PC gaming help. Wanting to get into PC gaming for the first time.

Getting a PC capable of 4k even today is going to cost quite a bit.

Going deep into details in regards to builds can be pretty exhausting, especially to a newbie, so i'll just give you a basic general price for each tier of rig (I'm no expert so take this with a grain of salt):

Low end/Starter - This tier'll run you between $300-600 and will either be for playing games that are already out with no plans for supporting many new games/even some current ones (near the $300-400 mark) or for giving you a decent base to start with in which you can periodically upgrade to continuously be able to play current games on lower settings and slightly old games on higher settings (near the $600 mark). If you know what you're doing and are frugal, you can build a PC that is as powerful or more powerful than a PS4 even at this tier.

Medium - ~$900 for this tier, and it'll be the main range for a PC that can play modern games at normal/high settings with good frames. Typically good for a year or two before needing to be upgraded. At this tier, if your rig isn't as powerful as a PS4 then you're falling for a colossal scam. 

Enthusiast/High end - For ~$1200 you can get a machine that'll play anything currently on the market at 1080p 60 FPS (and will be able to for a good half a decade unless games suddenly start advancing their graphics rapidly), and even some games at 4K. If you're spending this much money, make damn sure you know what you're doing or else you're gonna get shortchanged.

Rich - If you're willing to shell out $2000 or more, you can get a machine that'll literally last you 10 years provided you don't burn the system up or anything. I don't recommend shelling out this much money for your first rig even if you're filthy rich because again, you're gonna need to know what you're doing.

tbh PCGamer has some pretty good build guides 'n' tutorials. Highly recommend checking them out: www.pcgamer.com/best-gaming-pc/

Edit: Oh, and if it's not clear, make sure you build your own PC. It can be daunting to think about, but it's actually not that hard with a little bit of research and it'll save you a fuckload of money. Buying a prebuilt gaming rig is almost always worse than building your own. 

Edit 2: Also would like to mention that none of these prices take into account anything but the actual computer itself. Monitors, keyboards, mice and all other peripherals are of course going to add to the price. 

I have a 28" 4K display.  I wish it were smaller, but that's life.

As TooLazy4Name mentioned a 4K gaming PC will cost a fair bit, although that is somewhat dependent on if you consider 60 fps to be a requirement or an aspiration.

My PC

i7 4790K 4GHz, 16GB DDR RAM, 2x GTX 980 Ti + SSD will quite comfortably get 4K on DA:I and often return me 60 fps, but there are frequent drops and I'm constantly worried about the temperature my primary GPU reaches.

If you are content with 30 fps then 4K is within reach.

While I am an unrepentant PC gamer, I'd have to confess that it would be cheaper to buy a 4K TV than get a PC capable of 4K + 4K monitor.  I'd be a bit wary of that PS4 Pro 4K claims, though.  That GPU's specs don't seem anywhere near enough to get that resolution without cutting back massively in other areas that subtly add to the visual experience of gaming.

Bolded for truth.

Building your own PC - the first time - is a nerve-wracking, bucketload of sweat inducing exercise.  But you will save a lot of money and you will get a superior machine.  Just take your time with it.  Watch youtube videos and forums like tomshardware and hardwareguru are really helpful.

Am I the only person in the world who hasn't had trouble with the new Origin?

Or were you using that as a general example and they're "all the same", Origin, Steam, GoG Galaxy etc?

I'm glad to finally see someone who is only a console gamer expressing this opinion. I have both a gaming PC and a PS4, but after the announcement that both Microshaft and Sony are going to be doing mid-generation hardware upgrades, i've decided that the PS4 is likely to be my last console. 

I am not familiar with CyberPowerPC, as we don't have it here in the North. What I know and recommend for gaming PCs are either Alienware or Razer.

If you are willing to spend time and effort looking into overclocking, and the used PC market, you can obtain a decent amount of value out of it. My last rig cost me about 1000 USD (maybe 900-950 USD once we include the Australia tax) and was capable at playing older games (Shogun 2, Dragon's Dogma) at 4K mostly maxed out. I've got a heap of screenshots in the Dragon's Dogma thread. Modern titles would require big settings adjustments but are playable in the medium-high range.

Getting a PC that can max out 4K games beyond doubt is still ridiculously expensive and not recommended at all.

Regardless, I would not recommend getting a pre-built system unless absolutely necessary. In most cases, you are just adding a 25% cost onto the price of your system and may end up with inferior components (pre-builts often cheap out on power supplies).

First thing to figure out though, OP, is your budget and desired settings.

To proof my lack of intelligence in PC's, I didn't understand a word of that. Well, what about gaming laptops? Can they do just as much as a PC? 4k and such? I suppose the only downside would be that you can't upgrade a laptop. 

He was talking about the NVidia graphic card and no, you cannot do the same with gaming laptops as with desktops.

"Gaming laptop" is almost an oxymoron. You will not find a laptop that is better than an actual tower computer, and if you find a laptop that can compete with a good rig it will be ridiculously expensive. The simple fact that laptops are smaller than a normal computer tower means that they can't have as much in them which means they can't be as powerful (as a comparatively specced normal rig). 

I mean, if you want to shell out multiple thousands of dollars, be my guest, but it's not exactly economically sound. 

The really good thing about using a laptop with that capability is that they're likely to have a 1600x900 screen.

One of those laptop GPUs should thrash DA:I on that resolution. And the smaller screen size means you have higher pixel density.

I want to clarify a thing about the PS4 Pro and its 4K capabilities, since they are marketing hard for it.



Your gut feelings are correct.

Yes, the PS4 Pro is more powerful than the standard PS4, and will be able to run the games at higher resolutions at the same settings, or with higher settings at the same resolution, but the difference won't be that much because games are required to work on both platforms so there won't be much optimization for the Pro until much later when sales have actually picked up.

Now, the Pro hardware is probably capable of running current PS4 games at the same settings at 1080p or 1440p without struggling. Keep in mind that so many games on the PS4 don't run at 1080p natively either, they are rendered at 900p or less and then upscaled.

And that's the trick the Pro will use as well: upscaling.

Sony and AMD designed hardware dedicated to this function, that makes upscaling a lower resolution frame fast and cheap on hardware requirements. The other trick is that their upscaling functions apply a rather good level of sharpening to make everything crisp on a real 4K TV.

That trick is a lot cheaper than trying to cram inside more powerful hardware for cheap, and while the actual image output will be 4K in resolution, it won't have nearly the same image quality possible on a truly 4K capable PC.

As others said, 4K requires a lot of top end hardware, especially if you want good framerates, but that is assuming you will run games at the maximum settings allowed as well. You can probably get away and have higher resolution at lower settings on mid range hardware, but why? The whole point of PC gaming is that things can actually made to look better than any other platform, and as far as anyone is concerned a really good 1080p picture beats any day a blurry 4K one. Resolution isn't everything.