Built for your game
Start with what you play,the spec follows from there.
A machine for competitive shooters is a different machine from one for open world games at 4K, and both are different again from one that has to record while it plays. Find the way you play below and we will tell you honestly what it needs.
High frame rate
Competitive shooters
Games like these live or die on frames per second rather than on scenery, so the money goes into the processor and fast memory, and the monitor matters as much as the machine. We would rather sell you a lesser graphics card and a 144Hz screen than the other way round.
- Processor first, because the frame rate is usually limited there
- Fast memory, tuned rather than left at stock
- A card matched to the refresh rate of the screen you actually own
Detail and scale
Open world and single player
Large worlds at high settings lean on the graphics card and on storage. Loading a world in is a disk job, so an NVMe drive with room to grow does more for the experience than another few frames would. Cooling matters here too, because these sessions run long.
- Graphics card first, sized to the resolution of your screen
- NVMe storage with the headroom for very large installs
- Cooling specified for hours of load rather than minutes
Playing and working
Streaming, recording and editing
Doing two jobs at once changes the shape of the build. Encoding a stream while the game runs needs cores to spare and memory to match, and the drive layout starts to matter because captured footage fills a disk quickly. This is where a workstation specification starts to make sense.
- More cores, so the encode never steals from the game
- Memory sized for the game, the browser and the capture together
- Separate drives, so recording does not compete with the game
Not on the list
Tell us the titles,we will do the reading.
If what you play is not covered above, send us the three games you spend the most hours in and the screen you play on. We will come back with a specification and the reasoning behind every part of it, and we will tell you where spending more would make no difference you could see.
Talk to a builder