What parts should i get for a gaming computer

I also need something that will be at least as powerful as the PS5 and Xbox Series X , in case I need to compare games across platforms. From there, I went to Newegg the best place to buy PC components online, in my experience and started looking for components.

Obviously, Newegg is just one place to shop. Once you find the gear you need, you can bargain hunt at Amazon, Best Buy and other big electronics retailers. My personal favorite is Micro Center, especially if you have one of these electronics meccas near you.

You could very conceivably walk in with nothing and walk out with an unbuilt computer, at a very reasonable price. When possible, buy gear from established, known brands — Corsair, HyperX, Western Digital, and so forth. You could theoretically save a lot of money by going with no-name storage, RAM or power supplies.

But device quality is a total crapshoot, and customer service in small brands tends to be either haphazard or nonexistent.

My last piece of advice is to be somewhat flexible with your budget, if possible. A good PC will last a long time, and a few dozen dollars make very little difference over the course of a few years. As mentioned above, the GPU is the most important or at least the most straightforward place to start with a gaming PC build. The other two cards would have eaten up too much of the cost.

Buying older cards can save you some money, but makes your machine less future-proof. It's worth mentioning that at the time of writing, the RTX is still a few weeks away from release, and it's probably going to sell out quite fast. However, it was a tough call between the and the K. The latter is only a little more expensive, but you can overclock it — a huge boon for a gaming PC.

In the end, I settled on the , because the K would have caused sort of a pricing cascade. Furthermore, overclocking draws more electricity, which might have required a bigger, more expensive power supply. RAM is a tricky topic, since there are a lot of variables at play. Naturally, higher memory levels and speed cost more money. RAM speed is less important. There was also the question of whether to buy two SSDs: a small one just for system files, and a larger one for games. The benefits from this setup tend to be limited, however, and it increases the overall system complexity.

Depending on how you build your machine, the motherboard may be either the first or last component you choose. I also knew I wanted a motherboard with Wi-Fi built in, since my computer desk is far from my router. There are also mini- and microATX motherboards, and you can do some very cool things with them, but they can be expensive and difficult to put together. A common meme in PC-building communities is a power supply as a ticking time bomb. The best-case scenario is overheating your components and burning them out well before their expected lifespan.

The worst-case scenario involves a fire extinguisher. Selecting a case is mostly a matter of looks. You can keep one in your living room and watch Netflix off it. Gaming PCs are versatile pieces of technology. Gaming PCs double as excellent and reliable home offices too. Unless your employer asks everyone to use Apple hardware. If you can ignore the temptation to catch a game of Magic: The Gathering Arena during your morning Zoom meeting, a powerful gaming PC might help boost your productivity.

Plus, with peripherals, your setup may be a lot nicer than what your actual office supplies. You could probably do the research yourself as to which video card can really max out the settings on the games you like to play, which case would look just perfect on your desk, and which color LEDs would totally match your gaming chair.

The benefit of buying a gaming PC, however, is the same benefit as buying any product over a DIY version: You get what you pay for, and you get extras like support should you run into problems down the line with a glitchy component, replacements in case anything arrives broken or defective, and of course, you get back all the time and energy you would have spent building. Some prebuilt PCs for example, at MicroCenter sell for fair prices because the stores buy parts in bulk. Which should you choose?

I feel like most people will get more mileage out of a desktop, and your money goes way further. But what if you really, really want a gaming laptop—or you travel often and want to take your favorite games on the go? Part of PC gaming culture is glamming out.

That means keyboards , mice , headsets , mousepads, microphones, chairs, and webcams all customized to your taste and adorned with LEDs. And thankfully, today, there are more aesthetic options than sleek black hardware with alienesque green glowing lights. Razer has a gorgeous Quartz line of candy-pink peripherals. Secretlab sells an immense variety of gaming chairs , some with icons from Overwatch , Game of Thrones , and comic books.

C'est la vie, I guess. And while It's possible to pick up everything aside from the GPU today, the graphics card really is the beating heart of any gaming PC, and that makes it difficult to recommend a full build without basing your new rig around a GPU.

The other part of the picture is the processor, and thankfully CPU stock is far better now. The Ryzen 5 X is a better price these days and, as stock dwindles for the old Ryzen 5 chip, the newer series CPU is actually available for a better price. And it's a great gaming chip. We've had our hands on all these parts at some point or another, and we only recommend the products that we'd want in our own gaming PCs.

If this isn't quite what you're looking for, also check out our budget PC build guide and high-end PC build guide. Or even get someone else to build it for you with a cheap gaming PC deal. When it comes to gaming, everything that's great about the X rings true for this more affordable Zen 3 chip as well. There's nothing between any of the Ryzen chips in games, which means you'll hit the same frame rates with this chip as you will our number one pick.

Which is incredible when you think about it—top-tier performance from the most affordable Zen 3 CPU? We'll say yes to that every single day. This does have half the core count of that top chip, rolling in as it does with 6 cores and 12 threads. This is only an issue with those more serious workloads, though, and this is more than sufficient for more reasonable stuff. You could argue that gaming could go beyond the threads we have here, but there's no evidence that is the case so far, and that's even though the next-gen consoles are rocking 8-cores and threads.

The Ryzen 5 X also bucks the Ryzen family's trend by shipping with a Wraith Stealth cooler, so you don't have to drop extra money on a third-party chiller. You don't need to, but if you do, you'll hit higher clocks for longer and also open up the wonderful world of overclocking, which could make it worthwhile. This is a decent little overclocker, and while it won't affect gaming much, it'll help in other areas nicely.

You also get Wi-Fi 6 wireless networking as well as Intel 2. Performance too is typically good for a high-end Asus board, matching X motherboards for gaming performance without issue. It marks the same incredible generational leap in performance that has come to epitomise the Ampere architecture, up until the non-TI GeForce RTX , that is.

And, because of its RTX Super performance levels, that means you can nail p and p frame rates, but also that 4K at 60fps isn't beyond the realms of possibility for this GPU. The RTX Ti then delivers gaming performance that's rather stupendous when you look at generational gains over even the RTX series—next to the series it's quite frightening, actually.

Memory is pretty straightforward these days, though if the price isn't much higher you can improve performance slightly with faster RAM. An NVMe M. Fitted with GB worth of NAND flash, there's enough space for your operating system, applications, and a handful of games, too. A single M. Given the install sizes of most modern PC games, it's probably a good idea to get yourself a new drive for your gaming PC.

While SATA SSDs are almost cheap enough to recommend as secondary storage what a world we're living in , you'll probably look to a regular HDD to keep the cost down when you hit multiple terabyte demands.