Building Gaming PC

[fairbjosh]

I want to start building a gaming PC, right now I just have a PS4 and instead of upgrading to PS5 I want to spend the money on a building a Computer. I don't want to break the bank to build one, hopefully spend $500 - $700, I already have a good Monitor so I don't need that and will be playing on controller. I will mostly be playing Warzone.

My goal is to start buying pieces here and there and not all at once, can any experts help me with what to start with and what to start buying?

 

[Zoid]

I want to start building a gaming PC, right now I just have a PS4 and instead of upgrading to PS5 I want to spend the money on a building a Computer. I don't want to break the bank to build one, hopefully spend $500 - $700, I already have a good Monitor so I don't need that and will be playing on controller. I will mostly be playing Warzone.

My goal is to start buying pieces here and there and not all at once, can any experts help me with what to start with and what to start buying?

Welcome to the forums!

I would recommend against buying pieces here and there. Right now we have a lot of new hardware coming out. In just three days AMD is announcing new processors, and at the end of the month they're announcing new GPUs. If you buy a part and then put it on the shelf while you wait to by the rest of what you need, that part will be slowly going obsolete and its warranty will be slowly expiring.

It is almost always best to wait until you have everything saved up and then buy all your components at once.

I would recommend waiting until next month, since we'll have all that new AMD hardware to evaluate, and you might be able to snag some Black Friday deals.

In the mean time, do you have any preferences for the form factor of the case? Also, what is the resolution and refresh rate of your monitor?

 

[fairbjosh]

That does make a lot of sense to just save up and buy everything at once so I will go ahead and do that.

I don't have a any preferences for the form factor of the case. I have an Acer VG270 which it says it has a 144hz refresh rate.

How much do you recommend saving up to build a good gaming PC for Warzone, without breaking the bank.

I appreciate the advice.

 

[Zoid]

How much do you recommend saving up to build a good gaming PC for Warzone, without breaking the bank.

This depends on what expectations you have. Based on current hardware availability and pricing, for gaming at 1080p, you can definitely put together a sub-$700 build that will allow you to have fun in Warzone (something like a Ryzen 3 3100, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD, and an RX 570).

If you want to push closer to the 144Hz FPS possible on your monitor then I'd recommend going up to $900 or so.

Either way, there might be some intriguing new hardware coming out soon and / or holiday deals that could sweeten the pot!

 

[rjwilson49]

Just make sure you get a good motherboard that will allow you to upgrade your CPU and a Power Supply in the 650w to 750w range which will allow you a nice graphics card later on. I picked up a nice little Ryzen 3 3100 build for $629 that came with the RX 570 graphics. Then after a month or so I got the RGB bug to upgrade some things with RGB and just added more/faster RGB memory, then a faster CPU Ryzen 7 3700X with RGB Cooler that came with it and then I picked up a MSI GTX 1660 ti graphics card, which almost maxes me out because of only having a 500w power supply. Of course I can always upgrade my PSU at a later time if I even need something faster, this thing will play anything at 1080p in high fps and most at 144Hz at a good to fast fps. I spent an additional $630 adding the faster CPU, Memory and Graphics, all RGB stuff to add more color to my system, and I then sold the Ryzen 3 3100 CPU and RX570 graphics card getting back $200. You don't even need to get the faster stuff till after 6 months to a year or so, buy when a good deal comes around, especially with Black Friday coming up.

 

[rjwilson49]

Oh... have you ever built a gaming PC before? You can get an iBuyPower prebuilt on Amazon or directly from iBuyPower with a 3 year warranty and upgrade as you go over the next year or two. I was going to build my own, but after seeing all the wires/cables with RGB fans and such, I just decided to get an inexpensive cool looking RGB pre-built which was plenty fast enough for anything I wanted to do. I then got bored being home all the time right now because of Covid and upgraded some core things adding more RGB to my build.

 

[Zoid]

When you're thinking about your budget, try to think about what you really need / want and budget for that, even if it means saving up more. I would not recommend building a computer that you know you're going to upgrade in 6 months to a year. It's smart to build a system that will allow for upgrades, but I wouldn't build one that needs to be upgraded in the short term