Top Prebuilt Gaming Pc 2020 – AMD or Nvidia? Hard drive or solid state? We ask the experts what should be inside your dream car for this year and for the future.
Buying and accessing a new gaming PC is a big investment, and the decisions and trade-offs are many. But since you’ll be spending more time at home in the coming months, it might be a purchase you’re seriously considering.
Top Prebuilt Gaming Pc 2020
To guide you through this complicated process, here are the essentials of building a strong game for 2020 and beyond. We aim to exceed the recommended settings for today’s most demanding games and reach the required settings for major titles in at least a few years.
Engineering A Gaming Pc With And For Kids
PC Gamer’s Senior Hardware Editor Alan Dexter, Cardboard Sword’s Design Director Chris Wilson, Creative Assembly Communications Manager Al Bickham and Acer UK’s Head of Product Business Nic Claassen helped select the components.
Basically, there are two manufacturers to choose from here. Intel with the Core series and AMD with Ryzen. The latter have taken over the market with incredibly powerful multi-core products that offer simultaneous multi-threaded connections, but these products only really work if you’re doing other tasks on your computer, such as video editing and encoding or streaming live, while you play, do. “If your mission is purely gaming, Intel is the way to go,” says Dexter.
Dexter and Wilson both recommend the Intel Core i5-9600K (£230). “You get a lot of chips for your money,” says Dexter. “The base frequency of 3.7GHz means it’s good enough for most tasks and can cope well with heavy workloads, with a 4.6GHz turbo on all cores and up to 4.9 GHz on single-core tasks. The suffix K indicates that the chip is unlocked. That said, those who want to squeeze more performance out of their chips can do so through overclocking (provided they have enough cooling). As an AMD alternative, Dexter suggests the Ryzen 7 3700X (£270), and Wilson adds, “Don’t discount something like the AMD Ryzen 5 3600 unless you have strong brand loyalty.”
On the more expensive side, an Intel i7 or even an i9 will power you through. Id Software recommends an Intel Core i7-6700K or better (or AMD Ryzen 7 1800X or better) for Doom Eternal.
Best Gaming Pc Under $5000 [with Rtx 3090]
“Some games run perfectly acceptable on an Intel Core i3-9100 with a decent graphics card,” said Claassen, who provided the review PC for this article. “But with 8 cores, 8 threads and a turbo lock speed of 4.9 GHz for optimal performance at ultra-fast settings, the Intel Core i7-9700K will see you through for a long time to come. If you’re on a budget and want to make sure your gaming performance doesn’t suffer, a 10-core, 20-thread Intel Core i9-9900X gaming machine will blow your mind. HDR brings the game to life in 4K.”
If all that’s out of your price range, the Intel Core i5-9400F (£140) will do just fine, but according to Dexter, it’s about as low as you’d want. “Game developers are starting to shift toward using more cores, so a six-core chip is a reasonable minimum for any machine expected to last three years or more.”
Most common modern PC games require a minimum of 8GB of system RAM, but 16GB is recommended. “16GB is plenty,” says Wilson. I see a lot of people spending a lot of money for 32GB or more. There is a time and a place for sure, but not so much in our development system!”
For storage, solid-state drives are more expensive than hard drives, but they allow you to access data much faster, resulting in faster loading times for video games. But since they are more expensive, most people still use a combination of the two. “Typical options are high-speed SSDs for Windows and high-capacity mechanical drives for your favorite games and everything else,” says Wilson. “SSD prices continue to drop, so consider switching to SSD entirely if you don’t have a lot of data and the cost is too high.”
Best Gaming Pcs Of 2021: Get Playing Whatever Your Budget
Wilson points out that the interface between the drive and the computer is also important. SSDs can use the older SATA interface or the newer, much sleeker NVMe interface, so check the specs before you buy. “My honest choice would be something like the SATA based Samsung 860 EVO. The high end is the NVMe based Samsung 970 pro.”
Once again, there are two manufacturers here: Nvidia with its GeForce series and AMD with its Radeon. If you’re on a tight budget, Dexter recommends the AMD Radeon RX 570 4GB (£120) or the Nvidia GeForce 1650 Super (£150). Both have limitations, but will run most games very satisfactorily at 1080p resolution. “The recently released Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 is a solid entry-level gaming graphics card that goes with the Intel Core i3-9100 processor,” says Claassen. “But for 1440p gaming, a GTX 1660 Super GPU paired with an Intel Core i5-9400F processor should deliver a very pleasant experience.”
One mod to think about is support for ray tracing. “This is a new game graphics technique that tracks the path of light and affects how it interacts with the environment and objects, creating more dynamic and realistic lighting,” Bickham added, before adding: frame rate.” I’m only using a handful of titles right now, but they’re impressive.
Metro Exodus, the critically acclaimed first-person shooter, makes amazing use of this technology with its apocalyptic cityscape. You can see sparks from a nearby fire bouncing off the walls of a metal shack, the interior of a broken-down train car filled with vile orange sunlight, and nearby mutants. It sends long, dark shadows creeping across the concrete floor. Major upcoming releases like Cyberpunk 2077 and Watch Dogs: Legion are also on board, and the PS5 and Xbox Series X are set to support the effect, which will increase interest in the development community.
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The mid-range Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 Super (£330) is an excellent value card for those who don’t mind experimenting with ray tracing and sacrificing other performance features in return. At the top end, Dexter, Wilson and Bickham all recommend the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti (£990). “It’s basically the only card that can consistently record 4K at the highest settings,” says Dexter. “Again, you can’t set all ray tracing settings to max and expect silky smooth framerates.”
Don’t forget to match your GPU to your monitor. If your monitor can handle 1080p, you don’t need to spend hundreds of dollars more for a card that can handle 4K footage.
If you’re building a PC from scratch, you should also consider buying a case that’s the right size for all your components. Wilson cautions against skimping on this component. He uses cases from Fractal Design in his studio.
You also need a power supply that can handle your specification requirements. “A good 750W brand should do,” says Wilson. “The quality (certified 80+ Gold) is better than a cheap 1000W power supply that explodes and takes over all your hardware.”
Everything You Need For A Dream Pc Gaming Setup
A proper cooling system is another essential. “Like a high-performance car engine, cooling is critical to getting maximum power from a high-performance car,” says Claassen. “Using all this advanced computing power in a relatively limited space will generate a lot of heat. If the CPU, GPU, or overall system temperature rises too much, your computer will automatically begin to throttle performance, resulting in game lag and frame rate drops. Therefore, an advanced cooling system, whether it is a dedicated high-performance fan, an isolated cooling chamber or a liquid cooling solution, is critical.”
Here are three main options. The cheapest way is to buy all the components and then physically build the car yourself. It’s quite a technical task, but there are plenty of places to turn for help, including this PC Gamer video. Specialist vendors such as Overclockers, Scan, PCSpecialists or Chillblast supply the parts and build your PC from the components you choose for a small additional cost. Alternatively, you can choose fully pre-built PCs from brands like Acer, Alienware or Corsair. These computers can be more expensive, but have the advantage of providing a balanced and well-configured system. You have been selected as someone to work with.
For the purposes of this article, I tested an Acer Predator Orion 5000 with an Intel Core i7-9700K.
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