Recommended small form factor all-round PC

[soopytwist]

A friend of mine would like a small form PC, something good enough for work and play. She would use it for general internet use while her son would like to play Fortnite on it so it needs to be decent enough to run that at least. She doesn’t want to break the bank either. Though could probably stretch to £400. The important thing here though is it needs to be small and tidy with included monitor. She has thrown some ideas my way but the specs look pretty awful: Lenovo IdeaCentre 3 or HP M01-F0013na Desktop PC. Also needs to be simple, pre-built with some room for upgrade I guess.

[BillButNotBen]

Haven’t checked recently, but back when I was interested in small form factor PCs they were so overpriced compared to larger desktops that I never ended up getting one. Laptops were comparably priced and easier. Desktops were much more powerful for the price.
Laptops don’t have much room for upgrade, but when I checked the SFF Pcs didn’t have much more.

This was a number of years ago, so all that may have changed now.

If it was just web browsing then something on ChromeOS would probably be a good bet for something small and cheap, but that won’t run fortnite.

[alms]

Though could probably stretch to £400. The important thing here though is it needs to be small and tidy with included monitor. She has thrown some ideas my way but the specs look pretty awful: Lenovo IdeaCentre 3 or HP M01-F0013na Desktop PC. Also needs to be simple, pre-built with some room for upgrade I guess.

400 quid is quite tight, I don’t think one can afford to be very picky, especially if the monitor has to fit inside that budget.

[BillButNotBen]

Fortnite will apparently run on pretty low end pc hardware, so anything with a modern Intel graphics card or with any kind of integrated ATI/Nvidia graphics card can probably run that. Other games may have higher requirements.

But yeah, I’d imagine you’re not going to get anything with ‘gamer specs’ for 400quid if you need to include a monitor.

[alms]

From the cursory look I’ve taken, that price level is pretty much “cut every corner in sight” territory.

Like 90W PSUs and spinning rust, when end user price is about the same for a 1 TB mechanical drive, or a Corsair 250 GB SSD.

Ryzen integrated graphics are quite capable, BTW.

[looper]

She should probably buy a used office PC and used graphics card on eBay. Like a used Dell Optiplex SFF (Small Form Factor). The graphics card will need to be “Low Profile” in order to fit into a small case. You’ll also want the graphics card to run off 75 watts of power or less to run on the low-power power supplies of office computers, so an Nvidia card whose last two numbers end in “50” (and without any extra appelation like “Super” or “Overclock Edition”), for example. If you get a used graphics card on eBay, buy it from a domestic seller and at a not too-good-to-be-true price, to avoid “fake” graphics cards from China.

Here is a video which, while focused on regular-sized used PCs, outlines very clearly how to shop for the right speed of CPU in your used computer and what a reasonable amount of RAM is, etc: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7oYLY8j03M

There’s also a website (just Google “CPU graphics card bottleneck”) where you can plug in your CPU and graphics card names and make sure they’re a good fit for each other.

I recently bought a used Optiplex with an i5 4590/500 GB HD/8 GB RAM, and a GTX 1050 Ti graphics card, for a total of about $260 shipped off eBay and I’m quite happy with the performance of the build. I think it’s about equivalent to a PS4 or so and it’s good for 1080p gaming. It could’ve been even cheaper if it weren’t for the pandemic.

[soopytwist]

Thanks all. It’s all sorted now.