Computer for 11 Year Old

[charlie_B]

If you don't want to mess with building one the Dell XPS series are pretty good IMO. I have one that is probably somewhere between 5-7 years old now I think and has been solid for me. I don't do heavy gaming on it as most of mine are older titles and I do more non-gaming stuff with it really. I upgraded it with a SSD hard drive a couple years ago that made a world of difference and probably could just upgrade my 1 TB graphics card to something newer and be fine playing most of the newer games out there. Apex gaming PCs is one that custom builds or has ready to go builds you can buy too and I am sure there are a few more places out there like them too.

Like many said here all depends on what he plans to use down the road. If you buy one already built look at the gaming PC models not the personal or business models as a lot of those don't come with a lot of expansion options anymore especially when it comes to graphics cards because most are integrated graphics and may not even have an expansion port if you buy one of their compact models.

I'll take that card when you get rid of it. lol. I am guessing you meant 1 GB

 

[JimDogRock]

A couple points to note also about prebuilts, especially from the big names such as Dell/Alienware, HP, etc.
1. Power supply units might be sized "just right" for that system. Meaning that it's just fine for the low power GPU that comes in the system. But when you want to upgrade to a card that might take 100 more watts of power it will struggle. Windows might even blue screen when the GPU tries to take more power than the PSU can deliver.
2. Expansion space. Especially for GPU. I have a 5 or 6 year-old HP Omen that I picked up cheap on Craigslist a while back to run some home server things as well as do some crypto mining since it had to be powered on continuously. The point of the anecdote is that the middle-tier GPU that I put in for crypto mining barely fit. And I mean just barely.

 

[CYdTracked]

I'll take that card when you get rid of it. lol. I am guessing you meant 1 GB

LOL, yeah I meant 1 GB!