How To Build A Kick-Ass - Gaming PC For $1,000

As a hardware analyst at PCMag, I’ve had numerous opportunities to build PCs live on camera.

- Matthew Buzzi

John Burek, our hardware executive editor, and I have been itching to do another, but we wanted to add a twist or limitation that would make our do-it-yourself build useful for readers, entertaining to follow, and nice to look at. We landed on putting together a gaming desktop with a $1,000 price cap. There’s some wiggle room thanks to sales, rebates, and ever-changing component pricing, but we chose the parts by their current cost.

A gaming PC requires a pricey graphics card more than anything else, and once you factor that into the budget, you butt up against the price ceiling pretty quickly. But $1,000 is a realistic and helpful price point for the average person looking for a game-ready PC, so we were determined to put together the best mix of value and performance.

PICKING THE PARTS

If, like us, you decide to put together a build that stays under a set but reasonable price point, you’re simply going to have to make trade-offs. Deciding which parts to add and which to steer away from is a matter of determining what exactly your machine will be used for, which aspects you value most, and the deals you can get at the time.

A DIY builder has to choose seven core components when putting together a PC—a case, a motherboard, a power supply, a CPU, a GPU (or two), RAM, and storage. And many options exist for each of those. Considering cost, function, personal manufacturer preferences, and aesthetics, you have a lot of decisions to make. With our $1,000 cap, we had to figure out which of these were most important to the concept of an HD gaming machine, and which we could comprome on.