A gaming PC is one of the most flexible ways to play games, with options to upgrade and pick just the parts you need. There's plenty to keep in mind when buying a gaming PC: power, size, components. and what resolution you want to play at. If all you need is to play a few AAA titles at 1080p, you may not need a high-end CPU and graphics card.
But if you want to play at 1440p or 4K, then you need to start thinking about saving more for your rig. CPU horsepower is also tied to gaming acumen, but branching out into anything much over a quad-core processor will primarily see performance gains in multi-threaded workloads such as video processing, rendering and encoding, not games.
Intel latest chips are its Core Ultra 200S series, which are more efficient but aren't terribly powerful compared to previous generations. For intel loyalists, 13th and 14th Gen chips are still good choices. AMD's Ryzen 9000 processors are a bit more powerful, but the true gaming champion is the cache-heavy Ryzen 7 9800X3D. We haven't seen many machines with these just yet, but expect to see more soon.
We'll jump into our tested picks for best prebuilt gaming PCs directly below. But if you want more advice about how to shop and specific things to look for, our buying advice follows our top gaming PC picks.
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Quick List
A Powerful Gaming PC With Top-Notch Build Quality
Because this PC is built entirely from aftermarket parts, you can customize it to your heart's content. No proprietary parts here!
Best Mid-range gaming PC
The iBuyPower Y60 is a strong mid-range gaming desktop with plenty of room to grow. It comes in the beautiful (but large) Hyte Y60 case to show off your components, and we appreciate that you can get it for 32GB of RAM and 2TB of storage for a price that isn't crazy. It also offers a 240 mm liquid cooler, which some PCs in this price range don't include.
A Powerful, Quiet PC with Room to Upgrade
The MSI Infinite RS 13th delivers powerful performance with an Nvidia RTX 4090 and Intel Core i9, as long as you're willing to pay for it.
For 1080p gaming
The Lenovo Legion 5i (Gen 8) is quiet with solid performance at 1080p. At under $1,200 as tested, it's the type of PC you can take out of the box and not have to worry too much about to get started.
A Gaming PC Under $1,500
The Maingear MG-1 Silver is an affordable starter PC that is well built with lots of upgrade options.
A Solid Value Prebuilt
The Predator Orion 5000 delivers excellent performance for the money, with a Core i7 and a GeForce RTX 4070 Super for about $1,500, though its looks and case aren’t as upscale as some competing PCs.
A Small PC to Fit on Your Desk
The Corsair One i500 is bigger than it used to be due to the size of today's GPUs, but it also got a makeover with wooden paneling. The larger size also makes it easy to upgrade, but this PC is only available in pricey configurations.
Best Prebuilt Gaming PCs You Can Buy Today
A powerful gaming PC with top-notch build quality
Buying a gaming PC may be easier than building one, but perhaps the biggest benefit of the Corsair Vengeance i7500 is that it feels like one you built yourself. The build starts in a Vengeance 4000D mid-tower case and is built to excellent standards.
Our review system, with an Intel Core i9-14900K and Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 from Palit, offered top-notch performance. And while it's pricey at that configuration, the system is backed by a two-year warranty, rather than the one-year system you see on many prebuilt systems in big box stores.
Because this PC is built entirely from aftermarket parts, you can customize it to your heart's content. No proprietary parts here!
There were very few downsides, beyond the expense. But RGB-lovers be warned - our review unit's GPU didn't come with colorful lighting, which you kind of expect on something that expensive, like it or not.
Read: Corsair Vengeance i7500 review
Best Mid-range gaming PC
The iBuyPower Y60 is a strong mid-range performer with some bumped-up specs that will serve you well in the future. It's slightly pricer than some similar desktops, but it comes with 32GB of RAM and 2TB of storage, which will let you store plenty of games and will serve you with demanding apps in the future.
You get a classy case — the Hyte Y60 — with this prebuilt, which gives you a wrap-around window to your components and a vertically-mounted GPU. While the motherboard doesn't have a USB Type-C port on the rear, there is one on the case.
Other desktops we tested in this range used air coolers that didn't impress. While liquid cooling isn't a must, the 240 mm liquid cooler in this case was quieter than on some competitors.
There are some downsides, namely in networking. This system uses Wi-Fi 6, which is getting a bit old as a standard. Some gamers may want to plug in Ethernet (always a best practice, if you can), particularly for big game downloads.
Read: iBuyPower Y60 Gaming Desktop review
A Powerful, Quiet PC with Room to Upgrade
If you're looking for the best of the best, the MSI Infinite RS 13th delivers top-of-the-line performance, as long as you're willing to pay for it. Between the 13th Gen Intel Core i9 and a liquid-cooled Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090, this system delivers awesome performance, while still being quiet and upgradeable down the line.
All of the parts are standard, and the case (the MSI Prospect 700RL) is roomy. In fact, for some it may be too roomy! But it can fit the two radiators and nine fans that made this system all but silent in our testing.
A keyboard and mouse are included, though you'll likely want to get something a bit nicer.
In our testing, we got some incredible performance out of the Infinite. If you value smooth gameplay and upgradeability out of your prebuilt and will sacrifice room on or under your desk, this is the one to consider.
Read: MSI Infinite RS 13th review
For 1080p Gaming
If you're buying a PC from a big box store rather than building it yourself, you're likely looking for something with solid performance, quiet operation, and decent quality that you otherwise don't have to think about.
The Lenovo Legion Tower 5i (Gen 8) checks those boxes, delivering strong 1080p gaming for under $1,200 as tested. Despite a small fan on the Core i5-14400F, the system offered quiet cooling and operation during our gameplay testing.
You get a solid case with good build quality and customizable RGB lighting, though it lacks a front USB Type-C port, which is convenient as more accessories and peripherals move to the newer standard.
Read more: Lenovo Legion Tower 5i (Gen 8) review
A Gaming PC Under $1500
A lot of the gaming PCs we test are top-of-the-line, top-of-budget machines. But it doesn't always have to be that way. We were impressed by the Maingear MG-1 Silver, largely because it's a mid-range system that doesn't feel like you're getting much less.
The chassis still feels fairly premium, though it could use some more dust filters. It has impeccable cable management, and all of the parts are name-brand, giving you ample room to upgrade later on. And there's no bloatware on the system, so you don't have to spend time uninstalling lots of junk before you get to gaming.
The only component we had issue with was the Solidigm P41 Plus in our review unit, which was sluggish at 489.65 MBps. The motherboard in our unit did have room for another SSD, however.
We tested the Shroud Edition of the Maingear MG-1 Silver, which comes with special edition magnetic faceplates. That adds an extra $100 to the $1,149 starting price, so unless you're a big fan of Shroud, the esports gamer and Twitch streamer, stick to the regular version, which is otherwise identical and spend that money on games.
Read: Maingear MG-1 Silver (Shroud Edition) Review
Powerful Performancer
The Acer Predator Orion 5000 isn't super flashy (beyond the RGB, of course), but it has the basics and then some. A mix of a 14th Gen Intel Core i7 and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super provide strong performance. It's a solid value under $2,000, and when we reviewed it it was at just $1,499. Wait until you see a similar price for the best value.
The tower offers plenty of ports, including 20GBps USB Type-C. There's a mix of USB-A and USB-C on top.
With the money you save, you may be able to consider upgrading the CPU cooler later, as it can be a bit noisy while gaming. Or you can invest in headphones and get more games.
Read: Acer Predator Orion 5000 review
A Small PC to Fit on Your Desk
It's not exactly a secret that many desktops end up sitting on the floor, not a desk. The Corsair One i500 is designed to fit on your desk, even if this version is a bit larger than previous ones. The new model can fit large graphics cards, like the Nvidia RTX 4080 and RTX 4090, and also has a bit more room for upgradeability.
The One also follows another recent trend, offering wood paneling on the case. Corsair offers both dark and light wood, and in theory no two should look exactly the same.
Some of the cooling oculd use work, particularly on the CPU. There's a 120 mm radiator on the Core i9, but there's room for something bigger. That being said, performance didn't seem to suffer too much.
If you don't like bloatware, you'll like that the One comes largely clean. Corsair doesn't even use its own iCue software, instead opting for a minimalist app to control the RGB lighting. There's also a touch strip on the front to control the effects, but the software is more exact.
Read: Corsair One i500 review
How We Test Gaming PCs
How we test gaming PCs
We put prebuilt gaming PCs through a number of benchmarks and other tests as part of our review process.
Currently, games that we run and may include in our reviews are:
| Game | Preset |
|---|---|
| Shadow of the Tomb Raider | Highest |
| Grand Theft Auto V | Very High |
| Cyberpunk 2077 | Ray Tracing Ultra |
| Far Cry 6 | Ultra |
| Red Dead Redemption 2 | Medium |
| Borderlands 3 | Badass |
We also run a stress test, which currently consists of the Metro Exodus benchmark on the RTX preset, run 15 times in a loop while recording system statistics with HWInfo.
While productivity performance takes a backseat to gaming, we also run benchmarks such as Geekbench, Handbrake, and our proprietary file transfer test.
We also pore over a PC's build quality, components, cable management, and port selection. Ideally, we like to see a system that you can buy off the shelf, but upgrade or repair down the line if you need to. We prefer standardized parts and want to see clean cable management that makes it easy to swap out parts. In some more unique form-factors, we may give some of these a pass, but it has to provide benefits elsewhere.
If a test system includes a keyboard and mouse, we use them to evaluate if they add value or if you'll want to replace them. We don't typically penalize systems for not including peripherals.
Additionally, we spend time playing games and using systems on our own, playing games, listening for fan noise, and seeing how systems perform outside of benchmarks.
How to Choose a Gaming PC
How to Choose a Gaming PC
- Bigger isn't always better: You don’t need a huge tower to get a system with high-end components. Only buy a big desktop tower if you like the look of it and want lots of room to install future upgrades.
- Get an SSD if at all possible: This will make your computer far faster than loading off of a traditional HDD, and has no moving parts. Look for at least a 256GB SSD boot drive, ideally paired with a larger secondary SSD or a best hard drive for storage.
- You can't lose with Intel or AMD: As long as you opt for a current-generation chip, both companies offer comparable overall performance. Intel’s CPUs tend to perform a bit better when running games at lower resolutions (1080p and below), while AMD’s Ryzen processors often handle tasks like video editing better, thanks to their extra cores and threads.
- Don’t buy more RAM than you need: 8GB is OK in a pinch, but 16GB is ideal for most users. Serious game streamers and those doing high-end media creation working with large files will want more, but will have to pay a lot for options going as high as 64 or even 128GB.
- Don’t buy a multi-card gaming rig unless you have to: If you’re a serious gamer, get a system with the best-performing single graphics card you can afford. Many games don’t perform significantly better with two or more cards in Crossfire or SLI, and some perform worse, forcing you to disable an expensive piece of hardware to get the best experience possible. Because of these complications, you should only consider a multi-card desktop if you are after more performance than can be achieved with the best high-end consumer graphics card.
- The power supply is important: Does the PSU offer enough juice to cover the hardware inside? (In most cases, the answer is yes, but there are some exceptions, particularly if you intend to overclock a CPU.) Additionally, note if the PSU will offer enough power for future upgrades to GPUs and other components. Case size and expansion options vary drastically between our picks.
- Ports matter: Beyond the connections necessary to plug in your monitor(s), you’ll want plenty of USB ports for plugging in other peripherals and external storage. Front-facing ports are very handy for flash drives, card readers, and other frequently used devices. For added future-proofing, look for a system with USB 3.1 Gen 2 and USB-C ports.
Discounts on the Best Gaming PCs
Discounts on the Best Gaming PCs
If you're looking for a system that's among our best gaming PCs or something similar, you may find savings by checking out the latest Newegg promo codes, Corsair coupon codes, Dell coupon codes, HP coupon codes, Lenovo coupon codes or Razer promo codes.
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