Building on a budget? These are the parts you should use to build a powerful, affordable gaming PC.
Building a gaming PC doesn't have to mean spending an arm and a leg. If you pick your parts well and cut the right corners, it's entirely possible to put together a great budget build with excellent performance for the latest games. For this budget build guide, we're targeting a price of $750 (£600/AU$1,000), give or take, but with room to grow into a future higher performance rig. The good news is that with the current sales and drop in pricing on several core components, we're coming in well under that mark. You could upgrade to a faster GPU or CPU, double the RAM, or simply pocket the savings, which is what we're doing for now.
Sticking to a budget presents its own unique set of challenges. In the high-end realm, you can reasonably expect any expensive part to perform well. But at the budget end of the spectrum, a few dollars difference can sometimes mean a huge bump in performance. To hit our budget, we've left out optical storage and a large HDD, and we've skimped on components that have minimal impact on gaming performance, like the case, PSU, storage, and memory. Most of the budget gets poured into the graphics card, which is the most important element for a gaming PC.
That doesn't mean we're locked into a dead-end system. The CPU is at the low end of the Coffee Lake spectrum, but the Z370 motherboard will work with everything up to a full-fledged Core i7-8700K. Even without replacing the CPU, you can swap the GPU out for a more powerful card down the road if you want to bump your gaming visuals to the next level.
Performance-wise, you should expect this build to run games very well at 1080p with high or close to maximum settings. 1440p at medium to high settings should also be viable, depending on the game, but 4K isn't really a consideration. The price point also doesn't account for the operating system or any peripherals. Check out our buying guides on the best mouse, keyboard, and gaming monitor for our favorite picks to pair with your new rig.
