If you are thinking of buying your first gaming PC, you probably have many questions: buy a preconfigured PC or better assemble one piece by piece? Which processor to choose? Which component is more important to have better gaming performance? In this buying guide we are going to give you a series of tips to buy your first gaming PC and get it right , obtaining the best performance / price ratio possible.
Consoles may be the most popular gaming platform, but as you know there are many advantages to playing on PC and we are not just talking about their versatility (since we can use them for an infinity of things besides playing), but for the “exclusive” games “of PC and that do not exist in console like League of Legends or the new Valorant, in addition to a wide cast of strategy games and MOBA.
So, let’s see what factors you should take into account when choosing your first gaming PC and getting it right without spending too much money.
Buy a PC by parts or a preconfigured one?
The easiest option when buying a gaming PC is to go to any physical store and buy a preconfigured one. However, these teams tend to have more external marketing and design than anything else, leaving the internal components in the background.
Thus, these OEM computers often have OEM power supplies without any quality assurance, they use stock sinks, they do not take advantage of dual-channel RAM, and in the end they do not deliver the desired performance both by temperature and noise and by gross performance itself. For this reason, as a general rule and with a few exceptions, we will never recommend buying an OEM gaming PC .
The advantages of buying a PC by parts lie in that you choose all the components , and if your concern is to make the assembly, in addition to the fact that on this website we have numerous tutorials so that you can do it yourself most online stores have services of high quality assembly so you do not have to worry about anything, and with full guarantee. You may pay a little more money, but the quality and guarantee you will have are well worth it.
The most important components of a gaming PC
We are not talking about any PC, but a PC focused on games. Therefore, we must weigh the importance of the pieces of hardware that we are going to assemble, and surely we should skimp a little on some components in search of acquiring better ones.
In a gaming PC the most important components are, in this order, graphics card, processor, RAM and storage . The processor is the brain of the team and is vital for all types of games, while the quality and resolution of the games we intend to play will depend on the graphics card. Likewise, the amount and speed of RAM influences game performance, and of course having fast storage is crucial to speed up game loading.
The processor may be Intel or AMD , the latter generally being cheaper and with a better quality / price ratio. The graphics can be AMD or NVIDIA, and again the AMD graphics offer a better performance / price ratio, although at the moment the NVIDIA graphics are superior in pure performance. For RAM, with 8 GB you will have enough for most cases , but if you want to play in style and your budget is high, do not hesitate and go for 16 GB of RAM.
Regarding storage there is no doubt: buy an SSD . It doesn’t matter if you are on a budget and have to settle for a SATA 3 SSD, they are very cheap right now and provide excellent gaming performance compared to a traditional mechanical hard drive.
How to tell if a component is good or not
You will already have more or less clear what you want taking into account your budget, but now, how do you know if a component is good or not? Both graphics and processors can have confusing names, and you may not be clear if an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 is better than an AMD Radeon RX 560 or not, for example.
For this reason we recommend you spend a few minutes browsing the Internet and look for comparisons and reviews of the graphics cards and processors that fit you according to the budget you have.
Also, to know if a certain hardware component is going to work well in the games you intend to play, you can always look for benchmarks in reviews. Generally, when a graphic card is reviewed, it is always tested in games, and there you can see the FPS it is capable of generating .
Other factors to consider when buying a gaming PC
Before deciding on one hardware or another, you should consider what your claims are. In other words, if you want to buy a gaming PC for your child to play Fortnite, it is not the same as if you want a PC to play the latest triple-A games at 4K resolution, and therefore the budget for one or the other is good. different.
For example, to play Fornite at 1080p you surely have enough with a PC gaming of around 500 euros, but if you want to play Witcher 3 at 4K resolution and with everything at maximum, you will need to invest at least triple.
For this reason, the first advice is that before anything you have clear your claims and your budget, and that you are clear that you will not be able to play at 4K resolution and with everything to the maximum with a PC gaming of 500 euros.