A gaming machine is the one build where the parts list has to answer a specific question — which games, at which resolution, at what frame rate. Get that right and the budget goes where it is felt.
Builds are assembled, stress-tested and handed over within a few days of the parts arriving. Tuning an existing machine is usually a single session, on site or remotely.
Roughly half of this work is new machines and half is getting more out of one that already exists:
There is no general-purpose gaming build. A machine for competitive shooters at 1080p and high refresh wants a fast processor and is barely limited by the graphics card; a machine for single-player games at 4K is the reverse. Naming the games and the monitor first is what stops money going into the part that was never the bottleneck.
Frame rates that have fallen without the hardware changing usually come down to a handful of causes: thermal throttling from dust and dried paste, memory running at its default speed instead of its rated profile, a power plan holding the processor back, or a background application taking the graphics card. Each is checked and measured rather than guessed at, with before and after numbers.
A machine can average a perfectly good frame rate and still feel wrong, because the average hides the frames that arrived late. Frame-time is what you feel, and it has its own causes — shader compilation, a drive that cannot keep up with streaming assets, a background scan, or a graphics driver that regressed. Diagnosing that needs frame-time capture, not a frame counter in the corner.
A full build is £80 labour, with parts charged at cost against a list you have agreed in advance. Tuning an existing machine falls under remote support at £40 an hour or on-site labour at £50 an hour, and a cleaning and re-paste — which is what a throttling machine usually needs — is £45.
See the full price list