Building a gaming PC can be a satisfying experience. You get to set your own budget, choose the best components, and customize your build for the best performance. This tutorial guides you on building a top gaming PC for the most value for money.
If you need some additional food for thought, we recommend our guide on gaming PC building considerations.
How to Prioritize Parts for a Value-for-Money Gaming PC
It’s easy to overspend when building a gaming PC. This is why carefully assessing how much power you need from your gaming PC is essential, to get more value for your money. The objective should be to strike a balance between peak performance and affordable prices, while avoiding the common PC building mistakes.
We don’t recommend opting for cheap 4-core CPUs or APUs with onboard graphics for performance-oriented gaming PCs. Modern games require at least six cores and, in some cases, even eight cores for the best performance.
“1440p high settings” is our performance target when building a value-for-money gaming PC, so you should prioritize the CPU and GPU. Selecting sufficiently capable parts in these categories will maximize the performance per dollar. You can easily select compatible memory, storage, case, and power supply options using the remainder of your budget.
Tip: upgrade your existing PC into a high-end 2024-ready gaming rig with the best gaming PC parts.
CPU Recommendations
Investing in a powerful processor ensures that it can keep up with the GPU, and you don’t end up leaving performance on the table.
As for the best budget gaming CPU, our pick is AMD’s Ryzen 5 7600X. It delivers similar gaming performance as the competing (and pricier) Core i5-13600KF (and the newer Core i5-14600KF), and is also capable of decent productivity performance. Also, AMD takes the win in platform longevity and power efficiency in our AMD vs, Intel comparison, leading to a system that runs cooler and is easy to upgrade without changing your motherboard.
If you can find the non-X variant, the Ryzen 5 7600, significantly cheaper than the X variant, go with that for even more savings and not much loss in performance.
Those who prefer overall performance could instead get the Intel Core i5-13600K. It handily beats the Ryzen 5 7600X in multi-core workloads, and performs as well as its successor, the Core i5-14600KF, and even the Core i7-13700KF, in games.
For a detailed breakdown of what to look for when buying a desktop CPU, check out our CPU buying guide.
GPU Suggestions
The main issue with today’s graphics cards is that the prices have risen quite a lot. What may have gotten you an upper-mid-range graphics card five years ago is only enough to buy a mid-range or lower-mid-range card today. For the latest-gen components, AMD is currently the value king.
Our recommendation for the best graphics card for 1440p high settings is the AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT. Barring a few titles with heavy ray tracing graphics, it easily delivers a “1440p 100 FPS+” performance in most modern titles at high settings. Plus, it is equipped with 16GB of VRAM, compared to the 8GB seen in the competing Nvidia RTX 4070, ensuring stutter-free performance at 1440p high settings and even 4K resolution.
You can also overclock this graphics card with MSI Afterburner. Alternatively, check out our GPU buying guide for other budget and high-end recommendations.
Best Motherboard Options
Besides the CPU and the GPU, the motherboard is the most important component of your PC, affecting the degree of flexibility and upgradability of your rig.
For a compatible motherboard for our CPU recommendation, we picked the Gigabyte B650 Eagle AX, one of the best value-for-money motherboards on the market. The AM5 platform offers you a more future-proof build, due to the ability to drop in future CPUs on the same motherboard.
The B650 Eagle provides you with enough features for the price, such as three M.2 Gen4 slots (with one of them being PCIe 5.0), Wi-Fi 6E, high-speed DDR5 memory support, and a capable VRM design. It doesn’t compromise on looks, either, as you get stylish grey accents on its black PCB.
If you’re considering an Intel CPU or need higher-end recommendations, check out the best gaming motherboards for Intel 12th and 13th Gen CPUs and the best AMD motherboards for gaming.
Buying Memory
Though there are more RAM brands and variants than ever before, and you have to decide between DDR4 and DDR5 memory, there are a few simple things to keep in mind. The best gaming RAM kits have fallen in price significantly over the past year, and DDR5 RAM is the one we recommend for a future-looking gaming build.
Keeping our CPU and motherboard recommendations in mind, we picked the Teamgroup T-Force Delta RGB DDR5 6000 32GB (2x16GB) kit. It provides the current DDR5 sweet spot of speed and CAS latency, while outfitting your system with 32GB of memory, which you’ll need while running demanding games with multiple background applications. Its RGB design and build quality are also better than many pricier memory kits.
Storage Considerations
Opting for an NVMe SSD in a no-brainer. The other considerations while buying an SSD will be capacity, PCIe interface, and DRAM vs. DRAM-less SSD. For a gaming-focused build, you should absolutely get a 1TB NVMe SSD with a PCIe 4.0 interface (fast enough for gaming). DRAM-less SSDs perform the same as the ones with DRAM for gaming workloads. DRAM starts to matter only if you regularly copy large files across drives.
The Crucial T500 1TB is one of the best SSDs for gaming, as its PCIe 4.0 interface provides 7,300MB/s of read speed and has 1GB of DRAM cache. It’s one of the most affordable Gen4 SSDs at the moment. You can also consider Gen3 SSDs or the ones without DRAM to save some more money.
If you’re still confused about which storage to buy for your PC, we recommend reading our guide to determine how much storage you need.
Finding a PC Case
The PC case houses all of your precious components. It also impacts the noise and thermal performance of your entire build. A case equipped with sufficient air intake will help you optimize airflow on your PC. Plus, ample cable management and mounts for additional storage drives are good features to look for. The right PC case size depends on personal preferences and the size of the components you’ve chosen.
When choosing a PC case, ensure that it’s compatible with your motherboard, and has enough clearance for your graphics card and CPU cooler. We recommend the Montech Air 903 Max for its powerful airflow, preinstalled RGB fans, ample room for liquid cooler radiators and large GPUs, and decent build quality.
For more suggestions, look at our recommendations for desktop PC cases.
Getting a Power Supply
The Power Supply Unit (PSU) of your gaming PC is responsible for providing sufficient and stable power to your components. Failing to equip your build with a reliable PSU can cause crashes and performance drops and could damage your components permanently.
The choice of the PSU depends on the wattage your gaming PC requires. This is mainly determined by your GPU and CPU. Another vital aspect is the 80 Plus efficiency rating of the PSU. 80 Plus Bronze is the absolute minimum to safeguard your components. We recommend an 80 Plus Gold fully modular unit for added safety and easier cable management.
Our best PSU pick for the value-for-money build is the MSI MAG A850GL PCIe 5.0. It’s a top-tier PSU on the latest ATX 3.0 standard, with an 80 Plus Gold rating, and it’s also fully modular. Its 850W capacity can easily handle any GPU or CPU upgrades you are planning for the future.
For more information, read about all the considerations for buying a power supply.
Keeping Things Chill With a CPU Cooler
Although many modern CPUs ship with CPU coolers, they’re often not enough to keep your CPU temperature in check, especially during heavy loads. Moreover, if you want to experiment with overclocking your CPU, an aftermarket air cooler or liquid cooler is necessary.
Choosing the right CPU cooler can be tough, but we recommend the DeepCool LS720 SE as the best value-for-money CPU cooler. It’s a powerful 360mm liquid cooler, capable of cooling even the most power-hungry chips. It comes with silent ARGB fans that look and perform great. The AIO pump has a cool infinity mirror design as well.
Summary: Best Value-for-Money Gaming PC
We hope you picked up a few tips on how to build a value-for-money gaming PC. We’ve summarized all of our component recommendations below, along with the estimated total budget for this build:
- CPU: Ryzen 5 7600X
- GPU: AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT
- Motherboard: Gigabyte B650 Eagle AX
- RAM: Teamgroup T-Force Delta RGB DDR5 6000 32GB
- SSD: Crucial T500 1TB
- Case: Montech Air 903 Max
- PSU: MSI MAG A850GL PCIe 5.0
- Cooler: DeepCool LS720 SE
Estimated Total Budget: $1350 (prices are subject to change)
Image credit: Unsplash. All screenshots by Tanveer Singh.
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