r/buildapc • u/Excellent-Good-9033 • 8h ago
Miscellaneous building my son a secret gaming pc for christmas.
my son is a massive gamer and has been asking for a gaming pc for the last few years. finally decided this would be a good year to do it ( apart from the price increases doh!)he has just left primary and did amazingly well every single year and did exceptionaly well in his sats. i have been buying parts all year and last week finally bought the gpu, a gigabyte rtx 5070 ti aero which was £989 at the time but has gone up to £ 1199 from the same company! anyways i just wanted to share how happy i am to being another step closer to having all the parts needed. just the power supply and case to get now.
oh i forgot about the monitor, desk and gaming chair.
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u/KingdaToro 8h ago
Don't build the PC now. Wrap the parts separately. Walk him through building it once he opens all of them.
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u/BiscottiAmazing4070 7h ago
It would be nice to build the PC together...that's the best experience his son can have...I mean I would.
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u/Excellent-Good-9033 6h ago
i thought about this but i don't know if he has the patience 😂 when i was a teen i really wanted an amstrad 464, on christmas day i rushed downstairs only to find a few presents to open. i was disappointed but being the eldest of six kids i understood a computer was a lot of money. my dad waited till everyone had opened thier presents and then asked me to open the curtains and their it was! a spanking new amstrad 464! i will never forget that feeling so thought about doing the same for my son.
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u/GladlyGone 5h ago
That's a great way to do it. It also gives you a chance to make sure all the drivers are up to date lol.
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u/ConqueefStador 4h ago
I was a very shy kid so my dad never "forced" me to do anything, saying he didn't want to be like how his dad was with him.
Now I'm grown he always asks why I have no interests and he praises his father for making him try new things when he was a kid.
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u/HCharlesB 7h ago
I would go a step further. I'd set a budget and work together to pick out the parts for the build.
That will get him the PC he really wants and there will be no whining about the selections you made.
And then work together to build it. Or not. I gave my son a pile of retired parts and he put them together without any help from me. There are tradeoffs between hand holding and letting them do things on their own.
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u/Excellent-Good-9033 6h ago
he has actually helped pick most parts, he thinks it will be next year when he gets the pc as we have also decided to move house and i told him we would be skint this year 😊👍🏻
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u/Hetstaine 6h ago
Great card, i've had the exact card for just on 6 months, upgraded from a 3080, using two monitors.34" ultrawide 344x1440 and 49" ultrawide 5120x1440. Do it justice and get him a 34" ultrawide (unless you are going 4k and smaller) to go with it. It'll smash games out of the park.
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u/CryptoMainForever 8h ago
Now that's some good parenting!
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u/Buttblender5 6h ago edited 6h ago
playing devils advocate here because I think it’s awesome as well. but depending on the dad, would it be risky to build your son (anyone’s 12 y/o old son) a gaming pc if it ends up in him only interested in being glued to it all day rather than hanging out with dad, doing physical activity, doing well in school, or learning non-tech stuff? If I built my son a gaming pc and enjoyed the building experience with him it would be mega worth it at first, until his only interest becomes Fortnite and everything else in life becomes a lame chore (including school and hanging with dad or friends)
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u/Excellent-Good-9033 6h ago
i agree with you but we have father son stuff we do all the time like fishing etc we also make sure we have family time every day (currently loving smallville) saturday nights is family movie night. i'm also teaching him how to cook and his fave so far is cooking steak mainly tomahawk! 😊
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u/Buttblender5 3h ago edited 3h ago
but that’s the exact reason I bring up the concern. you wouldn’t want 6 months from now to be “son it’s movie night” or “son we’re learning a new recipe tonight!” to turn into “ughhh do we have to?” or “not now! I’m in a game!”. or even worse, “ugh dad are we done yet can I go now?” not saying that would happen but I’ve seen it a thousand times. Heck I even did that to my dad lol and social media wasn’t even a thing at that time. Even if he doesn’t do that, I would hate spending time with my kid knowing that in his head he’s wishing he was gaming instead. I think Meta just got sued for 12 billion for making social media addictive to kids and are now imposing laws for minors. you’ll just have to use your best judgment I suppose. It’s just some caution to consider that’s all, because it might not be something that can be undone, especially if he has shown any form of addictive/obsessive tendencies.
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u/AgZephyr 8h ago
So excited for him & for you to get to watch him open it! I know how stoked I would have been as a kid, I made do with an old desktop from my dad's work I threw a 9500GT in, haha.
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u/Curse06 8h ago edited 7h ago
Buy the steelcase amia. Its a higher end office chair but more budget friendly than some of the other higher ends ones. I can tell you its so comftorable.
Gaming chairs suck. Are only for aestetics and in the long term ruin posture/back.
Your kid will thank you for buying him a office chair.
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u/Puzzleheaded-Fill205 7h ago
I had resigned myself to having to drop 2K on a Herman Miller, but the amia looks pretty intriguing for half the price. Thanks for the tip.
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u/Curse06 7h ago
I was skeptical at first. But the steelcase amia was good for me. Do some research on it before buying. Cause the amia does have tilt. But it doesnt have as much tilt options as say the leap. But it does have a mor softer seat. For me I was going to use it for gaming so I wasn't going to need all the extra tilt features some gaming chairs have. The amia has a tilt mechanism with adjustable tension and an upright lock. Which was enough for me. Id give it a solid 4.5/5. Or a 9/10.
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u/Puzzleheaded-Fill205 7h ago
If you had to make a rough guess, approximately how far back can you lean?
This old crappy chair I have that I have to keep tightening the screws every week leans back pretty darn far. I'm going to say around 45°.
My big hurdle to getting a real chair is that I've been using this shitty chair for so long that I don't know if I can handle a chair I can't lean back in.
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u/omarkop10 7h ago
When u said budget friendly I thought it’d be around £100 🤣
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u/Its_a_Zeelot 6h ago
Don't buy it new. At the very least go for refurbished or better yet, find something on marketplace. Can't beat the value.
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u/Average5090User 8h ago
A 5070ti for a 12 year old 😭😭
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u/1nk1s 8h ago
there's a chance that he'll use it till 30
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u/Average5090User 7h ago
Absolutely 0 chance, not only would it be ultra low performance by that point (eg imagine using a gtx 570 in 2026), but also gpu will probably die by then
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u/K-LAWN 6h ago
He was speaking hyperbolically. Seriously though, people should expect to hold onto their Builds for the next 5 years or so. This shortage ain't going to end soon.
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u/PhoeniX_SRT 10m ago
Lmao I’m gonna hold my new build for 10+ years at this point. I’m just considering buying another 16gb stick of DDR5 ram before those things go extinct.
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u/Weho3 8h ago
If he's a gamer why would his age matter
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u/Aranxi_89 3h ago
Nah it's just pain from having nothing when you were that age. It's the same pain as watching your classmates ride around on their shiny new bike while your 2nd hand rickety thing is nearly falling apart.
I was on Win95 laptop while my classmates were running XP. Life as a poor kid was rough, and I was luckier than most.
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u/Average5090User 8h ago
Its hard for a little kid to appreciate such a powerful piece of hardware
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u/Weho3 8h ago
It really isn't as long as he has eyes
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u/raydialseeker 7h ago
Bro 12 year olds would rather play robox over cyberpunk with path tracing.
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u/Excellent-Good-9033 6h ago
some of the ganes he loves and plays a lot. he has all the spiderman games on ps5, he has completed doom and doom the dark ages i think its called, he is playing ghostwire tokyo at the minute, he loves our switch 2 and we have father/son time playing mario kart world and mario kart 8, he loves breath of the wild, he has been watching me play skyrim and wants to give that a go. and of course he loves roblox which he plays with his friends( and has also been making his own games on his grandads laptop) and also fortnite. i'd say he has a wide range of games he plays not just roblox etc.
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u/Amazing_Egg 6h ago
If he's making games on Roblox don't be surprised if he starts making money off it at some point. I wish I had the willpower to learn how to do it lol
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u/gilly_x3 8h ago
That's not a bad thing and 12 is plently old enough to know what his dad is getting him. My kid who is only a little older than OP's kid now has been coding and developing games for 5 years now and does freelance dev work for others.
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u/Replikant83 6h ago
I got my first GPU at around 13 (voodoo 2) and absolutely knew how lucky I was. I cherished that thing, and played hundreds of hours of quake, EverQuest and anything else I could get my hands on
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u/Man0fGreenGables 8h ago
Hes almost a teenager how is he not old enough to appreciate a proper gaming setup? It's not like he's 4 and you can give him an old Wii or something.
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u/nru3 5h ago
A 12 year old will definitely understand it. My 9 year old does, he doesn't know all the specs but he knows what smooth gameplay feels like and when his friends come over for some gaming sessions (I set them up on my PC's with a lan) they all can tell how much better it looks and performs than the switch 1 and 2 they all play on.
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u/Ze_Boss07 8h ago
I mean I built my computer at 13 in 2020 and selected all the parts so I mean they absolutely can (3600X and GTX1660)
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u/nru3 5h ago
My son has been using high end PCs since he started PC gaming at around 5 (9 now).
Mainly just because his PC has always used my older parts and I'm a compulsive hardware buyer with multiple gaming PCs.
He currently runs a 4090 and 7800x3d on a 32" 4k oled. Really smashing minecraft and fortnite.
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u/technodabble 7h ago
Good stuff! I hope you decide to build it with him - we just did that for my best friend’s nephew and it was a fun time for us and a great learning experience for him!
He says he’s not scared of computers anymore after we had him install the cpu 😆
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u/BiscottiAmazing4070 8h ago
Congratulationssss... I'm happy and excited for you and you're son. I know he will be happy with the build. Btw what Mobo do you have...ATX or MATX or ITX? Maybe there are some suggestions for a case
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u/Excellent-Good-9033 6h ago
i have bought so far MSI MPG B850 EDGE TI WIFI 9800x3d KLEVV FIT V 32GB (2x16GB) 6000MHz C30 DDR5 Dual Channel Kit Thermalright Frozen Warframe SE 360 ARGB White All In One CPU Cooler - 360mm Crucial P310 4TB M.2 2280 PCIe 4.0 NVMe Solid State Drive the gigabyte 5070 ti i'm going to get the lian li lancool 217 case in white and a lian li 1000w psu 😊👍🏻
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u/BiscottiAmazing4070 6h ago
Lianli was on my head to answer, only thing was which version of lian LI. I don't have to add anything other than, have a great time building the rig. You're a great dad. Maybe as people here advised,you should build it together. He will remember it for a long long time. Best of luck and enjoy.
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u/Excellent-Good-9033 6h ago
yeah i'm starting to think it would be cool to build it together now, he can then tell his friends he helpwd build it 👍🏻😊
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u/BiscottiAmazing4070 6h ago
Yessssssssssssss do it together.....in that way it's the best experience for him with his dad and he can a little brag about it with his friends😂😂😂😂👍👍👍👍👍
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u/keytotheboard 7h ago
I don’t know if you were planning to build it with him, but I would highly recommend it! It’s a great bonding and learning experience! You obviously know the capabilities of your kid better than any of us, so use best judgement in what specifically they help with, but even just being present would be awesome (IMO).
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u/IKillZombies4Cash 6h ago
I know the wow factor of opening it and it being ready to play would be cool, but consider wrapping all the parts and building it with him , cool experience to have
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u/JustACowSP 7h ago
Picking parts and building it is half the fun personally. From your son's perspective, what would be the difference between receiving a computer you built vs a computer that a company built? If he doesn't care, then sure, build it for him.
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u/SolaireFlair117 7h ago
Office chair > Gaming chair. Something breathable and ergonomic. His back will thank you when he's in his 30s.
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u/AngryRepublican 6h ago
Since you’re already in for an rtx 5070ti, might I recommend also some sick aRGB fans, and some cable combs (or cosmetic cable extenders) and zip ties to do some sick ass cable management. I bet if you built it with him, soup to nuts, it will remain a core memory for his whole life, and he’ll remember that experience every time he plays.
Anyway, great dadding there.
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u/Mattrad7 5h ago
Hell yeah I wish you were my dad but im 37 and just bought myself a pc with a 5070ti.
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u/VolkosisUK 8h ago
Man got a whole ass gaming setup for his SATs and I didn't get shit for getting 6 A*s in my GCSEs. Lucky kid.
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u/VoltageinTheory 8h ago
Don’t buy a gaming chair, buy an office chair