Gaming PC Configuration (February 2016)

Every year game producers come up with more and more fascinating games in competition to attract more people to their products. Year after year they increase their demands in PC performance and graphics quality to keep the pace. All this enforces PC gamers to improve their hardware performance  in order to ensure best gaming experience. Our subscribers and visitors have asked us many times for an advice in choosing the right hardware configuration for a PC. Thing is that current PC configuration that seems to be good now, will not be this good in a year or two. We decided to share our vision on a current gaming PC configuration keeping in mind reasonable price/quality relation and that it should good enough to cope with games to come within next several years.

The first and maybe one of the most important things to think of when choosing hardware for a gaming PC is the processor. After browsing through current offers we decided that the current winner is the Intel based Core i5-6600K processor. It has a rather moderate price of around $240 and enough potential to hold in the mainstream in next 3 years. This processor should be accompanied by a motherboard that supports Socket LGA1151. There is a pretty wide choice here, we would go with H170 PRO GAMING motherboard by ASUS. Support of DDR4 memory, USB 3.1 and the potential for 2 GPUs in SLI for $125 is a good deal to our mind. Now let’s look at memory. 8GB for $50 or 16GB for $70 that is the question we faced – we decided to go with 16GB as a more survivable and price efficient variant.

Also you should pay attention to bundles offered by Amazon sellers – they sometimes can offer a good deal when buying the above components as a bundle. Now it’s time to choose the drive. HDD or SSD? Our answer is both! Though HDD has more capacity and is cheaper, it dramatically falls behind when it comes to speed, if compared to SSD. (article?) We recommend to have an SSD for your OS and programs while leaving some 2TB HDD as the file storage. 128GB of SSD is enough for running the system with all necessary software there. If you would like to run games from SSD, you should go up to 240GB SSD. The price difference here would be about $40.

The most important thing in the gaming computer is the video card. We are more used to nVidia solutions, so our recommendation here will be a 4GB GTX 970. In our opinion, no other video card on the market has the same performance/price ratio. We will describe our decision in a separate article, telling how to choose the optimal video card.

And finally, last but not least – the power. A 500-550W power supply will easily handle everything above, but if you plan to have two GPUs in SLI, then 750W is your choice.

Now place all the elements into one of the cases that you like most and go for gaming!