BUILD A $942 GAMING PC

We dive into the Intel dimension to see if you can game on a budget at 1080p with the company’s latest CPU and GPU offerings

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IT’S THE ENDLESS POSSIBILITIES and customization options that draw us into PC building. You don’t have to buy the latest components, and spending your budget wisely is ultimately what most of us are trying to do. Not only will this stop you burning a ginormous hole in your wallet, you won’t spend your hard-earned bucks on just a few components. That said, while it’s a great idea to decide what the most important components are, you don’t need to dedicate the majority of your limit to those components. 

In this sub-$1000 build, we wanted to use some of Intel’s latest offerings, namely a 13th gen chip alongside an Arc graphics card. We’ve gone with Intel’s Core i5-13400F and the Arc A750 Limited Edition 8GB. Both of these should offer decent longevity and provide plenty of support, but can be upgraded and swapped out later if needed. Seeing as we haven’t done a cover build using both an Intel CPU and GPU, it’ll be interesting to see where this system stands compared to Nvidia and AMD’s alternatives, namely the Nvidia Geforce RTX 3060 and the AMD Radeon RX 6600. Is it worth going with a newer yet less experienced card, or sticking with the old but gold options?

As for the rest of the build, we spent wisely by not going overkill—okay, maybe the 750W NZXT PSU is, but there’s a good reason. As this build has longevity and future upgrades in mind, 750W is good enough all the way up to an RTX 4070Ti. Not to throw shade on our A750, but that’s quite the step up in performance, and could slot into this build later, once prices come down (hey, it could happen).