For those about to build a gaming PC, we salute you. These are the dark times for PC building, with the RAMpocalypse doing very bad things to almost every facet of selecting parts for your next setup. But we’re still big fans of building your own PC here at PC Gamer—it may not be any cheaper now, with price increases all round, but you get to learn all about how a PC is pieced together. That can be incredibly helpful knowledge if you ever need to upgrade or troubleshoot your machine.
And, as silly as it might sound, it also creates a bit of a bond between you, too.
But yes, RAM and SSD pricing is nothing short of ridiculous right now. It’s had quite the knock on effect on the overall price of our builds, although we’re still doing our darndest to find the best deals on components that we can. It’s looking like a rough year for pricing on anything with a memory module, so shop carefully, and make sure you compare prices before laying down your cash.
The first step to building your own PC is choosing your components. Below you’ll find three gaming PC builds, starting from a vaguely affordable build (we’ve really tried, here) to a high-end rig at, well, likely more than most of would want to spend. All the hardware components in this guide are parts I’d pick if I were building my own PC, and I’ve been using my own experience and our expert reviews to guide me. The key components have been tested on our test bench to ensure they meet expectations.
If this isn’t what you’re looking for, you can skip the whole building thing and get one of the best gaming PCs prebuilt or snap up a cheap gaming PC instead. But trust me, PC building can be a whole lot of fun. Go on, give it a go.
Shop the best value PC Gamer build
(Image credit: AMD | Powercolor | Corsair)
The ‘budget’ gaming PC build is arguably the hardest of all the builds to create, because it requires a level of compromise that can become uncomfortable. And, honestly, any notion of ‘budget’ is an long way from where we are right now. But there are some things that are hard to compromise, even on a budget machine; we want 16 GB of DDR5 memory at a time when memory prices are sky-rocketing, and we need a 1 TB SSD to feel comfortable. That’s why we’re well over our initial budget of around a grand here.
You might also be unhappy to see an 8 GB graphics card here, but while you could go for a slightly cheaper Intel B580 with a 12 GB frame buffer, you’re going to have a far better all-round experience with the Radeon RX 9060 XT, whether it’s got less memory or not.
The Ryzen 7 7600X is a very solid gaming chip, and while yes, we’d love a 7500X3D or 7600X3D, those are over $100 more for that bit of extra L3 cache. Still, you’re getting decent Zen 4 performance, and six cores and 12 thread of processing power. It’s no slouch, basically.
Shop the PC Gamer mid-range build
(Image credit: MSI | AMD | Corsair)
This is essentially the sweet spot of PC gaming builds: the mighty mid-ranger. We’re still trying to be disciplined with our spend, making sure to keep it to a relatively strong sub-$2,000 budget, and we actually have succeeded. Ideally you would want 32 GB of RAM for a bit of future-proofing, but memory is costing the earth right now (thank those AI data centers springing up all over the place, and their voracious appetite for memory). A 16 GB setup is still enough for a gaming PC right now, if you want to save some cash.
Likewise, you can save some money going for a 1 TB SSD again instead of the 2 TB drive we have pegged in here. Windows does hog up some space, and game sizes aren’t getting smaller, so we would always rather have that space.
Your eight-core, 16-thread AMD Ryzen 7700X CPU is a great mid-range choice here, and now the RTX 5070 has dipped around its MSRP, and the RX 9070 XT is still frustratingly pricey, it’s now a far more reasonable pick for a new graphics card.
Shop the PC Gamer high-end build
(Image credit: HAVN | Gigabyte | AMD)
Hey, at least we kept around the $5,000 mark, eh? Yes, this is the high-end build and that means we’ve got a bit more of a blank cheque when it comes to filling out the parts list. That’s not something that would have happened if we’d stuck with the RTX 5090 as our GPU recommendation. That card alone tops the $4,000 mark right now.
Even the RTX 5080 is getting on for around $1,500 pricing at the moment, but that at least is vaguely attainable for a high-end PC. Though it is making do with just 16 GB of VRAM, yet is also likely to be one of the few to get away with that level of video memory for a while, at least on the Nvidia side.
We haven’t skimped on the other aspects of the build, but have also not gone overboard just for the sake of it. In recommending the Ryzen 7 9800X3D over the far more CPU core-happy Ryzen 9 9950X3D you could say we’re being miserly, but any performance benefits you get with the bigger AMD chip are miniscule when we’re talking about gaming prowess. If you want your rig to be doing more productivity based tasks, then the big boi Ryzen might be a good bet.
