Shopping for computer hardware can often be a daunting task for those not familiar with the terminology, the average shopper will often simply buy whatever is on sale or what is recommended to them without knowing if they are getting good value for their money or not. In a time where money is tight, getting the best bang for your buck is more important than ever, fortunately I have over 10 years of experience buying and building PCs and in this article I will break down the key things you need to know to do your own independent research and make informed purchases. I will break the guide into two parts, the first will be for shopping for a basic laptop £500 or under and only cover the bare essentials, the second will be an enthusiast guide for shopping for a high end laptop, buying a prebuilt gaming/workstation PC or shopping for parts for your own PC and I will go in depth about each component you need to consider. You can read the second part to this blog where I talk about high end gaming laptops here
Two terms I would like to cover before getting into the guide are “price to performance ratio” and “Use case” understanding these terms are critical for finding the best value for money. Price to performance refers to how much performance you are getting per pound spent, this doesn’t always scale linearly, on the lower end, a piece of hardware that costs £200 rarely gives double the performance of something that costs £100 pound. It is often a lot more than twice as powerful. On the higher end the opposite is often true, the sweet spot is usually somewhere in the middle.
Use-case refers to what you plan on using the PC for, there are rarely bad PCs, just PCs not suited for your use case. If you plan to play the latest video game or develop on the PC a cheap laptop is going to be bad for that use case, similarly there is no point in spending thousands of pounds on a PC full of high end components if you only use it for browsing the internet and sending email.
Low end Laptop shopping guide
F or the purposes of this guide, “low-end” assumes a budget of no more than £500. With the main use case being doing tasks such as internet browsing, content consumption, office work, remoting into a more powerful cloud PC and perhaps some light gaming.
The first thing I would like to clear up is that Macbooks and PC Laptops are not the same thing. Macbooks are Laptop computers produced by Apple and run on Mac OS while PC laptops are produced by a wide range of companies and run on the Windows operating System from Microsoft. This guide is mostly irrelevant for people shopping for Macs.
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Above is an image of the listing for the current most popular laptop between £300 and £500 on Amazon as of the time of writing. To the average shopper the specifications given are not likely to mean much so I will start by going over the different key components to be aware of when shopping for a Laptop PC. Click here to view this product on Amazon (we are not affiliated!)
CPU
The CPU (Central Processing Unit) is the chip that does most of the work, the faster it is the faster it can run programs. The main thing to consider when shopping for a CPU is the core count, the more cores the CPU has, the more work it can do. I would recommend getting at least 4 cores generally, however the situation has gotten slightly more complex in the past few years with newer generation Intel CPUs so I will just recommend which class of CPU you should get at the end of the section.
There are two main brands for CPUs, Intel and AMD, neither is really better than the other but both use marketing terms that can be difficult to understand.
The CPU in the example system is listed as a i5-1135G7, I will explain what this actually means.
For Intel they name the CPUs typically as “I” followed by a number, 3, 5, 7 and 9. These numbers do not really mean much apart from giving a general idea of performance class. I3 is the lowest class, generally only good for light office work tasks, browsing and simpler/older games. I5 is mid range and generally the best value for money for gaming. I7s are high end and generally aimed at high end gaming systems that can also do professional work well. I9 are the highest end consumer chips, these are generally overkill for any gaming related task and should only be used for CPU intensive tasks such as professional level video editing.
This doesn’t tell the full story however, an I7 could refer to a processor that came out this year or one that came out 10 years ago, this is where the second number comes in, the first two numbers are the most important, in this case 11, that tells us what generation this chip is, in this an 11th generation i5, looking this up you will find that it was released in 2020 and is thus not terribly out of date. Some second hand sellers on the likes of E-bay will simply list “I7” computers for a low price and not mention that it is a processor from 2013 or something else that is massively out of date to scam unaware shoppers. The rest of the numbers are not really relevant to our purposes.
AMD follows a similar scheme, I is replaced by Ryzen (sometimes shortened to R) following the same 3,5,7 and 9 and the first number indicates generation, in this case 7th generation.
I would still recommend putting the exact code into a search engine and looking up articles and reviews about the specific processor because sometimes this general scheme isn’t always true.
For a PC Laptop in this budget I would recommend an I3/Ryzen 3 or an I5/ Ryzen 5 processor that had a release date no earlier than 2020.
RAM (sometimes also just called memory)
RAM is where programs and other critical data is stored while the PC is using it, it allows the processor to nearly instantly access data it needs to complete the current task. In short the more RAM you have the more processes the PC can be working on at once. If the current workload exceeds the current RAM, programs may run slow or even crash entirely.
I would not recommend anything lower than 8GB even for simple work and browsing tasks as programs have become increasingly RAM intensive over the years, 16GB is a good investment for future proofing and general gaming. Anything over that is overkill outside of heavy work tasks.
Storage drive
A storage is where all of your files and programs are kept, the more you have, the more programs and files you can save on your PC. There are two main types of storage device HDD (Hard Disk Drive) and SSD (Solid State Drive). I would highly advise against getting a laptop with HDD, HDD’s are mechanical devices which run far slower than SSDs. A PC with a hard drive may take minutes to boot up and load programs while an SSD will do it in seconds. As for storage size, I would generally recommend 1TB (terabyte), this is equivalent to 1000GB (gigabyte) though 512GB is not a terrible option if you aren’t a heavy user or downloading many games and programs. The storage is usually one of the only things that can be upgraded on a laptop by the user, so if you find you are running out of space you can buy a higher capacity drive. You could also buy an external drive store/back up extra files.
Screen
Generally 1080p is fine on laptops for consuming most content, laptop screens are small enough to the point where higher resolutions like 1440p and 4K are not that noticeably better than 1080p
Other considerations
The physical dimensions of the laptop may be important for you as might the weight. This is going to differ between every laptop so you will just have to look these details up. Similar case with battery life.
I did not mention GPUs (Graphics Processing Unit) in this article because most Laptops in this price range do not have one and simply use the graphics processing included with the CPU. These are generally weak and only suited for light gaming and 3D work.
Recommended specs overview
When looking for a PC of this class I would recommend looking for a Laptop that at least has an I3/ Ryzen 3 processor from a generation that is no older than 3 years with up to an I5/Ryzen 5 if you want more performance for games or development tasks, At least 8GB of RAM but no more than 16GB and an SSD storage drive with no less than 516GB of storage space.
With Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales upcoming (at the time of writing 22/11/23) you should have a good chance of getting a lot more out of your budget. My final recommendation is generally to avoid anything that retails for under £300 not on sale, machines in that price point usually have terrible price to performance Ratios.
One important think to bear in mind is if your child is coming in at entry level with Game Changers, then you really only need a budget machine, as our mentors will help you connect that device to one of our remote game design machines. This means it will feel like they are working on their local device at home when actually they are looking at the desktop of a Game Changers high spec PC. You can read more about our specs here.
You can certainly see how your child’s game design journey goes and if positve, then there is always the option to upgrade later to a high spec Game Design Lapiop or PC later on. We will be writing about that shortly.
