In this article i’m going to discuss components and prices in regarded to building a few gaming PCs in 2018. Before 2017 when someone wanted to build a gaming PC i would tell them they should spend about fifty percent of their budget (not including monitor and peripherals) on their graphic card. It is the most important part in a gaming PC. But in 2018 graphics card and RAM prices have ballooned to ridiculous prices. I talk more about it here. This leaves current buyers in a bad position when building a PC in 2018. There will have to be concessions and possibly leaving room for a upgrade for later in the year or the next year. Also i recommend Windows 10 for gaming as it is the most compatible with most games, but i will not include it in the price as you can get a copy in various ways.

The most interesting state of PC gaming has allowed for many different “tiers” of PC gaming. Before PC Gamers usually just built for the best components they could afford. There are still users that want the best of the best to run the newest graphic intensive games in 4k. But now there are many gamers who just want to play League of Legends or Minecraft. These users don’t need a $2,000 PC to run these games. In fact there are more lower spec games coming out now that out number the graphics heavy 4k games. Many new indie games can run easily on a 5 year old laptop or similar desktop.

The first tier i would like to tackle is the $2,000 dollar tier. With this build your PC will be VR capable high end PC able to play most games in 4K and the newest games in better than 1080p. Also this will make a great platform for a graphics intensive workload like video rendering or 3D rendering. I recommend AMD’s Ryzen second gen for the best performance for price. With this build i added room for a future upgrade if price drop in a year for upgrades.  I choose a single stick of 8GB RAM which is actually low but passable and a single 1080TI but a motherboard with extra slots if you would like to add a SLI card later. And the power supply has plenty of capacity for both. I included a water cooler that will allow for a fair amount of overclocking so that the user can push it further if they need. Also you can add a HDD for a less than $100 so you won’t have to redownload your games

If you wanted to build a $1,000 dollar PC you can swap out the Ryzen 7 2700x for a Ryzen first gen Ryzen 5 1400, a simpler motherboard, a GTX 1070, and a smaller SSD. this build will let you play many of the newest graphic heavy game it’s still VR compatible, but 4k might not be smooth.

In my next article i’ll discuss sub $500 builds and if they are even worth it.