How Much Money Should You Spend on a Gaming PC?

You don’t want to spend too much for your PC to be overkill, but you also don’t want to spend too little, so it will start dropping frames when you stream.

Of course this also highly depends on what you want to stream.

Triple A games require much better hardware to be able to run smoothly and also for your stream to look good. That’s why in some instances, and if you really have the money, you can run a dual-PC setup.

But in this, I will just go over on what I think is good enough to run most games well and for your PC to also handle streaming. I will only go over the most important hardware here.

So what do I think how much you should spend on a good streaming PC? The answer: Around $1000. You can probably spend a little less, but remember, the less you spend, the harder it is to get a good looking stream.

Here is some hardware I would recommend:

GPU: I only recommend NVIDIA GPU’s. Especially with the new encoder, this is really good for streaming. Right now I am running a GTX 1660 SUPER. Of course, this is more of a budget GPU. But especially with the current situation on chip shortage and scalpers, I think the 1660 SUPER is a great deal.

CPU: Of course you can go Intel, but I think that AMD with their lower prices is a lot more affordable.

I have a Ryzen 7 1700 right now. It was the first generation, and it still runs great. Personally, I wouldn’t go for a Ryzen 5, and I don’t think a Ryzen 9 would fit into the $1000 budget. So the Ryzen 7 is a good sweet spot. You can probably find the newest generation for around $300.

RAM: I never needed more than 16GB. Of course it’s always nice to have more RAM, but I would rather save the money and spend it on a better CPU.

HDD/SSD: These can get pretty expensive really quick. Of course they have gotten a lot cheaper over the past months. Personally, I am running a 1TB SSD + 4TB HDD setup right now. You can use the SSD space for your OS and some frequently used games, and the HDD space for the rest of your game library and recordings of your stream, if you want to do that.

For the rest of the hardware I really don’t have a recommendation.

But what I would always recommend, spend money on the important parts. Get a good CPU/GPU/PSU. Do you really need that fancy RGB case for $100?

In the end, your viewers won’t see your PC, but will see your stream. So you want your stream to look good and run smoothly.

And of course, with the current situation of chip shortages and scalpers, it’s really hard to find good hardware at reasonable prices. So try looking at used hardware. Maybe someone upgraded to an RTX 3090 and doesn’t need their 1660 anymore. If it still runs well, and you can get it for half than what Amazon is selling it for, go for it. It’s always good to save money to be able to use it on different hardware.

I hoped this helped you get a general idea on how much you should spend on a good streaming PC. So go build a sweet PC, and don’t cheap out on important hardware.