How much you should pay for a gaming PC in South Africa

Thanks to recent advances in graphics card technology, building a gaming PC is becoming cheaper than ever.

The price of high-end gaming rigs has lowered too, allowing gamers to reach new performance levels previously outside of their budget.

If you are looking at buying a gaming PC but are unsure as to how much you should be spending on your new machine, we’ve compiled data from our previous gaming builds in order to give you a relatively accurate idea of pricing.

Because the most important hardware for a gaming build is the graphics card and to a lesser extent processor, we have included the GPU and CPU details of each build.

The pricing is a rough approximation, as the pricing of individual parts is likely to change constantly.

Console-Level Gaming – R7,500

Processor: Intel Core i3-6100

Graphics Card: AMD Radeon RX 460 2GB

This build performs at a slightly higher level than the PlayStation 4, and is made possible due to the amazing cost efficiency of AMD’s Polaris 11 architecture which the Radeon RX 460 is based on.

Full HD Gaming – R11,000

Processor: Intel Core i3-6100

Graphics Card: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 6GB

Nvidia’s Pascal graphics are aimed at high-end gamers on a budget, and no product reflects this more than the GeForce GTX 1060 6GB.

This powerful build offers 1,920×1,080 gaming at a framerate of 60FPS for under R11,000.

VR Gaming – R13,000

Processor: Intel Core i5-4590

Graphics Card: Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 4GB

Please Note: This build was compiled before the release of Nvidia’s Pascal or AMD’s Polaris graphics cards. These new products offer better performance for money and would lower the cost of this build to something similar to the Full HD gaming build above.

A VR build is built very similarly to a Full HD gaming build, although it does require a quad-core processor, something that is explicitly mentioned in the system requirements for the Oculus Rift.

4K Gaming – R23,000

Processor: Intel Core i5-6600K

Graphics Card: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 8GB

Although 4K gaming has historically been expensive, its costs have been reduced thanks to better overall power efficiency and the latest generation of graphics cards.

The GeForce GTX 1080 offers the best stock 4K gaming performance possible, short of various SLI configurations.