this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2024
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First PC for My Son (lemmy.world)
submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by slingstone@lemmy.world to c/pcgaming@lemmy.world
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So my eight-year-old wants a desktop PC. He's kind of a budding gamer, but right now, he almost exclusively plays Roblox on his iPad and will definitely carry this over to the PC. As he gets older, he may want to graduate to more demanding titles. On the other hand, he may also get bored with it and stick with consoles and mobile gaming.

I don't want to spend a ton on a PC for a very young child who may not take to PC gaming seriously, but I also want to get something that might be upgradeable as he grows if he wants to join the PC master race.

In my research, I came across this.

The recommendation I saw in PCMag that led me to the PC above suggested that the integrated graphics with the Ryzen 5 5600G could serve as a starting point for low level gaming and allow me to spend on a GPU card later if it's justified. The price and functionality appear to offer exactly the path I want.

I've seen other, more expensive versions of this pre-built, and I've also looked at the possibility of building it myself. I like this particular chip because it's only a generation or so back and it still appears to be well-regarded by the community. If I went with one of the cheap old workstation conversions, I'd be limited by proprietary hardware and fewer options--a lot of the stuff out there, especially Intel stuff, is very old and won't be able to run Windows 11 when it becomes necessary. What I'm finding suggests this path could see us through quite a few years to come and allow us to upgrade as needed.

Am I barking up the wrong tree here, or does this seem like it could work the way I want?

UPDATE: I've decided to buy the pre built deal I found with the 6500G. I would like to go to a fancier build, but the price of the AM5 chips and motherboards takes them off of the table for me right now. I think what I'm getting will be good enough as some of you have said.

Thanks to everyone for your help! If y'all are interested, I'll post an update when I get it.

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[–] inclementimmigrant@lemmy.world 6 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Seems like a good choice for the uncertainty and the age.

The 5600G with it's Vegas 7 graphics isn't going to be the greatest, I mean it's multiple generations old now, but it'll run Roblox or Minecraft at a decent frame rate but you'll see some dips below 60 fps.

I personally think it's a solid choice given what your looking for.

[–] grue@lemmy.world 5 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

My kids are getting Raspberry Pi 400s as their first machines.

They can have something more powerful when they've learned enough to spec and assemble it themselves.

[–] Dagamant@lemmy.world 4 points 8 months ago

I just made sure my kids first PC could run Minecraft and it was good. There are tons of games out there and a kids idea of gaming is different from what an adults idea of gaming is.

[–] Toes@ani.social 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I'd suggest building your own with a much newer chip. It's not that complicated, if you can put together a Lego set you can build a computer.

The 5600g is old, consider using a 8600G.

Also, keep a eye on your kids interactions with people. The people on Roblox can get kinda weird.

[–] inclementimmigrant@lemmy.world 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I'm going to respectfully disagree.

The 8600g is half the price of the entire system this guy is looking at and his eight year old is only playing Roblox, not running cyberpunk 2077, the 8600g would be overkill for Roblox and other more kid oriented games. Even building the system around the 8700g would cost around 700 bucks with the cheapest of parts.

By the time this kid would probably ready to play more modern games, and even then depending on what games this kid will be playing, with a discreet GPU I think they'll be looking for a new CPU anyways.

[–] slingstone@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Would I be better buying one of these xeon or other older intel conversions with an old workstation super cheap and waiting for AM5 socket processors to get cheaper? If I'm going to be looking for a new CPU anyway, and AM4 AND LGA 1700 are both reaching the end of their cycles, I'm tempted to buy something that's just good enough now and get a whole new PC with a viable upgrade path when prices come down.

Throwing this in: my wife wants something to double for general home use, but I can't imagine we'd run anything more serious than Office for that purpose.

Thoughts?

[–] inclementimmigrant@lemmy.world 2 points 8 months ago

I'm not a fan of using an old Xeon processor as a gaming processor personally as the single threaded performance, which unfortunately most games still are, is pretty darn bad. But that's just me and I know they're ultra cheap, I know I can get a used one old ass server for like a hundred bucks at my local computer shop but still I'd have reservations all things considered since it's an old server, you know it's been on a long, long time with minimal upkeep.

Both AM4 and LGA 1700 are at the end of life, not reaching it since AMD announced that the latest X3D's they launched are the last for AM4 and Intel has also announced that the 15th Gen are moving to a new socket I'm pretty darn sure, so with that said I think if you're looking for "good enough" then the 5600G good enough for Roblox and light office work but that's just me.

It doesn't seem like you'll get a lot of opinions here unfortunately so you might want to ask another community or hit up buildapc on reddit, yes I know blasphemy.

Good luck.

[–] inclementimmigrant@lemmy.world 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Forgot to mention to not forget to go into the BIOS first thing. These boutique builders really suck at the configuration side of things and often don't set things up, if at all so you'll be stuck at literal default settings including setting the RAM up with docp leaving you with slow RAM settings.

[–] slingstone@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Thanks for the heads up. I'm learning a lot about modern PC's from my research, and this tracks with what I've been learning--it's cool to realize I understand what you're talking about. I have been enjoying this more than I expected. I'm seriously considering starting to look for old PC's to play with for myself and maybe build a new one some day.

It should let me set the RAM to the highest speed it will handle, right? If I'm remembering right, that ought to be around 3200 or 3600 MHz for DDR 4, right?

Any other BIOS settings I should check when I fire it up?

[–] inclementimmigrant@lemmy.world 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Yeah man, I use the 5600G for a jellyfin server for hardware transcoding so my setup of course is going to be a little different than yours but generally I'd turn off the CSM, turn on SAM if it's there, go into the NB configuration, probably in the advanced tab somewhere and up the frame buffer size to a 4GB for the iGPU to use.

Might want look at the overclocking it too just a bit, plenty of guides out there but it does look like you have a stock cooler there, which isn't great, so you overclock to squeeze just that bit more performance out there, you should look for a new cooler, this ID-COOLING SE-214-XT caught my eye for my system, except the fan cause who needs RGB for a server, for 17 bucks and was reviewed really well by a lot of places including gamers nexus. Buy yourself a tube of arctic silver or mx4 for another 7 dollars and I'd think you'd be set for a little gaming rig for your kid and a nice re-introduction to building a pc for you.

Honestly though, I think you can get away with just bumping up the igpu just a smidge with the stock cooler and you'd be fine if you don't want to spend the extra cash on a "good enough" build.