Budget Gamer PC Build, the Budget part

Budget Gamer PC – Where to spend your money

You can find lots of articles on how to build a Budget Gaming PC like this PC Gamer article from January 2021 but they don’t tell you if you can afford what you want to do. Here we are going to discuss how to prioritize your Budget Gaming PC build hardware expense. The focus here is on where to spend your hardware money.

If you are not on a tight budget ($2000 gamer system?) you can pretty much just buy the best or near best of everything. Go to “Priority of where to spend your money” for our recommendations of where to spend the money you have. If you are on a tight budget, read on. This may help you make best use of that limited budget.

Step 1: What Video Card is recommended for your game?

Check the specs for the game(s) you want to play and see what the publisher recommends for a video card and system specification. The card they recommend is the absolute minimum you are going to need, otherwise you will not have adequate video horsepower for the game. An inadequate video card makes games show less detail, have slower graphic response times, and generally negatively impact game play. As you can guess, often times the video card is where you need to spend most of your money in a budget build.

Step 2: Budget – Video Card = The whole rest of the system.

Find a price for the recommended video card and do the rough calculation below. We are going to do this with variables so you can plug in your own real numbers.

Let’s make:

X = Your total budget. (Let’s say $900)
V = Price of the recommended video card (or better). (Let’s say $600)

OS = Price of the operating system. Win 10 costs $100

The budget minus the video card and the operating system leaves how much you have left to build your PC; the motherboard, CPU, memory, drive(s), case, and power supply.
X – V – OS = $$

For our example that would be: $1100 – $600 – $100 = $400

Our budget Gamer PC is not complete without the following which all need to come out of the remaining budget $$:

CPU
Motherboard
Memory
Case
Power Supply
Drive(s)

If there is not enough money left ($$) to build the PC then you need to either:

Increase your budget X

Get a cheaper video card V

In our example, that remaining $400 (V) is not very much money to get all of the above. If you are upgrading, some of these parts can be reused from the old system saving on budget.

The good thing about this formula is it tells you quickly if your budget is adequate for the machine you need. If you just don’t have the budget to get the right parts then you should make other plans. Spending all your budget and not getting a workable gaming machine would be a waste.