Hi all My kid will get a gaming pc soon. I can’t swallow the cost of a whole setup at the moment. I’m thinking of getting a good motherboard with a decent second hand graphics card (a colleague I trust can find me one). And over time upgrade where needed. For monitor I would be using my TV.
Is this a smart idea? We’d have a wireless mouse/keyboard and some table thing to game from the couch.
At the moment my kid is into Roblox and Minecraft, but I assume once his pc can run more; he’ll play ‘real’ games. We are also looking to learn to program (scratch/python). Would that work on a TV?
The TV is an older model (10 years old).
Edit; Thanks everyone for the ideas and advice. We’ll try the TV first. And will also look into a steamdeck. It’s nice to get such positive feedback from everyone!
Depends on the TV. For gaming, it would be essential that it has some form of gaming/low latency mode.
Also, why would you pay extra for a “good” main board? That’s literally the one thing where you can go cheap without a problem if you’re not investing in the high-end segments of the other components.
As a sidenote: have you looked at something like a SteamDeck for your kid? It’s a full fledged PC that you kid can hook up to the TV and if you want to watch something on it the kiddo can still use it with the build in display. the base model is also dirt cheap for what you get.
Haven’t thought on that, but the Steam deck is a great option! OP should consider this!
Although for long term, you get better upgradablity which I think the kid would appreciate if they’re into hardware at some point…
They were selling refurbed Steam Decks recently too so you can get an even better price.
Second on going for a more budget motherboard. They seem the most likely of any to change acceptable inputs over time. A proper 1080p (preferably 144hz but 60-90 isn’t unacceptable) monitor will give a lot of longetivity.
Thank you for the motherboard advice. I was under the assumption that it’s something you buy once good and it shouldn’t change.
I should look into steamdeck. I know nothing about it 😅 Price wise it seems interesting, but that makes me doubt about specs. I’ll review some sites and YouTube’s to get a good idea of what it can do.
Thanx
I played a lot of Elden Ring with a steam deck plugged into a cheap TV. I wouldn’t want to play anything competitively on one, and I wouldn’t want to play FPS on it like that, but overall it wasn’t bad.
Get the lowest model with a microSD card and go to town for a few hundred bucks. If it’s ever not enough it’s pretty simple to break one open and replace the drive with a 1TB drive. I have dozens of games installed across microSD cards and shaders filled my drive. Took me about 20 minutes to replace it. Would take someone with no knowledge probably an hour.