Building a PC is still an incredibly costly undertaking. Despite the semiconductor industry recovering throughout 2022, a looming recession isn’t helping prices.
Over here in South Africa we have another concern, loadshedding and its seemingly indefinite grip on the country. Constant power outages lasting over four hours are not uncommon and while backup power solutions are more widely available, spending fuel to power your PC feels like a chore.
Should you want to build a PC, tools such as these from Wootware and Computer Mania can help you shop within budget while being aware of the constraints your build have with each part such as the CPU socket, power supply unit and other components.
Building a competent PC is not as unaffordable as it was a year ago at least. We were able to build a R22 287 system that includes:
- Raidmax H701 ATX Mid-Tower Gaming Chassis
- AMD Ryzen 5 5600 3.5GHz
- 16GB Crucial 3600 DDR4
- MSI Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti VENTUS 2X 8GB OCV1
- MSI A520M-A Pro AM4
- FSP HV Pro 550W Plus
We would have preferred a different PSU and RAM but with what was available, we took what we could find for our budget.
We have to point out that this build doesn’t include a display or peripherals which would bump you up closer to the R25 000 range and perhaps even overshoot it depending on the gear you select.
Now one could do that and sit without games for four hours at a time or, you could buy a gaming notebook.
The ASUS TUF Gaming A17 is a rather good gaming notebook and it’s going to do as good of a job, if not better than the PC above. We’re not saying the A17’s 48Wh battery is going to last all two hours of loadshedding while gaming but, you could do more gaming than you would on a desktop.
We do have one more suggestion although, it’s really more something to consider for the future.
As announced earlier this year, Nvidia GeForce Now will be available in South Africa in 2023 and in that case, you don’t need a PC with a GPU at all. As cloud gaming relies more on the internet connection you have, you could get away with a notebook that retails for under R10 000 such as the Lenovo IdeaPad 3 which sports an Intel i5-10210U paired with 8GB of DDR4 memory and a 512GB SDD as well as a 1TB hard drive. The Intel i5 gives a bit more performance headroom so that you aren’t waiting for things to boot up. We would have liked a bit more RAM but 8GB will suffice for Windows 11 and a Chrome window.
While we maintain the best entry point into gaming is the Xbox Series S (plus Game Pass), that’s not a good enough answer for a PC gamer.
For those looking to build a PC, we recommend watching the market and particularly potential sales in January. There are many options and used-marketplaces such as Carbonite can be great for deal hunting.
With that having been said, consider shopping for a gaming notebook. The performance is comparable to a similarly spec’d desktop and you won’t be let down by Eskom constantly.
[Image – CC 0 Pixabay]
