Buy Gaming Tower

One of the most significant advantages of building your PC is the ability to hand-pick every single component in the system. This enables you to shop around for deals and find the best combination of parts to fit your budget and performance needs. The downside for most inexperienced builders is that this process can take some time and cause quite a headache if something goes wrong. You only get warranties on the individual components, not your finished build, and this is where the best prebuilt gaming PCs shine.

buy gaming tower

When you pay the premium to configure or purchase a prebuilt PC, you pay for more than just the parts. You pay for warranty service, support, and peace of mind that professionals put your system together. These are some of the things we value highly when considering what the best gaming PC is. We also look at other selling points, like design, upgradability, and anything you wouldn't be able to do when building it yourself.

When we set out to choose our top choices of prebuilt gaming PCs, we look at almost every major manufacturer and system integrator to find the best combination of value, reliability, customer feedback, design, and performance for various budgets and needs.

The best gaming PC is meant to bring you hours and hours of joy. It's more than a collection of fancy bits stuffed in a case. That's why what we look out for in our testing is a complete system built with care by professionals and tailored to gaming performance. We also want to see that the manufacturer has put thought and care into selecting its components to fit your budget without cutting corners. And after all our testing, the best gaming PC is the NZXT BLD Kit (opens in new tab). The range offers the perfect mix of affordability, power, and sheer joy. You don't have to put it together yourself, you get to, and it's genuinely fun.

We've all seen how hard it's been to get components like the best graphics cards throughout the last couple of years. And if finding them wasn't difficult enough, they often sell well above MSRP to the point where it feels like a rip-off. There has been some improvement in product availability and pricing in 2023. Still, it remains true that the buying power of system builders means they generally have a better chance of getting hold of a new piece of hardware than you do on your own. That means it's easier and often cheaper to chase down that desirable new GPU by buying the best gaming PC and, for the most part, passing those savings onto you. I get it; nothing is better than building your own gaming rig, but not everyone has the know-how or the patience to make it happen.

But with so many different configurations, how can you tell the best gaming PC? We've switched up how we test prebuilt PCs and are focusing less on exact configurations and more on what different system builders will prioritize in terms of specs and what they offer regarding the quality of build and warranty.

The NZXT Streaming Plus BLD Kit (opens in new tab) isn't your typical off-the-shelf gaming PC. You end up with an absolute monster of a machine, but you have to put most of it together yourself. NZXT offers more traditional builds for would-be buyers, but this doesn't feel too much for most PC gamers to handle.

Essentially, you're going to be able to play pretty much any game at the top settings at 1440p without issue. And with DLSS on hand to help out in ray tracing heavy titles, you can easily show off what the best games are capable of with this machine and not feel like you're missing out. 4K isn't too much of an ask either, making this a versatile option for plenty of gaming setups.

AMD Ryzen 7 7700X GeForce RTX 4070 Ti 16GB DDR4 1TB SSD (opens in new tab)This combination of RTX 4070 Ti and AMD's eight-core Zen 4 CPU makes for a mighty powerful gaming PC that will outperform pretty much any $3K RTX 3090-based gaming PC you could have bought last year. Coming with a 1TB PCIe SSD is absolutely vital at this level, too.

The ABS Master gaming PC has a lot going for it: 1440p gaming, rendering prowess, and a big tick for productivity. And while it does deliver when it comes to the core components, it wouldn't have hurt for ABS to give the supporting parts a little more love.

Build Redux sets out to make buying a new gaming PC a much easier affair than normal. The traditional frustrations of wading through nonsense names trying to work out whether they'll handle your game of choice will be familiar to any PC gamer. This system builder offers three main gaming PCs to choose from and each one can be configured slightly further by throwing a bit more cash at the system if you do want to dig into the details.

That means the Build Redux Good is a decent machine when it comes to gaming. The key component here is that RTX 3060 Ti, which can handle anything you can throw at it at 1080p, and as can be seen from the benchmarks is capable enough at 1440p too. There's not a lot between this machine and the ABS Master, which packs the same GPU.

Overall, the Build Redux 'Good' is a capable gaming machine representing strong value for money. The component selection is mostly spot on and SSD aside, this should last you a good few years of gaming without worries. If you don't want to build your own PC with the better value NZXT BLD Kit above, the ready-made Build Redux is a good, and still good value, alternative.

System builder iBuyPower is an old hand at putting together gaming PCs. So it's well aware that not all gamers are the same and some want a gaming machine that can also handle more serious tasks. Thus, the Gaming RDY SLMBG218 (opens in new tab) we tested (really trips off the tongue that one) bucks the trend of focusing on the graphics card, and instead goes big on processing power, electing to give Intel's Core i7 12700F room to show off.

Best gaming keyboard (opens in new tab) Best gaming mouse (opens in new tab) Best gaming chair (opens in new tab)Best VR headset (opens in new tab) Best wireless gaming mouse (opens in new tab) Best CPU for gaming (opens in new tab)

Intel Core i5 11400 Nvidia RTX 3060 12GB 16GB DDR4 512GB SSD + 1TB HDD (opens in new tab)Somewhat surprisingly it's a last-gen version of the Legion Tower 5 that I'm recommending. The 12th Gen Intel chips are far superior, but if you're just looking for gaming performance the sub-$1,000 price point for this RTX 3060 spec is more palatable than the much more expensive Core i5 12400F version. The last-gen version also has slightly more SSD storage. If you want that extra CPU power it's going to cost you around $100 (opens in new tab) more, which could be worth it in the right hands. It's a real toss-up to choose between the two.

Lenovo's Legion gaming PCs are solid, if rather uninspiring systems with which to start your PC gaming experience. That probably sounds like I'm damning them with faint praise, but if you're looking for your first gaming PC then buying a full system from a reputable company is likely what you want to be doing, and Lenovo rigs represent a reliable platform to build upon in the future. Though they do not, however, start out with the most exciting component list.

The Lenovo Legion Tower 5 ends up being one of those pre-built PCs that would work comfortably as 'my first gaming PC' as it comes from a reputable manufacturer. Though the one year mail-in warranty (you pay to ship it to Lenovo and they pay to ship back) feels a bit weak on what should be a $1,400 piece of hardware.

That would be fine if it was cheaper than the competition, but the Legion machines retain the same sort of pricing as more boutique PC builders. And because of that I'm going to stick with our recommendation that the best way of getting into the hobby, particularly those with a hankering for tinkering, are those darling NZXT DIY BLD kits (opens in new tab). And hell, they're a great purchase even if you're well versed in PC building, too: they end up with a higher gaming spec and you may just learn something new as you go.

Intel Core i5 12400F Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 12GB 16GB DDR4-3200 512GB SSD (opens in new tab)If we're going to recommend a Nitro 50 spec it would be the 12th Gen RTX 3060 version, but it's worth noting that you can get higher specced gaming PCs for the same money without the Acer branding.

The bottom line here is that, while the Nitro is a nifty machine for gaming it's really been let down on the storage side. The config we were expecting to have in the lab is this Nitro 50 (opens in new tab) at $1,300 with a larger SSD, though Acer has still felt the need to jam a hard drive in there. Honestly, that machine would perform at about the same level as the one in front of us here, and with that larger boot drive would have garnered a far higher score, too.

Sure, I would have been much happier with even a single, speedy 1TB SSD, rather than some additional spinning platter nonsense, but a 512GB drive is the bare minimum for a modern gaming PC. You can easily upgrade the storage later or add some more into one of the two spare M.2 slots, but these storage shenanigans really make the Nitro hard to recommend. 041b061a72