ATX case be better? If so, which one?
Memory - 16GB (2x8GB), with some RGB. Do I just find the cheapest with at least 3200MHz? 3600MHz? Is timing worth stressing over?
SSD - I'm not good at analysing SSD specs. I think 1TB since 500GB fills up fast with games. Does it have to be M.2, NVMe with L3 cache? Please lead me in the right direction here.
We are looking to buy parts as deals pop up leading to Christmas.
I think if we get some good deals on the memory, SSD and motherboard we can have a PC for under $900.
He is only 10, so if there are corners worth cutting, let's hear about them please.
Thanks for coming to my ted talk
p.s. Melbourne metropolitan based, so can do store pickups around the area.
Not an expert but I'll give some advice to get you started and I'm happy to be corrected on any of this. I'll keep this at a practical level aimed to help, without getting into the weeds. I haven't been looking for parts for a while so I won't have specific parts to recommend - sorry.
mATX and ATX motherboards should both be fine, but I'd recommend ATX. Biggest difference AFAIK is the number of PCIE ports. Who knows, he might want more USB ports or a capture card/SSD/wireless/bluetooth/whatever. I don't need wifi with my motherboard and don't think it's necessary if you have ethernet, but maybe you don't.
If you have space for it, I'd go for a full ATX. Some people think it's ugly but I first built my PC when I was 10 and absolutely hated cable management. A bigger case gave me more corners to push things into.
Higher frequencies tend to do better for Ryzens. 3600Mhz with slightly poorer timings should outperform 3200Mhz with slightly better timings. There's a lot of complexity if you want to really get into it but I just waited for a deal on 3600Mhz RAM to get a good number of upvotes.
For gaming, a NVMe SSD and a SATA SSD should both work. NVMe is much faster, but SATA is already fast enough for gaming and general purpose I'd be surprised if he'd notice a difference. I'd just hop onto the first 1TB deal that gets popular. Make sure your motherboard has the appropriate M2 slot if that's what you end up getting, though it should be fine.