The PC that you linked is very expensive and also bad for gaming.

Are you looking for a prebuilt or do you want to build your own? Also, the monitor choice matters quite a lot.

There are entire genres on PC that barely exist on console. It's mostly nerd shit like strategy, simulation, and tycoon games. The ones that do get ported to console tend to be crippled in one way or another. That's not even to mention the huge modding scene on PC.

I’m considering buying a renewed PC from Amazon. From what little I know - it seems like a good deal. If I buy something like a renewed Dell XPS 8940 for - I dunno up to $1,500 is that good enough for gaming? I’d prefer a boring PC case.

On Amazon it looks like most of the renewed systems are former office PCs without GPUs, so not the ideal choice for gaming. There are a lot of options for new desktops though

This desktop for $850 will be able to play everything out these days. And the thousands of games from previous years!

Have fun checking out some games :meow-bounce:

easier to yarr harr on a computer i guess

Do you have a tv?

Best option - laptop for whatever your non gaming needs are and buy a console. It’s $500 and you’ll have monumentally less BS to deal with.

1. Since you mention wanting to pirate games, PC wins easily. Consoles are cheaper up-front, but that's about it.
2. The integrated graphics card in that PC isn't anywhere near good enough, unfortunately (from what I can tell it's worse than 10 year old cards). 32GB of RAM is overkill. The CPU is probably also overkill but that's not a big issue compared to the others. I'm also always wary of refurbished items in general.
3. Depends on what level of graphics settings you want, and especially if you're willing to build it yourself. Minimum probably around $600 on a good day, though that will struggle with modern AAA games. $1000 should manage to get something pretty decent.
4. Buying parts that are incompatible, buying an HDD when SSDs are so much faster, and buying pre-builts that are marked up due to the brand (alienware etc).
5. Yes, though it often takes a while for cracks to come out, and you generally can't play multiplayer modes due to anticheat. fitgirl-repacks.site is the place to go. I would suggest qbittorrent as your client.
6. I haven't had a console in years, but AFAIK it's basically impossible to pirate console games (someone correct me if I'm wrong). PC is trivial.

A good place to start, imo, is PC Part Picker (scroll down to see the budget options). Even if you decide to go with a pre-built setup, this will give you an idea of the kind of specs you want. There's also /r/buildapc , which can have decent advice, notifications of deals, etc.

EDIT: Some more notes:

• If it's your first time getting a PC and you don't have any background with electronics stuff, building your own PC might be a headache so it may be better to go with a pre-built. As you upgrade parts over time, you'll gain the knowledge and experience.
• If you do build your own PC, remember to get an anti-static wrist strap so you don't fry any components!
• Whatever you get, make sure you get a standard ATX-sized case so you can replace/upgrade things in the future without having to worry too much.

I wouldn't go with that prebuilt, it doesn't have a graphics card, and you probably can't add one easily because the power supply probably isn't beefy enough. For $1000USD I think you can make a better gaming computer. Also Dell/HP prebuilts suck because the parts are non-standard, so if you want to replace a motherboard or power supply, you are at the mercy of buying only Dell or HP parts.

The new graphics card market kinda sucks right now, and used cards you have to be careful to not buy an improperly treated mining card.

If you want to find a build that makes sense, look up something like "2023 PC Build". It's hard to pick parts that don't hold each other back (if you spend $1000 on a graphics card (GPU) and $100 on a CPU, obviously you won't get the full performance of the GPU).

You probably want 16GB of ram. Your graphics card depends on your budget, and then to choose a processor you look up something like "2023 *graphics *card PC build" to find a CPU that makes sense for the GPU.

Your monitor also matters, because depending on if you want 1080p, 1440p or 4k resolution, it will change how much you spend on GPU.

The motherboard isn't super important unless you need certain features, all that matters is it works for the CPU you choose. You don't need to worry about overclocking probably, but you do need to worry about if wifi/Bluetooth is included on the motherboard.

The motherboard size you need depends on the case size. ATX, mATX and ITX are the sizes of motherboard from big to small, probably don't bother with ITX because you pay more to get small parts that fit in small cases.

PCpart picker makes sure your CPU and motherboard are compatible, and it tell you how big of a power supply you need based on the CPU and GPU.

While building a computer is so easy a 5 year old can do it, I understand the hesitance. It's a lot of expensive parts and it's a lot harder to deal with the troubleshooting alone in the very rare case that something does go wrong.

Your best bet for getting into gaming on a budget is probably going to be by upgrading a workstation with a graphics card like this.

A lot of other people have addressed the nitty-gritty, so I'll just give my opinion on console vs pc - I generally prefer PC gaming. There are some areas where console is better - space, and if you're gonna be moving it around a lot, for example, can be more of a hassle with a desktop, and gaming with laptops tends to have a lot of issues too. But broadly speaking, PC is usually a better experience. Big AAA games tend to be tailored to a console market, and recently there's been a rash of them that don't run well on PC, but outside of those the experience is vastly better on PC. You're not trapped in a single company's ecosystem, you have the freedom to pirate, the indie scene is way bigger than anything you'd expect, and the modding scene is fantastic, especially with Steam workshop which turns most mods into a one-click install.

When it comes to consoles, outside of the Nintendo Switch (thank u Nintendo) pirating games isn't a thing anymore, and with big triple A releases it seems to be less of a certainty on PC as well thanks to Denuvo. I think these days the frugal Xbox and PC gamer mostly relies on Game Pass (:disgost: )

What’s the minimum I’d need to spend to get a gaming PC that plays most games?

Define "most games". If you want to play the latest and biggest Triple A slop on PC on max settings, it's increasingly looking like you will need some kind of ludicrous monster machine. However, for someone like you there's decades and decades of excellent games (not to mention emulating older consoles) you can happily play on modest hardware, and the stuff from the past 10 or so years is still very technically impressive so you don't need to feel like some kind of Dickensian orphan forlornly peering into the window of a candy store.

As for your the computer you linked, it seems to be missing a graphics card entirely. You could get a perfectly decent card for, I don't know, 200 bucks. I do love the optical media drive though. Very retro

Most people would tell you to build your own system or get one prebuilt. I will tell you though that with 1500 bucks you can get yourself a very nice machine

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Basic question: I’d like to get into gaming. What’s better a console or a gaming PC? My PC is super old so I have to buy a new PC anyway.

A console is cheaper and is lower hassle, but you can do a lot more on PC and have access to things like mods for games as well as emulation and a much, much, much bigger library of games available to you. A lot of games that are on console are also available on PC, with a few rare exceptions. Nowadays almost every game gets ported to PC. The only exception is Nintendo whose games are still exclusive to the Switch.

I’m considering buying a renewed PC from Amazon. From what little I know - it seems like a good deal. If I buy something like a renewed Dell XPS 8940 for - I dunno up to $1,500 is that good enough for gaming? I’d prefer a boring PC case.

I do not recommend buying a prebuilt. Strongly consider building your own PC - it's not hard and there are plenty of resources on how to do it, on top of being cheaper and more bang for your buck.

What’s the minimum I’d need to spend to get a gaming PC that plays most games?

800 for a gaming PC able of playing the most recent games, but I would suggest about 1400-1500 for a very decent machine.

What are common mistakes people make when buying a gaming PC?

Focusing on ultimately unimportant aspects of the PC like the looks, purchasing a very bad power supply if they are building it.

Can most games be torrented?

Yes, but AAA games nowadays have Denuvo on them which makes cracking them difficult and slow. Still, you'll have a wealth of games to play anyway if you simply torrent most of them.

What’s easier to torrent? Games for consoles or PC games? Ideally torrents will be my gaming store.

I have never torrented games for consoles, but I assume it's a more annoying process simply because you have to get that shit to work on the console. In my experience, torrenting is pretty simple and easy for most games on PC.

Definitely consider building it yourself. Seriously, it's not that hard and will save you SO much money. I know you said you wouldn't, but seriously, you should consider it.

I built my first one about 5 years ago for about £850 without any experience in pc building. Just followed videos. It took me about a day to build. All I knew prior to this was basically what a fan does. NVIDIA graphics cards will give you least hassle is what I found out. 'Building' is literally just buying all the parts and plugging wires between the parts. Many of the wires have different shaped ends that will only fit in a specific hole so it's even more obvious. If you wanted tips on building a pc I'm sure this website would inundate you with valuable knowledge if you asked.

My specs at the time were beating prebuilts up to like the £1600 mark. Maybe that's changed due to graphics card prices going up so much over the last few years, but yeah, there's big money to be saved. Plus, you can add bits and bobs as you please.

My PC is still going strong to this day, still plays all the new games, even if I have to turn the graphics down sometimes. It plays everything up to like 2018 I'd say on maximum graphics with frames per second in the hundreds if I want.

Consoles are better if you're gonna play with friends who only play on those consoles, or with friends in person. PC is better if you're gonna get into high-end games or VR (some VR games like Half-Life Alyx are basically worth getting the setup all on their own).

PS if you want a free copy of my game just hit me up, don't need to torrent and it'll probably run on your old PC.

Unrelated but I just googled "Kor steam" to get that link and according to google my 97% positive Steam review percentage amounts to an 8/10 lmao.

Prebuilt PC is the way to go, don't start off building your own. Build your next one yourself 8 years from now or whatever. Or just slowly swap parts.

I got my households last 3 machines built by CyberPower PC, I dont keep up with everything so I can't say whether it's the best option, but it all worked out great for me. I could have built, but I had to get prebuilt because of some part scarcity at the time.

Before you decide on a PC tower budget, make sure you account for decent peripherals. You dont need crazy shit, but getting to that nice B-tier level of quality will get you 98% of the value honestly.

• Mid range Logitech gaming mouse. FUCK Razer, the hardware is good but the software is outlandishly broken, avoid. Corsair can be great for that mid range but they have a high defective rate. Logitech.
• BIG mousepad, so you can set your mouse to a somewhat low/slow setting. That will let you control it better.
• Mid-range mechanical keyboard. You might want one without the numpad, and go buy a 10 dollar separate numpad keyboard for the 5 times you're gonna use it this year. Better for your arms and gives you more space to swing that mouse.
• if you are using the computer nearby someone, get the quieter mechanical keys!! It will say "red switches" "blue switches" etc on the keyboard's sales listing, and you gotta Google what that means. If theres nobody around to get mad at your noisy keyboard, get "tactile" switches like Blue (loud) or Brown(less loud). The "linear" switches can be nice for some games, but you'll mistype a lot. They're hard to type on for most people. Very sensitive.
• Spend like 200-300 bucks on a monitor. That's not fancy but is likely quite good. Look for response times in milliseconds, make sure it's under 10 or so milliseconds. 5ms are actually pretty common. 1080p is fine, or get a widescreen but not like ultrawide. See this monitor?I literally have never used this monitor, I just did a Google search, but it's probably fantastic for what you need. Honestly, just Google "mid range gaming monitors". Any monitor for gaming will very likely be good and not fuck you over, while a non-gaming monitor might fuck you over by being really slow or whatever.
• check if the monitor has built in speakers. If not you obviously need speakers no question. BUT if you do cheap out and not buy speakers, you gotta gotta gotta get headphones (and probably an audio cable extension). Headphones are better for gaming.
• Wireless bluetooth headphones tend to not work while they're being charged, for some fucking reason, so I avoid them. I never fucking remember to charge them and then I'm fucked when I want to use them. Up to you.
• Gaming headphones often have mics. The mics slightly suck ass, and I use a separate microphone. But honestly... Setting up multi-device computer audio is such a fucking hassle, it's so fucking annoying, and if the software doesn't fuck you, you'll get some stupid echo or static or ambient noise etc... just use the stupid shitty headset mic. It's fine. Make sure to test it with someone and ask if your mic happens to be fucked up

Oh also, set up mouse your mouse sensitivity and try to get your settings saved into the "onboard memory" of the mouse so you can turn off the settings adjustment software when youre done using it. Logitech's software "GHub" lets you do that, it's worth it because even though it's not horrible like Razer, it does crash sometimes. Onboard settings will never ever fuck up.

Another sort of adjacent tip:

Google may be your class enemy, but they are your tech support friend. Most stuff you want to do will be answered by someone on the internet already.

And if the answers to your question are all vague shitty blogs, you add this to your Google search: "site:reddit.com" without the quotes. That will show you only results from :reddit-logo:. Again, that site sucks but it has a much higher success rate of actually good answers compared to the shitty blogs spamming up the rest of Google.