Building a £400 Gaming PC

Final Thoughts...

There are many things we feel we’ve learned over the course of this article and I have to say that this has been an incredibly fun piece to write because it happened to be settling a debate we have had in the office for some time now.

Before we get onto rounding this article up though, we couldn’t have completed it without the help of the guys at Scan. In particular, I’d like to thank Chris P, who has been incredibly helpful and has ensured that stock levels have remained healthy on our chosen components.

With that out of the way, I hope that what we’ve proven here is that, although you’re not going to get the best gaming experience known to man on a PC that costs less than a high-end graphics card or CPU, you will get a great experience nevertheless if you’re prepared to do a bit of overclocking.

There were two parts to the office debate – there was one side saying you couldn’t build a good gaming system for £400, and there was the other side (well, me) saying that you could. I think that both sides of the coin are right to some extent, as the gaming experience on the default system we specced up wasn’t fantastic by any stretch of the imagination – we found ourselves spending a lot of time fine-tuning the in-game graphical settings because the auto-selected settings were way too optimistic in two of the three games.

However, once we’d overclocked the system, things got a lot more interesting and we were able to play all three games at settings that we were actually very happy to play the game at. Not only could we enable some of the high quality options in Crysis, but we could also play both Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and World in Conflict at their maximum settings.


Gaming on this system was incredible fun once we’d finished tweaking it, but up until that point it wasn’t looking particularly good. In fact, I found myself reaching for my beloved Xbox 360 controller on more than one occasion through sheer frustration. The great thing about PC gaming though is that the bounds are limitless – you can improve the graphics further down the line and you can tune to get better performance. That’s something you can’t do with a console, but it does require time investment on the user's part and that's not for everyone.

Anyway, I’m not here to create a debate the benefits and downsides of PCs and games consoles – I came here to prove that PC gaming isn’t as expensive as everyone seems to think. You don’t need the biggest, baddest and most power hungry high-end graphics card on the market to enjoy games at their maximum in-game settings, and you don’t need the world’s fastest processor either.

You can get a great gaming experience—a great computing experience, in fact—on a system that costs less than that high-end CPU or graphics card on its own. This industry focuses on the ‘sexy’ high end stuff far too often in my opinion and it’s that that is killing a lot of our enthusiasm because it’s no longer fun – we’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: enthusiasts are being misinterpreted. Building a PC that burns holes in ones pockets isn’t what enthusiasts are about; building a PC that delivers maximum bang-for-buck is what it’s all about and I think we’ve achieved that right here.