Last updated on 27-04-2026
We anticipate that you may wish to purchase a new computer to see you through your time at Falmouth University. This page will be updated to reflect our start of term buying advice for students enrolling on our undergraduate courses who wish to purchase a personal computer.
Depending on your needs you may prefer a desktop or a laptop. We often find our students prefer a laptop due to the portability. Although laptops tend to be more expensive, they do not need additional peripherals.
Although we have facilities with up to spec PCs available on campus, having a personal computer can be helpful for work done from home or when facilities are in high demand. We have separated our computer recommendations by course, which you will find below.
In the following document we provide a rough recommended specification and price range, as well as a list of recommended retailers. The parts recommendations we provide take into account latest gen hardware to ensure the longevity of the system you build. However, it is worth noting that looking at older gen hardware can be an easy way to keep costs down without a huge decrease in performance.
As of writing there is a shortage of Ram(memory) and storage parts for PC's. This has led to a large hike in prices that could last for months or years depending on the market. As a result buying a pc parts or a prebuilt has become more expencive. We will try best to make suggestions that are within the normal budget but there will be some sacrafices to the usability of the device in the long term.
You can purchase complete systems or parts from retailers. The websites below are recommendations from us for buying parts as traditionally building a pc from scratch is usually much cheaper than buying a prebuilt system.
- MSI
- ACER
- ASUS
- LENOVO
- GIGABYTE
- HP / Omen
For these courses we recommend a computer that has plenty of power, as students will be working on or with complex 3D assets and game engines, which are notoriously resource heavy.
Desktop Specifications
- Rough price range: £1300-£1500
- Processor: AMD Ryzen 5 9600X or Intel Core Ultra 5 245K
- Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 or AMD Radeon RX 9070
- Memory: 16GB DDR5 (32GB is ideal but will push the budget due to current RAM prices — see warning above)
- Main Storage: 1TB or higher M.2 NVMe SSD
- Secondary Storage: 1TB or higher SATA SSD
- Operating System: Windows 11
Laptop Specifications
- Rough price range: £1500-£1800
- Processor: Intel Core Ultra 7 265H or AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370
- Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 (RTX 5070 Ti achievable at the upper end of the budget)
- Memory: 16GB DDR5 (32GB is ideal but will push the budget due to current RAM prices — see warning above)
- Main Storage: 1TB or higher M.2 NVMe SSD
- Operating System: Windows 11
The courses above can involve resource intensive workflows but generally wont require the most 'beefy' of specs to provide a seemless experience. If you are an esports student please look below for recommendations on external storage mediums, these are recommended due to the large storage size of video files.
Desktop Specifications
- Rough price range: £900-£1100
- Processor: AMD Ryzen 5 9600X or Intel Core Ultra 5 245K
- Memory: 16GB DDR5 (see RAM warning above)
- Storage: 1TB M.2 NVMe SSD
- Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 or AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT (the RTX 5060 Ti is preferred if you can find a model within budget — look for models under £400)
- Operating System: Windows 11
Laptop Specifications
- Rough price range: £1000-£1200
- Processor: Intel Core Ultra 5 235H or AMD Ryzen AI 7 350
- Memory: 16GB DDR5 (see RAM warning above)
- Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060
- Storage: 1TB M.2 NVMe SSD
- Operating System: Windows 11
This course does not require high specs due to the nature of working with embedded systems. Further to this, our robotics students often prefer purchasing a laptop, focusing on portability and battery life due to the mobile nature of the course. A desktop PC is not advised. Many robotics students will purchase second hand laptops and then install a linux distro on them.
Laptop Specifications
- Rough price range: £500-£700
- Processor: Intel Core Ultra 5 225U or AMD Ryzen AI 5 340
- Memory: 16GB DDR5
- Graphics: Integrated Graphics
- Storage: 512GB SSD
- Operating System: Windows 11
We highly recommend students purchase an external solid state drive for transferring the large video content that you will be working with on the course. Here are two recommendations.