How to pick the perfect computer
There are several choices you need to make when buying a PC. Here, we navigate our way through the main decisions (and some minor ones)
CHOICE 1 Bespoke or off-the-shelf
You have two main routes when buying a PC. The first is to settle for a pre-made configuration decided by the manufacturer, which will usually be a huge US, Chinese or Taiwanese company (think HP, Lenovo and Acer). You can’t make any changes: what you see is what you get.
British manufacturers such as Chillblast, PCSpecialist and Scan take a different approach. Whilst they may offer “ready-made” PCs for quick despatch, their major benefit over the multinationals is that you can pick and choose almost everything – right down to the chassis, the power supply and the speed of RAM.
The big downside of bespoke PCs is that you have to wait. Each PC is custom-built and that means it must also be stress-tested. The other problem – as we cover with some exaxparation on p93 – is availability.
But getting hold of pre-made systems from the likes of Acer and HP at a spec you want is sometimes impossible. Stock sells out, especially if it’s featured in a magazine such as ours, but it’s well worth putting in the part code online and seeing if it appears for sale. Don’t forget that many manufacturers also sell direct, so check their websites too.
Which brings us to Dell, as this direct model remains the best route of buying a PC from the company. It’s almost a hybrid approach of bespoke and pre-built, with Dell offering versions of a PC that can be delivered quickly, but also providing a configuration service. This, however, will delay the arrival of your PC.
CHOICE 2 To game or not to game
The good news is that in th the vast majority of cases we don’t need hulking, expensive machines. Every one of the PCs we test here is fast enough (although we’d replace the hard disk in the Acer Aspire at the earliest possible opportunity) to handle software such as Photoshop – it’s just that tasks will complete rather more slowly than the very fastest machines.
Things change if you like to game – and not play the odd bit of Fortnite, but load up AAA titles that demand advanced features. We suspect that 2022’s top games will demand ray tracing capability at the very least.
There’s good news, however, and that’s something that dates right back to the birth of the PC: these systems are modular and upgradeable. Even if you can’t afford an RTX 3070 card now, if you buy wisely then you will be able to easily upgrade.
CHOICE 3 The core question
The world has moved on from AMD versus Intel. Both firms produce fast, efficient processors. Instead, you should focus on how many cores the processor contains and if these hese support multiple threads (Intel calls this “Hyper-Threading”).
As a rule, a processor with six cores and 12 threads will tackle tasks such as video editing – where the software is designed with multithreading in mind – much more quickly than a processor with four cores and eight threads (or a six-core processor that doesn’t supporting multithreading). You can see this play out in benchmarks such as PC Pro’s own, Cinebench and Geekbench, as detailed on p92.
Intel and AMD use model numbers that indicate where they sit in the hierarchy. A Core i3 and Ryzen 3 are at the low end, Core i5 and Ryzen 5 in the middle, Core i7 and Ryzen 7 near the top and the Core i9 and Ryzen 9 are for enthusiasts with deep pockets.
It’s also worth noting which generation of processor you’re buying. The clue is again in the model name, with Intel’s Core chips starting with the relevant number – so the Core i5-11400 is an 11th-generation processor, and as our graphs reveal it’s significantly faster than a tenthgeneration Core i5-10400.
AMD’s naming methodology isn’t as straightforward, but its latest desktop chips are worth seeking out (they begin with 5, such as the AMD Ryzen 7 58 00X). It’s always worth putting the model name into the search engine of your choice to double-check such information.
CHOICE 4 The graphics card
Your choice of graphics card will dictate the resolution at which you can play demanding games. We have tried to illustrate this in the graphs by giving an average frame rate across
“The major benefit of British manufacturers over the multinationals is that you can pick and choose almost everything”
all our gaming tests at the different resolutions, so you can see the results you are likely to get from each PC. You can also use the 3DMark result to roughly calculate how well each PC will play games such as Fortnite and
Apex Legends at 2,560 x 1,440 (1440p) by visiting pcpro.link/323fortnite.
As with the AMD versus Intel battle, we don’t think you should take up a position regarding AMD or Nvidia when it comes to graphics cards. Both firms make fast cards, and we’re disappointed not to see any AMD-based systems in this Labs to get a better guide to their relative performance. Perhaps this isn’t surprising: there’s barely any stock of AMD’s RX 6000 range of cards and the ones you see on sale tend to be expensive. We blame cryptominers…
Nvidia cards offer gamers a range of options depending on their budget. Just note that buying a GTX rather than RTX card means you’ll miss out on Nvidia’s ray tracing cores – these can help lift a scene due to their handling of light – and its frame-rateboosting Deep Level Super Sampling (DLSS) tech. AMD has also added ray tracing to its RX 6000 series.
Finally, note that cheaper PCs usually rely on graphics integrated with the processor. These provide basic 3D acceleration that can be good enough to run undemanding games, but the 1080p, 1440p and 4K gaming graphs on p92 tell no lies. For these graphs, we used a weighted average of frame rates across all our realworld gaming benchmarks to give an indication of what frame rates you will see. We recommend looking for 40fps or above for smooth play.
CHOICE 5 8GB of RAM or beyond
Windows 10 is perfectly happy with 8GB of memory, but if you can afford 16GB then it’s certainly worth doubling down: some software chews up memory and having more to hand makes life smoother. Gamers in particular will want 16GB of memory, especially if you intend to run other tasks in the background. Unless you’re working with huge files, such as high-res photos and 4K videos, few people will push their computer so hard that they need 32GB or 64GB.
CHOICE 6 Storage principles
Solid-state drives (SSDs) offer tremendous speed advantages over hard disks, which is why only the cheapest machine here – the Acer Aspire – offers a hard disk as its primary storage device. SSDs not only make Windows run more smoothly and boost faster, they’re also quieter.
But things are never quite that simple. Ideally, you should look for an M.2 NVMe SSD: M.2 indicates the format of the drive, resembling a stick of RAM and stuck into a M.2 slot in the motherboard, while NVMe stands for Non-Volatile Memory Express – but what really matters is that it’s many times faster than SATA SSDs.
We recommend you choose a 500GB SSD or larger, as otherwise you’ll soon find space running out and you will want most applications (and particularly games) to be stored on the SSD for quick loading. That said, a secondary storage drive is always useful for space-hogging data such as music, videos and photos, and a hard disk makes sense here as you get much more storage space for your money.
CHOICE 7 Looking ahead
Like every other purchase we make, buying a PC always comes with a compromise. Most of us would love to have the very fastest components in the world, but budget dictates all. Where desktop PCs continue to win over all other formats of computer, however, is expandability.
Sometimes it makes sense to compromise on the most expensive components – the processor and graphics card – at first with a mind to buying faster versions when you can afford them. Just make sure that there’s space in the case for a chunky card and that the power supply has capacity to run it at full pelt; you will see a clear link between the supply rating in our feature table ( overleaf) and the power of the graphics card.
If you’re keen to upgrade, we suggest you consider British manufacturers ahead of their international rivals. Not only can you talk to them and tell them of your expansionist plans before you buy, but they will use fully featured motherboards whereas the likes of Acer, Dell and HP customise their own, and that can lead to sacrifices.
CHOICE 8 A question of support
PC Pro runs an annual survey that provides a breakdown of our readers’ experiences with manufacturers, with the most recent results printed in issue 314 (take part in this year’s survey at pcpro.link/techies21). We summarise the results – for customer service, reliability and one overall rating, with a higher number being better – overleaf.
Also check what’s covered by the warranty and whether it includes return-to-base cover (RTB, where you’re responsible for shipping it back to the manufacturer or retailer) or collect and return (C&R), where the supplier will bear the cost and organise the collection. The best cover is on-site, where the company sends an engineer to fix the problem, but always check the small print to see what is and isn’t covered by this.
“Windows 10 is perfectly happy with 8GB of memory, but if you can afford 16GB then it’s certainly worth doubling down”