Gaming PC

Gaming PCs are great because of the flexibility they offer. You can choose the parts you want to fit your needs and the type of games you play. While plenty of people like to put together their own PCs like the best PC builds, others prefer the simplicity of buying a rig that's ready to play out of the box.

If you're playing at 1080p, you may not need the highest-end CPU and graphics cards. But if you step up to 1440p or 4K, you'll want higher-end components. While a GPU is typically considered the gaming workhorse, a CPU is tied to gaming acumen and can help in multi-threaded workloads, including video processing, rendering, and encoding.

Intel's latest chips are its Core Ultra 200S series, which are more efficient but aren't great gaming performers compared to previous generations. For Intel loyalists, 13th and 14th Gen chips are still good choices. AMD's Ryzen 9000 processors are a bit more powerful, but the true gaming champion is the cache-heavy Ryzen 7 9800X3D. At CES 2026, AMD announced its Ryzen 7 9850X3D, which we're likely to see in some more premium builds throughout the first half of the year.

Nvidia's RTX 50-series GPUs, including the RTX 5090, RTX 5080, and RTX 5070 Ti are still the latest in graphics, as the company hasn't announced anything to replace them. AMD's RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 offer strong value in the mainstream with 16GB of VRAM. One other big component to look at is RAM, as the increasing price of memory is likely to lead to pricier builds; some boutique brands have options to find your own RAM and send it in to be included.

We'll jump into our tested picks for best prebuilt gaming PCs directly below. But if you want more advice about how to shop and specific things to look for, our buying advice follows our top gaming PC picks.