Many people dream about a proper PC, some to enjoy the latest gaming titles on steam, some to play slots and blackjack in Red Dog Casino, some need it for video editing, and so on. First of all, considering the situation with the chips in the world we should make it clear, up to what price PC is considered “high-end”. Basically, this number is around $2,000. Let’s go through all the main pieces you need to build a gaming PC, considering their cost, to fit our $2000 budget.
CPU
Such names as Intel and Radeon are well known to almost every PC user, however, this knowledge usually does not further. For the price of the highest-end chips, you can buy a scooter for the price of this processor. For mainstream gaming, we recommend you to look at Intel i5-12600K. With a price tag of under $300, it’s one of the fastest chips on the market and an excellent choice for a gaming rig. It will allow you to enjoy the latest gaming titles with low and sometimes even medium settings.
Motherboard
We recommend looking at the Gigabyte Z690 Aorus Elite or the ASUS ROG Z690 Strix both of which are available on Amazon now for somewhere between $200-320. They are ample for the Core i5-12600K and come with plenty of M.2 SSD slots, PCIe Gen 5, and plenty of I/O options.
RAM
We will be looking at DDR4 memory. The Corsair Vengeance LPX 16 GB is a decent choice unless you’re a hardcore overclocker. If we have some money left, you can get a pricier Samsung B-die kit but it’s not a must. The LPX can be had for just $72.
Graphics card
With the mining boom over, it couldn’t be a better time to buy a graphics card. The GeForce RTX 30 series are selling well below their MSRPs and the same goes for AMD’s Radeon RX 6000 offerings. If you don’t want to wait for the next-gen offerings, we recommend opting for the Radeon RX 6900 XT which has dropped to just $799, or the GeForce RTX 3080 12GB (~$7xx)/RTX 3080 Ti (~$9xx). These cards are more than capable of 4K or 1440p 144Hz gaming with support for ray-tracing and other DX12 technologies.
Conclusion
So, let’s check what we have here. We have theoretically built a gaming PC for just under $1,500. Well, it is not finished yet, of course. You also need a heatsink, a case, a monitor, a mouse, and a keyboard, but we have covered the most challenging part in this article. And with all that added together, your total should be around $2000. We hope our recommendations will be helpful for you, and we wish you good luck!