We either need a universal way to benchmark the performance of PCs… or for people to stop asking Barry what they should buy
Barry Collins is a former editor of PC Pro. This doesn’t make him qualified to assess whether a ThinkPad will run Red Dead Redemption 2. Capeesh? @bazzacollins
When friends come to me for tech advice, there’s one question I dread above all others: “Can you recommend a gaming PC?” Can’t you ask me something easier, like “can you sequence the DNA of a Cadbury’s Twirl?” or “why do people keep hiring Piers Morgan?”
There’s no such thing as a gaming PC. A gaming PC means different things to different people. To my dad, it means a system capable of playing Solitaire without crashing when the cards bounce and cascade down the screen after a win. To the 15-year-old son of my friends, it means being able to play Cyberpunk 2077 with ray tracing, at high texture quality and medium volumetric fog resolution.
Of course, parents of said 15-year-old don’t know that. They know he plays “that shooting game” when they’d rather he was doing his maths homework, but they don’t know what the game’s called, and don’t want to ask him because they’re buying the PC as a surprise and they haven’t spoken to him for the best part of three years anyway. He’s a teenage boy, after all. So I end up recommending a £3,500 hulking desktop tower with the latest Nvidia monstrosity inside it, just to be on the safe side, and said parents never speak to me again, either.
Still, at least they’re better off than the poor souls who buy “gaming PCs” from the Facebook Marketplace. I’m not sure whether the sellers of these used systems are unaware that PCs depreciate faster than signed photos of Phillip Schofield or whether they’re pulling a fast one, but the amount of vastly overpriced old hardware you see changing hands on there is insane.
Few bother detailing the spec, relying on three blurry pictures of a dust-ridden case in a dimly lit bedroom to sell the thing. Those that do will list a Pentium III with 128MB of RAM and a Matrox graphics card for “£650, no timewasters”. And yet these things do sell. When I see such a listing, I’m enormously tempted to warn off potential buyers in the comments, telling them that Windows XP-era heap of rubble isn’t fast enough to run Jet Set Willy, but I don’t want Dave from Croydon sliding into my DMs and threatening to stab me.
Even when people can tell me what games they want to play on a prospective purchase, it’s far from easy t
