It is a fact that nowadays if you want to buy a new gaming PC, you will have to invest a large part of your budget in the Graphic card. While it’s true that the graphics card has always been one of the most expensive components to invest in (as long as it’s a gaming PC, of course), nowadays you can easily lose half of your estimate or more in it. For this reason, until how much would it be reasonable to spend inside today?
In the past, saying that you had a gaming PC at $1,200 was synonymous with having a real beast capable of managing everything; On the contrary, today you could spend that amount of money (or more) just on the graphics card, and if you want a new TOP gaming PC, you can easily go for $3,000 or $4,000. For this reason, it is always advisable to think in advance how much you want to spend, not only for the whole PC (that would be your budget), but also how much to invest in the graphics card.
Do you need TOP graphics on your new PC?
This is the first question you should ask yourself. Today, high-end graphics cards are very expensive, and we don’t talk about the almost 2000 $ that an RTX 4090 can cost you, but even a Radeon RX 6800 family graphics card can already cost you more than 800 $…all nonsense.
At this stage, you have to think cold and ask yourself the question: do you need a high-end graphics card? Are you going to be playing in 4K resolution, with everything maxed out and your monitor has a high refresh rate? If you didn’t answer yes to all three of these premises, then it may well be worth it with a mid-range graphics card; think the mid-range of current generations is much, much higher than the high-end of previous generations, and for example a GeForce RTX 3060 It’s a graphics more than worthy of playing in Full HD resolution at a high refresh rate and you can find it for just over $300.
Yes, it’s clear that if you have the budget for a higher model, the games will work better for you (remember we’re thinking of building a PC to play), but we’re talking about being “reasonable” and that means try to get the best possible performance for the minimum amount of money needed.
So, how much of the budget should be invested in graphics?
As always, this will depend on your budget, and so it’s clear that if you’re planning to spend 600-800$ on a PC you’ll have to go for an entry-level graphics card at no more than 200$, whereas if you you have around 1200 to 1500$ to spend and yes, you can choose to go for a model that costs you perfectly between 500$ and 600$. If, as we mentioned earlier, you intend to play at 4K resolution, with all settings maxed out, and at high refresh rates, you’ll need to save a lot more money, but keep in mind that you will hardly need an RTX 4090 for this (an RTX 4070 Ti already gives enough for that and it is much cheaper).
As they always say, it all depends on what you want to spend, but if you want to be reasonable, the rule is that the lower your budget, the less you need to invest in the graphics card so that the rest of the components are neither of poor quality or that tend to clog you up on the PC.
So, continuing with the example we said before and emphasizing again that of being reasonable, we would say that with budgets under $1,000 you should not invest more than 30% in graphics , whereas if you have up to $2,000 to spend , then yes, you can invest 50% in the chart. Anyway, this is our point of view and also just for guidance, but it is our recommendation when you want to invest some money in a new PC for gaming.
