I haven't had a gaming pc in well over a decade. My series of laptops have been great for home/work, but beyond simple games like The Long Dark, my laptop can't handle fps. I don't know the first thing about building a rig so my question is where are good places to find gaming rigs for sale and what's a good quality rig cost these days. I want to play SCUM, RUST, games like that. So I don't think I need top of the line but obviously want something better than minimum requirements cause obviously games are only going to demand more cpu/graphic power going forward. Help, please I need a gaming rig crash course.
Budget somewhere around $1.5-2k, US dollars. Just a cursory look around and graphics card prices seem a bit obscene. I know there are shortages, when those let up will prices come back to normal?
For a very gaming-focused system, a good rule of thumb is to plan to put as much as 2/3 of the total cost into your graphics card. Your CPU is relatively less important, unless you are going to be doing a lot of productivity work (especially video editing). If you are a content creator, you want to invest in the CPU as well.
As far as the landscape goes, the struggle for builders for the last two years or so has been limited availability of GPUs owing to GPU cryptocurrency mining. This led scalpers to buy up all the stock and to inflated prices for gamers. That has come down in a big way this year, but you can still struggle to find GPUs at their listed MSRP. You also might have to be patient to find a card at a price you consider reasonable. Stock and prices are improving, but you might need to get lucky to find what you want in stock at that price.
Using the 2/3 guidance, if you're looking at an upper mid-range GPU like a RTX 3070 at $500, you can build a streamlined system for about $800. (This is excluding monitor and peripherals and taking a very streamlined approach, with few bells and whistles at this price point. Any decision to re-use parts you may already have makes sense at this lower tier.)
With a $600 GPU like RTX 3070 Ti, your total cost might be about $1000.
With an $800 GPU like an RTX 3080, your total cost might be about $1200-$1400.
If you look at an RTX 3080 Ti at around $1200 or so, your total cost falls in the $1800-$1900 range.
For a system based around the RTX 3090, the GPU is $1800 and the total cost is going to push $3000.
AMD doesn't yet do ray tracing as well as nVidia, and their GPU prices are lower for the same clock speeds as a result. You can get great value from going with AMD over nVidia, especially at the lower price points and if ray tracing is not important to you.
I recommend nVidia 3000 series for the GPU and AMD 5000 series on the AM4 platform for the CPU right now, personally. As for the perennial question, "isn't something better coming out in six months," well, the answer to that is always yes. The technology is always moving. Intel just introduced a new platform and AMD is planning to do so with AM5 later this year.
Getting in on a new platform early can give you CPU upgrade potential down the line. If you buy AM4 right now, the last of the compatible CPUs have just come out. You're limited as far as your CPU upgrade path. So it might be a factor for you if you want to build something today and continue upgrading it over time. A new platform can be expensive, though, and parts compatibility hit and miss (e.g., RAM, CPU coolers, etc.)
