Advice and Resources to Join the PC Gaming World
If the PC gaming hivemind is to be believed, you must spend thousands of dollars and get hundreds of frames per second to have a real gaming PC. In reality, there’s a much wider world out there open to people wanting to play games on PC, and if you are interested, you can get to work building your own quality gaming PC easily, and at nearly any budget.
Things to Consider Before Jumping In
Like any hobby, PC gaming can get expensive quick, but as is typically the case, a little preparation can reduce the stress on your heart, your soul – and your bank account. Let’s start with a few questions you can ask yourself.
What is your budget?
Your budget can greatly impact what your machine is capable of doing, which makes it important to manage your expectations. While a budget under $100 is doable, it will definitely be more limiting than even $150. Figure out what your budget is, and from there you can begin to research what that budget should be able to get you.
What do you want to play?
Knowing what kinds of games you might want to play can help give you a solid target to aim for in terms of the specs of your PC. While you should never build a system around a single game, knowing what games you want to play, and looking up their system requirements, can at least give you a picture of your minimum viable PC parts to work with. Use some of the resources listed below to understand what parts will meet them.
New or Used?
Once you have established your budget, and what kind of system specs you should looking for, at minimum, to play the games you want to play, it’s time to plan your PC build. There are a couple of ways to get the parts you will need.
Building New
If you value warranties and being on a still-supported hardware platform, building new is likely the best way for you to go. New parts will inherently be more expensive than going the used route, and will need a much higher minimum budget to fully build out. As an aside, this year’s low-end new parts will almost alway lose out to high and midrange parts from even five years ago around the same budget in most cases. But that doesn’t mean that building a PC using new parts is a bad idea. With processors like the Athlon 3000ge, people can enter into the low end of PC gaming onto a platform with a lot of upgrade potential down the line. And of course if something goes wrong with a part of that PC, you can likely get it replaced with the warranty the part comes with. Building new also lessens the risk of missing out on features like USB3.0, USB C, and NVMe storage. Build a new PC if you want to be on a cutting edge platform, and want the features that come along with that.
Building Used
If you are looking for great performance for the lowest investment, new isn’t likely to be your best choice. That is where used parts and prebuilt computers come in to offer you some amazing value, in addition to other benefits. Used parts vary widely in age and performance level, allowing even a modest budget to open doors into gaming. And buying a used prebuilt PC and throwing a graphics card in it can offer good performance and less hassle for anyone who doesn’t want to build a PC while still jumping into gaming. Building with used parts or a prebuilt PC has the benefit of being better for the environment as well.
According to the New York Times, eWaste is the fastest-growing stream of trash into landfills, with a predicted 57 million tons added in the year 2021 alone. The biggest danger of eWaste is the large amount of heavy metals contained within many electronic devices, which slowly break down into the soil and groundwater, raising their toxicity. By buying used, you are doing your part to keep perfectly viable electronics from becoming eWaste, which keeps the planet looking beautiful. After all, don’t you want the world outside your window to be just as beautiful as the worlds in your favorite games*?
But building with used hardware isn’t without its downsides. With used parts, you will always be at the mercy of the parts’ condition, and what their previous usage level might have been can have a big impact on how long those parts may survive for you. And of course, unlike new parts, you are very unlikely to have any sort of warranty to lean on if a part does fail. You also lose out on new features, and as new games get more advanced, maybe even compatibility to play the latest titles. If you are okay with these trade offs in order to get a better value, consider building a PC with used parts.
*So long as your favorite games are not set in desolate wastelands. If you want that outside your window, move to Nevada.
Resources
Now once you get into your game, you get to concern yourself with resource management for whole encampments and civilizations. But we aren’t there yet! You still have a PC to build, and possibly no idea how to do it! Luckily, we have compiled a set of resources that will help get you through that journey. Disclaimer: this set is non-exhaustive, and there are no doubt many other sites and communities out there that would be great additions, but over my many years of building super cheap gaming PCs, these are the ones I have spent time with and found useful. To help navigate through these resources and what assistance they are best at providing, I have divided everything into three simple categories: The guiding light, the gather quest, and the promised land – arrived.
The Guiding Light
Need help understanding what you are looking for or how to put it all together? These resources will help you during your journey.
Logical Increments has an excellent list of PC builds using brand new parts. Following these part lists will get you a solid PC, and they even provide stats on how each one performs in a handful of popular games.
Trying to decide if that graphics card you are looking provides good bang for your buck? TomsHardware GPU Hierarchy helps to illustrate which cards perform at what level. You can find plenty of older, used cards that still perform great at much cheaper prices than some of the new cards on the market.
YouTube
YouTube is home to many great content creators focused on PC gaming on a budget. Each has their own style, so which of them you might find yourself drawn to depends on your tastes. Videos range from used graphics card reviews to CPU testing to full build guides that you can follow to help you put together your machine. The following is a non-exhaustive list of creators that I find to have great tips for the budget builder:
First time building a PC and don’t know what you need? PC parts store Newegg has a nifty guide to help you out.
If there is one thing you should never cheap out on, it is the power supply you put in your computer. To figure out how much power your PSU will need to supply to the rest of the machine, use this calculator. It will even suggest a reliable unit that will supply what your computer needs.
The Gather Quest
If you are used to games with quests, you will have no doubt encountered the much beloved “Gather Quest” type, where you are told by some lazy or possibly preoccupied-but-definitely -just-lazy NPC to go and get a bunch of items, almost assuredly for a nice pat on the back. But this gather quest is different! This gather quest is for you to get the resources that you need to make your budget gaming computer a reality.
If you are looking for a prebuilt system that just needs a graphics card slapped in, this is the place. I have personally built a few cheap gaming PCs using prebuilt systems from this seller and have never been disappointed. They also have PC parts you can use to build up your PC, ranging from Motherboard and CPU combos, to RAM, to the occasional graphics cards. Plus, they run a charity to get computers into the hands of children in need!
Find lots of new and used parts here. Its best to have an idea of what you are looking for, and what it’s worth to get a good deal here. And to avoid the sketchy sellers.
Looking to find used parts more locally? Facebook Marketplace has been where I have experienced the best selection and deals. Craigslist can also be an option, but I have found buyer-seller communication to go much smoother on Facebook.
If you are one of those people who enjoy Reddit, this subreddit can be a great place to find some parts for your PC.
If you are in need of a free or cheap OS, and aren’t a fan of Linux, fear not! Microsoft provides a tool for downloading and installing Windows 10 from a USB drive, and the best part is that it is free. You can use Windows 10 indefinitely without activation, however you will eventually get a small watermark in the bottom left of your screen. It doesn’t really get in the way though.
The Promised Land, Arrived
You’ve built your gaming PC and now you need to know what to play! These websites and communities will provide excellent recommendations!
Steam Curated Lists
Browsing the many curated lists people have created on Steam can be a good place to discover new games to try!
Once again, if you find Reddit to be your cup of tea, this subreddit provides a community devote to playing games on modest hardware. Plenty of lists of games that do well on budget PCs can be found here.
Intel provides updated lists of games that run great on their integrated graphics. If you are on a tight budget and couldn’t afford a dedicated GPU or have a laptop from college still in use, these lists can provide some awesome games to play.
Next Steps
Well, you now have some resources that will help you through choosing parts, buying them, building your computer, and finding great games to play on it! They only thing left to do is to follow through and get to playing!
Thank you to Adam Clark for contributing this piece on budget gaming! He’s our first (PAID!) contributor, and his contribution was made possible by you, our lovely readers!
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