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While you can buy one of the best gaming PCs and just install it, building your own desktop is more rewarding. When you build your own gaming PC, you get complete control over everything from the exact motherboard and model to the aesthetics of the chassis and how many RGB fans you need.
Best Computer Hardware Reviews
By building your own PC from components, you will save hundreds of dollars over the cost of buying a pre-built system. For example, right now, getting a desktop with the same specs but a little less than a $1000 PC will cost you $1259 or more at Best Buy (Opens in a new tab).
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To help you put together the best gaming or PC build product you can find, we’ve created a list of recommended components for every budget: from the cheapest system under $500 to $1,000 to $4,000+ dream machines for the serious. pockets.
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Please note that the best PC build recommendations are based on our industry expertise, market research, and testing we’ve done on the key components of each build, i.e., CPU, GPU, and SSD. However, because we try to beat the prices and we always change this list (as the prices change), we don’t test every part of each building together, and some of the small functional areas that work like the case, the mother board, and the PSU. maintenance. it might be the ones we didn’t analyze.
We will also recommend GPUs over specific graphics card features and models. For example, we recommend the RTX 407 (opens in a new tab) 0 (opens in a new tab) Ti (opens in a new tab) and a link to the list of cards available above, for example, the Zotac RTX 4070 Ti (opens in a new tab). (opens in new tab) Due to the general price and inventory changes in the area, you should be able to find any third party or original graphics card available with the GPU you want at a reasonable price by the time you read this.
Best Prebuilt Gaming Pc Under $1500 In 2023
You may notice that most of our current PCs use Intel CPUs. That’s because, right now, the prices of Ryzen 7000 CPUs, along with their expensive motherboards and expensive DDR5 RAM, make them a budget option. At the top of the line though, the Ryzen 9 7900X3D is a good choice.
Also note that we’re not including the cost of the operating system, because you can get Windows for free or for less. We also don’t include prices for peripherals such as the best gaming monitors, the best gaming keyboards, or the best gaming mice. And if you’ve never built a computer before, check out our article on how to build a PC.
For around $500, you can build a PC with a discrete graphics card. You won’t have the fastest GPU, but you’ll be able to play at 1080p with modest settings. This is a huge improvement over relying on integrated graphics.
For the graphics card in this program, we will use Intel’s Arc A380. We didn’t like the card at launch, but it’s been available on Newegg for a few months now. What’s more, it’s faster than AMD’s rival RX 6400, comes with more VRAM, and most importantly, has full video encode/decode acceleration – including future AV1 support.
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The card averaged 54.7 fps in our benchmarks at average 1080p, although updated drivers can improve things by another 5 to 10 percent. If you want something fast and can stretch your budget by just a few bucks, your best bet is the RX 6500 XT card (opens in a new tab), which goes for $159 and can take up to 65.8 fps on average. 1080p.
For our CPU, we’ll be using Intel’s Core i3-12100F (opens in a new tab), which is over $100 but offers a lot of power for the price. This CPU has four cores, all cores, and a strong clock of 4.3GHz. We found that it outperformed AMD’s more expensive Ryzen 5 5600X, which costs about $60 more, in gaming workloads. The 12100F comes with a cooler in the box so we don’t have to spend money on buying a CPU fan.
If you follow the processor market, you know that the 12100F has been replaced by the Core i3-13100F, which is part of Intel’s current 13th Generation Core lineup. But at current prices, getting the 13100F and the 700 series motherboard it supports out of the box will put us in the $500 price range.
The 13100F is not much faster than the 12100F as it has the same 4 cores and 8 cores and the same 5MB of L2 cache. However, the 13100F has a boost clock of 4.5GHz instead of 4.3GHz. So if you want to spend a few bucks more to get the 13100F then go for it, but you won’t get much performance.
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We have to cut some costs and Intel H610 motherboards are not cheap. We chose the ASRock H610M-HDV, because it costs $10 less than the closest competition. However, there is one major drawback: the H610M-HDV does not have an M.2 slot for PCIe NVMe SSDs. So we have to go with a 2.5 inch SATA SSD.
Our SSD is the tried and true MX500 with a capacity of 500GB. It’s fast and reliable for a SATA drive, with a limited read and write rate of 560MBps / 510MBps respectively. When we tested the MX500 in 2019, we gave it high marks for its strong endurance and solid performance. If we could stretch our budget beyond $500, however, we would get a motherboard that supports PCIe M.2 SSDs and a 1TB SSD.
Another area where we didn’t skimp on RAM, where we got 16GB of PC-3200 DDR4 RAM in a 2 x 8GB configuration. The Silicon Power Value RAM we chose isn’t the flashiest, but it’s cheap and from a reputable brand. Whatever you do, don’t build or buy a gaming PC with less than 16GB of RAM.
Our case is the Thermaltake Versa H18, which comes with a tempered glass panel, something we don’t often see on a sub-$50 case. It also has plenty of room for additional cooling, with room for two 120mm or 140mm fans (one 280mm radiator) in the front, as well as a 120mm rear fan and a 120mm or 140mm top fan. Our power supply is the Thermaltake Smart Series 500W, because it’s the cheapest power supply from a reliable brand we can find.
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If you can raise your budget from $500 to $800, you can enter a new world of gaming with a product that will be ideal for heavy gaming at 1080p (no ray tracing). Here we go from the 12th gen Core i3 to the Core i5-13400F with 6 cores, 4 cores and 16 threads in total with a clock of 4.6GHz.
With a price of just over $200 and performance that allowed it to deliver 152fps on our 1080p test set, this is our current pick for the best gaming CPU based on its price alone. In fact, the Core i5-13400F is such a good value for money that we recommend it for three of our builds. It also comes with a capable cooler in the box.
To accompany this Intel processor, we use the ASRock B760M-HDV motherboard because it supports 13th generation CPUs without BIOS updates. It’s a DDR4 card so we can save money by using DDR4 memory. It also has two M.2 slots for SSDs, and one PCIe 4.0 support.
Our graphics card in this price range is the AMD Radeon RX 6650 XT. At these affordable prices, AMD offers more bang for your buck than Nvidia or Intel. According to our GPU Benchmark Hierarchy, the 6650 XT places just below the older RTX 2080 and above Intel’s Arc A770. It delivered a solid 79.8 fps in our 8-game test suite at Ultra 1080p settings and an acceptable 56.7 fps at Ultra 1440p.
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For our storage, we choose the WD Blue SN570 1TB NVMe SSD, which was just $57 at press time. The PCIe 3.0 drive promises read and write speeds of up to 3,500 and 3,000 MBps, respectively. When testing the WD Blue SN570, we tested it and saw that it stacks up well against all the best PCIe 3.0 SSDs, coming within a few milliseconds of the SK hynix Gold P31 in our game load time test.
We’re using the cheapest DDR4 RAM here, and we’re going up to a 600W version of the Thermaltake Smart power supply to support our higher power CPU and GPU.
Our case
