Building a new gaming PC in 2019 - A basic guide

Bradley Prior

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Building a new gaming PC in 2019 - A basic guide

With the availability of Nvidia's new GeForce RTX graphics cards and the upcoming AMD Ryzen 3rd-gen processors, being a PC gamer in 2019 is more exciting than ever.

Building a machine that can play modern games at 1080p on High graphics settings is also cheaper than ever before, and it is becoming more reasonable to build 4K gaming machines, too.
 
Just went through and "built" a pc on wootware. Under R15k for a ryzen 5 2400 with 16GB ram and a 1660Ti with a 256 GB SSD and a 1TB 7200 drive as well. Very pleasantly surprised by that to be honest. Last time I looked at a new gaming rig it worked out to way over the R20k mark. And the "build" I made could be drastically improved upon, just grabbed the first things that looked good.
 
Just went through and "built" a pc on wootware. Under R15k for a ryzen 5 2400 with 16GB ram and a 1660Ti with a 256 GB SSD and a 1TB 7200 drive as well. Very pleasantly surprised by that to be honest. Last time I looked at a new gaming rig it worked out to way over the R20k mark. And the "build" I made could be drastically improved upon, just grabbed the first things that looked good.

Could go lower, look at the builds Ponder has done on the PC Build thread. I hit R15k for my build and it's a Ryzen 2600 with the exact spec you've listed, but that was two weeks ago.
 
This article is a bit misleading saying that you can get a cheap cpu and spend more on a graphics? Yes spending alot on a graphics card is always good but with a bad mobo and cpu combo you're just going to bottleneck all that potential. Go read real forums on finding the right combo for what you want to do.
 
This article is a bit misleading saying that you can get a cheap cpu and spend more on a graphics? Yes spending alot on a graphics card is always good but with a bad mobo and cpu combo you're just going to bottleneck all that potential. Go read real forums on finding the right combo for what you want to do.

This choice will obviously depend on your budget, but it is important to note that if you are building a gaming PC you do not need an expensive processor.

In fact, you can often get much better value by buying a cheap CPU and spending more on a powerful graphics card.

Depends on your definition of cheap & powerful. Many would consider an i3 8xxx cheap but that will bottleneck a gtx1660. For R2700 which is cheaper than most i3s you can get yourself a R5 2600 at the moment, that's both cheap and powerful.
 
Just went through and "built" a pc on wootware. Under R15k for a ryzen 5 2400 with 16GB ram and a 1660Ti with a 256 GB SSD and a 1TB 7200 drive as well. Very pleasantly surprised by that to be honest. Last time I looked at a new gaming rig it worked out to way over the R20k mark. And the "build" I made could be drastically improved upon, just grabbed the first things that looked good.

Would you mind sharing your parts list?
 
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