Building a gaming PC for the price of a PlayStation 5

South Africans who prefer gaming on PC could build an entry-level machine for the same price as a PS5 or Xbox Series X.

The two consoles retail for around R11,999 online without any extras.

MyBroadband investigated the type of gaming PC we could build for R11,999 in South Africa.

We sourced the components’ prices using Wootware and Progenix.

Although we came in slightly under budget, our build did not include a disc drive, or peripherals like a mouse and keyboard. It also doesn’t have a monitor or headphones — but neither does a console.

PC gamers tend to spend the most money on their graphics processing unit (GPU) since it plays an overwhelming role in gaming performance.

We opted for an ASUS GeForce GTX 1650 TUF Gaming OC edition graphics card for this build.

It has 4GB VRAM and a core clock of 1,590MHz that has been overclocked to 1,785MHz, supporting a maximum resolution of 7,680×4,320 at 60Hz.

However, if you go slightly over budget, a Radeon RX 6600 is a much better choice.

Progenix has a Gigabyte Radeon RX 6600 EAGLE 8G for R5,131, which would bring the build’s total cost to between R12,302 and R12,380.

Considering Sony will be hiking the price of PlayStation 5 in South Africa, a build with this graphics card may soon be within the budget.

For the central processing unit and motherboard, gamers can choose between Intel and AMD while remaining under budget.

For those preferring Intel, we selected the Core i3-12100F CPU and the Gigabyte Gigabyte H610M H micro ATX motherboard.

The 12th generation i3-12100F has a 3.30GHz base clock, which boosts to 4.30GHz when needed.

It has four performance cores and supports DDR5 RAM if you pair it with the correct motherboard.

If you’d rather go with AMD, we’ve paired the Asus Prime A520M-K micro ATX motherboard with AMD’s Ryzen 5 4500 CPU.

Although Intel’s i3-12100 has better single-core performance than the Ryzen 5 4500, AMD’s CPU has more cores.

The six-core Ryzen CPU is better for users who also plan to use their PC for productivity workloads like video rendering and encoding.

We didn’t go for any aftermarket cooling since the stock coolers included with these CPUs are acceptable.

Since both motherboards come in micro ATX form factors, we chose Thermaltake’s Versa H15 mini tower micro ATX case.

The case includes one 120mm fan, and users can add Deepcool 120mm fans, if they deem it necessary, for R67 a piece from Progenix.

Regarding the RAM, two 8GB Adata XPG Gammix D20 3200MHz should be enough for a gaming-focused desktop PC.

While Intel’s 12th-generation chips can get a slight boost in gaming performance by using DDR5 RAM, these memory modules are still very expensive.

For storage, we chose Crucial’s 500GB P2 M.2 NVMe SSD. There are several affordable 1TB SSDs available if you want to add more storage for your games library, but this would push the build over the budget.

Regarding the power supply, Cooler Master’s 600W Elite V3 Series 80 Plus White PSU gives enough headroom for the components running in this system.

These components give you a gaming desktop that can play several high-end games at 1080p while maintaining 60 frames per second, depending on the title and graphics settings.

If you own a 4K TV and have already invested in an Xbox or PS4 games library, a PS5 or Xbox Series X would be a better choice.

A PC is better if you need a multi-purpose machine that extends beyond gaming and offers more flexibility. PC games also tend to work out cheaper in the long run.

The table below shows the components and their prices.

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