We're finally seeing some great budget gaming PCs around the $1,000 mark, case in point this Stormcraft RTX 5060 Ti build for $1,100. During the previous GPU generation, $1,000 RTX 4060 Ti gaming PCs hit a sweet spot for many gamers, and now it's looking like RTX 5060 Ti builds might start to fit the same bill for the new generation. We're not quite at $1,000 for a build of this calibre just yet, but $1,100 is damn close.
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 Ti at the heart of this rig is a card that we think is pretty decent, though not groundbreaking (is anything groundbreaking this generation?). Though it is an 8 GB version you're getting here rather than a 16 GB version such as the one we reviewed.
That'll be enough to get the comment sections turning over in disgust, I'm sure, but I don't think 8 GB of VRAM on an RTX 5060 Ti PC for this price is too bad, all things considered. Rendering longevity thanks to the GPU itself will probably be an issue long before 8 GB of VRAM will, certainly at lower resolutions. And there are very few games today—though not zero—that kick up a fuss against 8 GB. 12 GB or 16 GB would be ideal, but for a budget card like this, 8 GB isn't the worst.
To put this into perspective, I just spent an inordinate amount of time over the weekend playing Killing Floor 3, a new UE5 game that has all the usual modern graphical bells and whistles, on an 8 GB RTX 5060 gaming laptop (so that's an RTX 5060 mobile, rather than the full-fat version). And I noticed no issues at all that suggested problems with VRAM. Just one sample, but that holds across most games today, though there are, of course, exceptions.
One of the big benefits of a budget current-gen Nvidia build like this rather than, say, a previous-gen one, is that you get access to Multi Frame Gen. That's another thing I was sceptical about until I gave it a proper, concerted go. While it's not as nice as extra native performance would be, it's not nothing—as long as you're starting off at a decent enough frame rate, that is, otherwise latency can be bad.
The rest of this gaming PC is great for the current $1,100 price tag, too. The Core i5 14400F is a pretty wonderful pairing for this graphics card, as it shouldn't bottleneck it at all. 1 TB of storage, on the other hand, isn't wonderful, but you can add another terabyte pretty easily whenever you're ready. And what is ideal is that 32 GB of fast RAM, which should allow you to keep all those Chrome tabs open without your PC throwing a fit.
The icing on the cake is the small form factor, although you might want to swap out those top two fans and get a liquid cooler on that CPU instead, if it'll fit, as I doubt the cooling will be ideal in this build. Still, it'll look mighty fine sitting neatly on your desk in that dinky little fish tank chassis, and that's what really matters, right?
1. Best overall: HP Omen 35L
2. Best budget: Lenovo Legion Tower 5i
3. Best compact: Velocity Micro Raptor ES40
4. Alienware: Alienware Aurora
5. Best mini PC: Minisforum AtomMan G7 PT
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