How to assemble a gaming computer
Buying a new gaming machine is a big investment in these financially difficult times. A capable PC that will cope with the latest gaming releases for at least 18 months starts at $ 800. But, no matter what you want, you need to make some compromises.
But in the world of gaming PCs, it is true that a true gamer must assemble his car himself. Therefore, in our material we have collected for you three configurations: budget, optimal and progressive. So, let’s see what is inside them and find out how to assemble a gaming PC …
Your choice here is mainly between two manufacturers: AMD and Intel. AMD shines in the budget segment, as Intel chips are often prohibitively expensive or inferior to their AMD counterparts. Therefore, in the budget version, our choice fell on the AMD Ryzen 3 1300X, which is capable of much more than what is being asked for.
However, as your budget grows, consensus changes dramatically in a different direction. Most modern games have special requirements that are best served by Intel processors. Therefore, here we choose the i5 7600. But just spending a lot of money does not necessarily mean that you will get better performance. Therefore, i5 7600 will be the best choice and a good reserve for the future.
But if money is not a problem, then i7 8700K should be put in a progressive assembly. Today, this stone for its price offers simply tremendous performance and any toy can handle it.
It is in the RAM that your computer holds the current programs that it launches, and modern games present quite a lot of demand for this element of your machine. According to Steam hardware analysis, almost half of the users still have 8 GB, which will allow you to get the minimum system requirements for new games. Therefore, 8 GB is the minimum minimum for a budget gaming PC.
If you have a big budget, then you can buy 12 GB already. Well, as for the ultimate configuration, then here the conversation can begin with 16 GB or more. Of course, there is never a lot of RAM, but we believe that 32 GB will be a reasonable ceiling for a modern gaming system. In addition, this node is the easiest to upgrade. Therefore, always leave at least one free slot for RAM on your motherboard.
Once again, you have two manufacturer options here: AMD or Nvidia, with the latter being the most popular choice among gamers. However, there may be slight differences in performance between brands, but it’s far more important to think about what you personally want — and you can afford — the graphic performance of your machine.
Given that at present, most games with basic AAA features go to consoles, the first thing you should think about is permission. If you want to divide the GPUs into budget, optimal and high-performance, you will mainly talk about launching games at a resolution of 1080p, 1440p or 4K. If you follow the example of Steam users, 85% of whom currently choose Nvidia, then the choice falls on 1050 Ti, 1070 and any version of 1080 that suits your needs.
On a budget solution, you get stable 60 frames per second with high settings, especially in games that scale well across all equipment. In fact, almost all games will work fine on 1050 Ti if you stay at 1920 × 1080. In the middle range, 1070 will be enough for all games at 1080p resolution and for most projects for playing at 1440p monitors and high quality settings.
Something like 1080 Ti is really necessary only if you want to run games with the highest possible settings and want to get a picture with at least 60 frames per second!
But our choice is a little different. We recommend choosing 4 GB of AMD RX 560 for a budget build, 6 GB of Nvidia GTX 1060 for an optimal gaming machine, and 8 GB of Nvidia GTX 1080 for an ultra-optimal machine.
Information repository
We immediately say what exactly should not be in such an assembly – this is a hard drive. SSDs are becoming more affordable these days and are commonly used in conjunction with a hard drive. SSD storage gets access faster, so most users will store their operating system, as well as the most commonly used applications and games here. And all other information can be dumped to the HDD.
Ideally, the ratio of hard disk to SDD should be 75/25, but you should not be led to cheap SSDs. In 2018, your OS and main applications can occupy up to 250 GB, and all this should be on the SSD.
