son is building a gaming computer

wendirc

Reputable
Nov 1, 2015
2
0
4,510
My 12 year old son saved up $925 to build his first gaming computer. He's a little over budget, so he may need to wait for the holiday sales before he buys anything. In the meantime, could we get your feedback on the components he's selected? Does it look like a decent list of items? Is he missing anything? Any of the items seem like overkill for a first computer? He'll be playing Minecraft and making videos. He'll be playing other games, too, but I forgot the name of them. Thank you!

1. MSI ATX DDR3 2600 LGA 1150 Motherboards Z97-G45 GAMING

2. EVGA GeForce GTX 960 2GB SSC GAMING ACX 2.0+, Whisper Silent Cooling Graphics Card 02G-P4-2966-KR

3. Intel Core i5-4690K Processor 3.5 GHz LGA 1150

4. Dell E2414Hr 24-Inch LED-Lit Monitor

5. Crucial Ballistix Sport 8GB Kit (4GBx2) DDR3 1600 (PC3-12800) 240-Pin UDIMM Memory

6. Corsair Vengeance K65 Compact Mechanical Gaming Keyboard

7. Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 64bit, System Builder OEM DVD 1

8. Sentey® KRON GS-6005 Desktop Gaming Computer Case

9. WD Blue 1TB Desktop Hard Disk Drive - 7200 RPM SATA 6 Gb/s 64MB Cache 3.5 Inch

10. EVGA 500 W1 80+, 500W Continuous Power

11. Samsung 850 EVO 250GB 2.5-Inch SATA III Internal SSD

 
drop windows 7 it end of life os. pick up windows 10 and if he does not like the way it looks use free classic shell program to make it look like windows 7. i would pick up a newer skylake cpu and mb and ram. it give your son in a few years one or two cpu upgrades without tossing out the mb. the older 1150 pin cpu and mb are going end of life. on the gpu have him hold off till nvidia pascal drops in 2016. have him use onboard cpu grafics or use older gpu from his older pc if he has one.
 

Ralston18

Titan
Moderator
I would forego 9.) the WD 1 TB hard drive. Save the money or put the money toward a second SSD.

Saves room in the case, reduces power requirements and noise. Optionally, he could save video's etc. to an attached USB 3.0 drive via one of those enclosure kits using an existing HDD. Or some other storage location on your family network if you have one.