Seven guiding principles when choosing a PC
With prices of components higher than ever, you need to invest your money wisely when booking your next computer
PRINCIPLE 1
The importance of being expandable Now more than ever, the modular nature of desktop PCs is something to be grateful for. It means we can spend a few hundred pounds today for a solid system that will do the job, but have the opportunity to upgrade components (and particularly the graphics card) when the time is right.
Just make sure that there is 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 supplies’ rating in our feature table ( see p76) and the power of the supplied graphics card. They’re greedy beasts, and if you don’t provide enough power they won’t perform.
If you’re keen to upgrade in the future, it’s worth considering the British manufacturers ahead of their international rivals. Not only can you phone them and discuss your expansionist plans before you buy, but they will use fully featured motherboards, whereas the likes of Acer and Dell customise their own, and that sometimes leads to sacrifices. For example, having just two DIMM sockets on the motherboard rather than four.
PRINCIPLE 2
The unbearable brightness of being Let us, for a moment, talk RGB. It’s easy to dismiss RGB as the stuff of boy racers who never grew up, but there is an undoubted pleasure in seeing a brightly lit system – especially if it’s ARGB, so programmable via software, rather than plain RGB. If you think you might like some extra light in your life, make sure you make it a core part of the system you specify, as it’s so much more difficult to tack it on afterwards.
PRINCIPLE 3
The games of wrath Graphics cards come at a premium at the moment, so you need to make sure that you’re only paying for what your games need. The good news is that graphics cards have excellent resell value, so even if you buy a machine with a GeForce GTX 1650 now it should be sellable in a year.
If you’re not a gamer and don’t need GPU acceleration for specific tasks such as high-end photo editing, then it makes zero sense to spend money on a graphics card now. Far better to buy a system such as the PCSpecialist Fusion Master that has integrated graphics and then buy a card a year down the line if you need it.
As our graphs on p90 show, most discrete cards are capable of 1080p gaming.
PRINCIPLE 4
Tinker, tailor, solder, saler
Yes, we know the name of this principle is a stretch – but it’s all about tinkering and tailoring. Buy a mass-made computer – such as one from Acer or HP – and you’re getting what you’re given. Even Dell doesn’t offer as many customisation options as it used to. Compare that to British manufacturers such as Chillblast, PCSpecialist, Scan and Wired2Fire, where you can call them up and discuss what you want your PC to do. Within reason, you can pick and choose almost everything, right down to the power supply.
The one caveat to that is for the PCs they put together specially for our Labs. Often, these can’t be customised (just like the “ready-made” PCs they often have on their websites for quick despatch) because they’ve been honed to hit a price point.
Another downside of bespoke PCs is that you have to wait. Each PC is custom-built and that means it must also be stress-tested, so expect a wait of seven to ten days (likewise for Dell). A pre-built Acer or HP PC can be shipped instantly as it’s just sitting in a warehouse.
If you’re keen to upgrade in the future, it’s worth considering the British manufacturers ahead of their international rivals
PRINCIPLE 5
The number games
If you care about speed but don’t want to dig into the convoluted differences between the chips produced by AMD and Intel, then turn to p90 and our pages of graphs. They will tell their story in straightforward fashion.
But it’s worth understanding what the various chips have to offer. For instance, Intel’s 12th generation Core processors (marked by a “12” at the start of the product name, such as Core i7- 1270 0K) include a combination of Efficient and Performance cores, or E-cores and
P-cores. That, along with the sheer power of those P-cores, means Intel’s chips are now faster, as a rule, than AMD’s. But that’s not true for Intel’s 11th generation chips, so be very aware of what you’re buying.
While a higher frequency also translates into higher speed in our tests, what often separates the chips is how many cores they have. As a rule of thumb, 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 support multithreading).
You can see this play out in benchmarks such as PC Pro’s own, Cinebench and Geekbench, as detailed, once again, on p90.
Both 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 reserved for enthusiasts with deep pockets.
PRINCIPLE 5
Flash board-on
Windows 11 is perfectly happy with 8GB of memory, but if you can afford 16GB then it’s worth doubling up: some software chews up memory, and having more to hand simply 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-resolution photos and videos, few people will push their computer so hard that they need 32GB or 64GB of memory.
Instead of worrying about memory, then, we suggest you focus on storage. Solid-state drives (SSDs) offer tremendous speed advantages over traditional hard disks, which is why even the cheapest machine here includes an SSD as its main drive.
But things are never 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 straight 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. Ideally, look for PCIe 4 rather than PCIe 3 drives, as these are quicker.
We recommend you choose a 500GB SSD or larger, as otherwise you’ll soon find space running out and you’ll 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 so much more storage space for your money than an SSD.
PRINCIPLE 6
This supporting life
PC Pro is in the fortunate position of running an annual survey that provides a breakdown of our readers’ experiences with computer manufacturers, with the most recent results printed in issue 326. We summarise these results – for customer service, reliability and one overall rating, with a higher number being better – on the feature table on p76. If a company has N/A, it simply means we didn’t get enough feedback in our survey to give them a statistically valid result.
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 company 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.
PRINCIPLE 7
How to get rich
Or rather, perhaps, how to avoid being poor. Because when it comes to electricity consumption, desktop PCs are suckers. In fact, if you look at our annualised running costs on p91 you’ll see the range in annual costs stretches from £25 to £91. That’s based on eight hours of use per day, as described in How we test, left. Leave your PC running all the time and it could easily cost you more than £200 per year.