The powerful gaming PC you can build for R15,000 in South Africa

If you have a budget of around R15,000, it is possible to build a formidable gaming desktop PC with components from well-known online stores in South Africa.
The months-long global chip shortage brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic and the hoarding of GPUs for crypto mining during a boom in that industry have long passed.
According to Gartner, PC sales volumes in 2023 were at their lowest since 2006.
When demand is low and supply is high, distributors and retailers are under pressure to move stock, which often leads to big discounts on parts.
MyBroadband configured a budget desktop gaming system and found that the prices of components from major online PC specialist retailers in South Africa are generally quite low compared to previous years.
How we chose our components
For our setup, we only had one major requirement — the system must be able to play most of the latest games at over 60 frames per second with medium or high settings at 1,440p resolution.
The two most important components in a gaming PC are the graphics card and processor.
The graphics card supports the rendering of visual elements in a game, as well as the artificial intelligence (AI) upscaling process in some more recent models.
A processor’s job in games is a bit more complex but primarily involves performing calculations on in-game physics, input and output control, and sound effects.
The CPU also comes into play when decompressing game files, and is important when compiling shaders for the graphics card to use.
Its tasks primarily relate to the player’s in-game actions and the behaviour of non-playable characters and environments.

Counter-Strike is generally not that demanding on a GPU
Balancing the power of these two components is essential.
If you have a very powerful graphics card but a mediocre processor, the card will not be able to perform at its peak, particularly at lower resolutions.
In higher resolutions, the role of the graphics card is more important, while it might hit a ceiling in performance at lower resolutions with an inadequate processor.
We chose the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 8GB card and AMD Ryzen 5500 processor as a good starting combination.
While the latter will create a bottleneck for the card in certain games, only an AMD Ryzen 9 or Intel Core i9 chip could avoid this altogether.
These are simply too expensive for a budget system and can be considered when upgrading at a later stage.
The most cost-effective deal we found with the AMD Ryzen 5500 processor included a motherboard and 16GB RAM — more than sufficient for our requirements.
However, we would recommend getting an extra stick of 16GB RAM down the line, especially if you like keeping a web browser open in the background while playing games.
Storage and other bits
Games also take up plenty of storage, and having to uninstall and redownload them can be a hassle. Therefore, we opted to look at 1TB drives as a minimum for storage.
Games can also benefit hugely from fast drive read speeds, so NVMe solid-state drives are the way to go.
The two components you can get for more affordable prices without sacrificing performance are your power supply and case.
However, it is vital that the former’s electricity supply is safe and won’t damage your components.
According to Newegg’s Power Supply calculator, a 400–499 watt unit would be sufficient for our needs.
The 550W Raidmax model we chose had a rating of 4.4 out of 5 on Takealot, based on 29 reviews.
The final part of your setup will be the essential software you need to play games.
When it comes to PC gaming, Windows offers the widest range of support and best performance.
If you already have a PC with a retail copy of Windows 10 or Windows 11, you can move it to your new system.
If you need a new retail copy, you must pay between R2,500 and R3,300.
“Grey” OEM copies sell for far less but can only be used on a single machine.
The table below summarises our chosen components and their prices in our sub-R15,000 gaming PC build for February 2024.
R15,000 gaming PC build | |
Components | Price |
MSI B450M-A Pro Max motherboard | R3,699 (upgrade kit price) |
AMD Ryzen 5 5500 processor | |
16GB Klevv 3,200MHz DDR4 RAM | |
Zotac GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 8GB | R8,999 |
Samsung 970 Evo Plus 1TB NVMe SSD | R1,299 |
Raidmax RX-5XT 550W power supply | R513 |
Antec Ax20 mid-tower gaming case | R499 |
Total | R15,009 |
Add Windows 11 Home installation (+R2,599 from Makro) | R17,608 |