Epic R15,000 gaming PC

R15,000 is more than enough to buy a powerful gaming PC in December 2024.

The prices of PCs and computing components have gradually reduced in the years following the Covid-19 pandemic and the global chip shortage.

Demand for these items has largely normalised after a big surge driven by people requiring hardware to work and study from home.

The crypto mining industry — in particular the Ethereum mining segment — has also slowed down significantly, with much less demand for powerful graphics cards.

MyBroadband configured a PC for R15,000 — roughly the same cost as a PS5 or Xbox Series X — using the most affordable components from major online PC retailers.

Our main goal was that the system should have the capability to play many of the latest popular games at 60 frames per second or more with settings at high and a resolution of 1440p.

Upgrading to 4K would not be noticeable on 24-inch or 27-inch monitors at the typical distance from the screen that most gamers would be seated.

It is also likely that gamers using these screen sizes would prioritise high refresh rates over resolution.

Our second goal was to beat the R15,000 system we configured in February 2024.

The most important component in a gaming rig is the graphics card, as it provides most of the rendering power needed to produce high-quality 3D imagery and lighting.

We opted for the AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT 12GB as it achieved an average of almost exactly 60 frames per second at 1440p across Tom’s Hardware’s GPU benchmarks.

This card also provides slightly better performance than the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 8GB we used in our previous rig while costing R500 less at the time of publication than the previous card cost at the time of our last build.

The next most important component in your gaming PC is the CPU, which is mainly responsible for the game logic, AI calculations, physics, and input processing.

It also comes into play when decompressing files, such as when launching a game or loading levels, or when downloading and updating games.

AMD’s Ryzen CPUs are highly popular among gamers as they tend to offer better value for money than Intel’s latest chips.

We chose the AMD Ryzen 7 5700 as it provided a modest bump in performance over the Ryzen 5 5500 we had previously used.

The main downside to this chip is that it uses the previous generation AM4 socket, which will also limit you to older chips and RAM in the future.

Fortunately, it was available at a very good price in an upgrade kit with an MSI A520 micro-ATX motherboard from Evetech, which also came with 32GB of Klevv 3,200MHz DDR4 RAM.

The last essential internal component was storage.

While our option of the Adata 1TB NVMe SSD does not anywhere near the fastest speeds, its price tag of R899 offered unbeatable value.

Most competing SSDs with similar capacities were priced at well over R1,000.

It still offers a highly respectable 3,500MB/s read and 2,800MB/s write speed, which should result in relatively quick boot-up and short-lived in-game loading screens.

For our last two parts — the power supply and case — we stuck with budget options, as these have a smaller impact on overall performance.

They can also be upgraded at a much lower cost at a later stage.

Windows install may add cost

The total cost of our system worked out to R14,895, not including the Windows installation.

Those gamers who are upgrading from a previous system will likely already have a copy of the operating system they can transfer to their new machine.

However, we also included the cost of a Windows 11 licence for those who are starting from scratch.

The table below summarises the system we were able to build with components from Evetech.