The kit filter: The perfect parts for building your first gaming PC

Building your first gaming PC can be an intimidating task. There are a ton of different components you need to jam into a chassis, in the correct order and orientation, before you can even get anywhere near firing it up to see if it actually works. But, while I'm not going to tell you it's like slotting together bits of LEGO, so long as you've got all the right, compatible parts it's a remarkably straightforward process.

The beauty of building your own gaming rig, though, is that you can tailor it yourself and it's this which gives you the ability to prioritise cash in specific areas and save money in others. This specific build list comes to around the $1,300 mark, but you can easily push that down to a more budget level if you make some small changes.

But this is also the most difficult and most important part of your first gaming PC build: choosing the parts for your new machine. This is where it can all go wrong and you can end up making little mistakes in compatibility that end up costing you a lot of time and money making good.

So, we're here to help at least take the pain out of that part of things, by offering you a sweet PC build in what we think is the price/performance sweet spot right now. We regularly build different gaming PCs, and update our lists of the best gaming PC builds throughout the year, so if you want a cheaper alternative, or want to go all-out on the most expensive, most powerful parts, we can help there, too.

TOPICS
Dave James
Editor-in-Chief, Hardware

Dave has been gaming since the days of Zaxxon and Lady Bug on the Colecovision, and code books for the Commodore Vic 20 (Death Race 2000!). He built his first gaming PC at the tender age of 16, and finally finished bug-fixing the Cyrix-based system around a year later. When he dropped it out of the window. He first started writing for Official PlayStation Magazine and Xbox World many decades ago, then moved onto PC Format full-time, then PC Gamer, TechRadar, and T3 among others. Now he's back, writing about the nightmarish graphics card market, CPUs with more cores than sense, gaming laptops hotter than the sun, and SSDs more capacious than a Cybertruck.

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