How much gaming PC do you actually need?
What is the simplest answer to this question?
Realistically less than you think you need. Secondly, enough to play the games or do the work you want to.
Yes I can hear you saying it already ‘what kind of answer is that?’
Honestly, it's the best answer we can give. There are simply too many reasons why we choose the PCs we do. Let's be honest here us gamers have a habit of buying parts that are way more over the top than they need to be.
All joking aside, let's look at what you need to look at when you're trying to figure out what kind of gaming PC you need.
What Games do you play?
This should be the foundation of your decision, this is the simplest place to start because this will give you a great starting point on deciding where to start.
If you play AAA games that are purely story driven games your needs are going to be different to someone who only plays games like CS 2.
This is the starting point I used when I built my current gaming setup. For myself I play games such as Red Dead Redemption, The Division, Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order, and Call of Duty. This tells me a rough idea of the parts that will suit my gaming needs, for myself I would need a CPU that could feed them that would allow me to play these types of games at the resolution I wanted to play them at. Because how you want them to look is as important as how much FPS you get in these games. Unlike games like CS2 where the thing you want is high FPS and smooth frame delivery.
Resolution and monitor
The resolution and monitor are two things that we believe are the most overlooked things people consider when buying a gaming PC.
So many focus on the tower of the setup as this is where they are sinking their money, and rightfully so. But when you are building a balanced setup the monitor can completely bottleneck your setup and leave you scratching your head as to why your expensive gaming rig is looking so bad!
For myself I spent a long time finding the right monitor for my setup. This came from the games I wanted to play, for the games I played I wanted to be immersed and for me this meant I wanted a large display that would make my games look awesome. For this I settled on a 43 inch Aorus monitor but I chose not to go for an OLED, but this was purely down to the price. This meant that for me I would need something that would drive this panel to give me the immersion I wanted.
Yet for a friend of mine whose primary gaming is CS2, Fortnite, PUBG and games like this they wanted super high refresh rates which meant a 24 - 27 inch monitor that could get up to and above 240Hz. Again this setup is very different to my needs.
Price
This is the elephant in the room that we just don't talk enough about.
Can you afford the setup you want? Or should you buy what you can afford and upgrade when you can or need to.
This is something only you can decide on because what one person might do another person will do the opposite. For some they are happy buying what they can afford at the time and upgrading when they need to, others want to have the best of the best and will save up for it.
My journey was one of upgrades, upgrades, and more upgrades. I started out with a pre-built back in the day and upgraded things as I went. First it was small upgrades like the RAM and GPU then case and this continued until I had the funds to build an almost fully new setup. Ironically I still have the original SSD and until recently I still had the power supply from that rig. It now resides in a friend's setup!
In the end we would recommend doing this how you want to because only you can decide the route you want to take. This is exactly why there is no single perfect gaming PC. A system that is ideal for someone playing CS2 at 1080p may be completely wrong for someone who wants to play Cyberpunk at 4K with ray tracing enabled.
The trick is finding the balance that works for your games, your monitor and your budget.
The main advice we can give is get what fits your needs and use quality products because in the end some of those weird no name products can be great, some are just too much of a risk to use but the same was said about companies like Team Group, Lexar and Montech in the past and now they are household names that everyone uses!