Apologies as I’m very new to this. My 11yr old daughter is very keen to start learning game development in UE. She’s been playing around with Roblox & Minecraft up to now on a very old, low-spec laptop.
For Christmas I’d like to buy her a new PC capable of running UE5 so she can start learning the platform, but I only have a budget of £500. Looking at the minimum specs of UE it seems I need £800+ to have any chance.
It’s a see-saw between processor, GPU, RAM etc that I can’t balance out to meet my budget.
I just wanted to check if anyone could offer any advice on what min spec I genuinely could get away with for her to learn (she’s not going to be rendering the next Hollywood epic, obviously) - and therefore if I could squeeze it into my budget, or am I wasting my time?
Many thanks in anticipation.
RAM is always going to be your limiting factor. CPU/GPU will provide features like ray-tracing (or not) but otherwise the size, quality, complexity of what you want to build will all drive RAM-consumption. When package/build, you will need still-more RAM.
Get as good a CPU/GPU as you can reasonably get and make sure to get a comfortable amount of RAM.
However, RAM is something that you can add-capacity to later. So if you splurge on a GPU now you can always add more RAM down the line. If you are flexible/disciplined enough for something like that, then get a good GPU now and pace yourself for RAM as you need it.
If she is just picking it up, IMHO, she might not be doing super-complex things today, so does she need the RAM quite yet?
I’ve built the same project now over the course of many years on 3 different desktops:
1 - An old slim HP destined for recycling with a i7 quad core, 16GB of ram, and no GPU.
2 - A budget build - AMD 3800XT / 32GB RAM / 2060 Super.
3 - My current higher end build, i9-13900k, 64GB RAM, 4080.
Tips:
#1 - I’ve learnt that physical cores are the key to speeding up your development. Physical cores are used for building everything from lighting, to the code itself in visual studio. Get as many cores as you can afford (physical cores, not logical). This is key to fast iteration periods. Meaning faster learning.
#2 - 32GB of RAM minimum, go for 64GB if you can. As mentioned, things get quite RAM intensive. More so if you’re building from visual studio and have it running as well. Doubly so if you start running servers to test locally, etc. Don’t worry about speed as much as capacity. If you cap out 64GB, somethings broken. 
#3 - I started my UE development on a system without a GPU at all, and went a long, long way, before finding myself limited much by that factor. If anything the GPU just smoothed my framerate (duh) which made getting around in the levels easier. If you’re daughter is more intrigued by say, animations and flashy effects, and wants to “build worlds” in the level editor with fancy ray traced lighting, vs “build games” in C++ and blueprints, then you may want to add more weight to the GPU column. Any decent gaming card from the last few years will work fine for a beginner. You can adjust the settings to get a decent frame rate.
#4 - You will want a lot of storage. Demo projects, content, and the engine built from source, take up space quite quickly. Easy to expand storage later if needed although.
Short answer:
NO.
Long answer:
NO.
Unreal is free, but it ain’t cheap.
Thanks everyone - all your info has been very helpful.
Appreciated.