I haven’t built a gaming PC for over fifteen years; I defected to PlayStation in '08 when the constant upgrading got too expensive to really justify, but now I’m looking to come crawling back.
I am finding it easy enough to find build ideas for very capable (and expensive) machines but I am that out of touch with “what’s good” that I no longer have any idea of what would be “good enough” (to play most modern games at “high” settings and at 60fps).
Basically, I would like help in avoiding an attempt at going back to my old ways and building some kind of pie in the sky setup like this:
CPU AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D
CPU fan NZXT Kraken 360 RGB
MB Asus Prime X670E-Pro WiFi 6E
GPU Gigabyte Aero GeForce RTX 4090 24GB
RAM G.Skill Trident Z5 RGB Series 64GB DDR5-6000
SSD Samsung 990 Pro 2TB
PSU Corsair RM1000x Shift 1000 W
Perhaps the could serve as a starting point - what could you cut from the above build and what would you substitute?
So, the trap of modern game setups is that there is a lot of super high powered hardware out there- but unless you’re driving 4K monitors at 120hz+, or striving for super fast 360hz+ refresh rates for competitive gaming, you don’t need any of it. And people often get too caught up in the flashy new latest-and-greatest to recognize what’s a good deal and what’s just showing off.
Define your use case. What’s your desirable budget? What kind of games do you want to play, do you want to do VR, what kind of display do you plan on using. Because while it’s easy to drop $2800+ on hardware these days (like I did), it is still very possible to end up with a $900-1k machine that is super capable at 1440p and can run most all games you throw at it for at least another 5 years. Dpending on what exactly you want to do with it, prioritizing certain areas of hardware over others will pay off.
Simply going one step down from buying every “halo” product would already do wonders for a significant price/performance increase.
That said, when building a new PC I usually start with the recommendations listed at Logical Increments, which has a neat table sorted by budget. Anything at or above the “Suberb” should give you what you want at 1440p.
I’d also very much recommend a high refresh rate monitor, preferably 1440p, which has either GSYNC or FreeSync with a good variable refresh rate range. It really helps with maintaining a smooth presentation as you aren’t forced to keep your game running at a fixed framerate anymore.
Second the PCPartPicker recommendation. You can also share your build ideas with people via that site, very useful.
