Best Buy Pc For Gaming
While Best Buy has offered PC gaming products for years, each Alienware in-store experience will include a dedicated specialist who can answer questions, demonstrate products and help you get the most out of your PC gaming systems. The experts can walk through various laptop and desktop features that showcase top-tier performance and revolutionary graphics.
best buy pc for gaming
We test all the new gaming PCs we can get our hands on to see if they pass muster for this list, and update the page as systems become available. Read on, and we'll help you find your next great gaming machine.
Alienware claims to have redesigned it to run cooler and quieter than the older Aurora gaming PCs, and our experience putting a top-tier review unit through its paces bears that out. The Aurora R15's sleek oblong case isn't as easy to work inside as some larger cases, and some design choices make upgrading components harder than necessary, but that's the price you pay for its well-organized good looks.
If you can afford it, Alienware will fill the Aurora R15 with top-of-the-line components that make it a top-tier gaming PC. At roughly $5k our review unit is far from cheap, but it's powerful enough to play the latest and greatest games in 4K for years to come.
Apart from that, the Vengeance i7200 features beautiful RGB lighting, a tasteful glass side panel and extremely quiet fans. That makes it a good productivity tool in addition to a gaming powerhouse. Whether you game in QHD or 4K, there's almost certainly a Vengeance i7200 build that will work with your setup.
It's not a great choice if you're looking to play games at 4K, however, and its packed-in keyboard and mouse leave much to be desired. The Orion 3000 also fared slightly worse in our suite of performance tests than some similarly-priced gaming PCs, perhaps because our review unit arrived with just 16GB of RAM.
The case is well-organized and easy to open though, so it should be pretty easy to upgrade this machine with more RAM when you need it. With its sub-$2,000 price, beefy components, and stylish, accessible case, Acer's Predator Orion 3000 is a great first gaming PC for someone looking to get into the hobby.
Admittedly, the Turbo's small, stylish case isn't easy to poke around in once you fill it up with a cooling system, a giant GPU and some storage drives. But if you have the cash to burn and just want a quiet, stylish compact PC that can run all the latest games at blistering-fast framerates, this is the gaming rig for you.
If you want a powerful pre-built gaming PC, but want to steer clear of Intel and Nvidia components, then the Alienware Aurora Ryzen Edition R10 is the way to go. This gaming PC is large and heavy, but that's because it packs top-of-the-line AMD CPUs and GPUs. It's a powerful tool for full HD, QHD or even 4K gaming, and yet it's not as obscenely expensive as these systems come.
Granted, Alienware machines tend to sound like jet engines, and the Aurora Ryzen Edition R10 is no exception. Furthermore, the R10's built-in software tends to confuse rather than enhance the experience. But when it comes to high-fidelity gaming with AMD components, the Aurora Ryzen Edition R10 is one of the most comprehensive systems currently available.
The first thing you'll notice about the MSI MEG Trident X is that it's absolutely gorgeous. This small, angular machine fits easily into just about any gaming nook, and is ideal for either desktop or living room setups. The second thing you'll notice is that it runs games absolutely beautifully, whether you want to experience them at full HD, QHD or UHD settings. With a variety of processor, GPU and RAM options from which to choose, you'll be able to customize a machine that works for your games, and for your monitor.
The HP Omen 30L Gaming Desktop has one significant advantage over many of its competitors: It's quiet. It turns on with a gentle whirr and provides ambient white noise when you're running demanding games. Compare and contrast to the jet engine sounds of other modern gaming rigs, and the Omen 30L has a lot going for it, even just as an everyday productivity machine.
The HP Omen 30L also runs games beautifully, thanks to its powerful hardware and quiet cooling system. It's expensive, though, and packed with a lot of extraneous software and accessories. Still, the HP Omen 30L Gaming Desktop is a thing of beauty: an elegant, quiet and powerful gaming PC.
The Dell G5 5090 is one of the best gaming PCs for folks who want a solid entry-level machine that's very easy to upgrade. This fairly affordable desktop starts with a modest Core i3 processor and Nvidia GTX 1650 card but can be outfitted with up to a Core i7 CPU and RTX 2080 GPU for more intensive gaming.
Price: If affordability is your concern, most decent gaming PCs start around $700 to $1,000. For that price, you're looking at specs such as Intel Core i3 and Core i5 processors, Nvidia 1660 and 1660 Ti GPUs and 8GB to 16GB of RAM.
Performance: Think about the type of gaming experience you're after. Game streaming services like Google Stadia can offer decent performance, but if its solid 1080p/60fps gaming you want, a machine with a decent Core i5 processor and GeForce 2060 or AMD Radeon RX 5600 GPU will get you there. Cards such as the Radeon RX 5700 and GeForce 2080 hit a nice sweet spot for dependable 1440p gaming. Going 4K? You'll want to spring for hardware such as an RTX 3080 or AMD RX 6800.
Upgradability: Gaming PC components are always evolving, and the best gaming PCs can be easily upgraded with new parts over time. Machines such as the Alienware Aurora and Dell G5 are easy to open up and tinker with, even for the less tech-savvy. Compact machines, such as the Corsair One, can be a bit harder to open up. So if you plan on upgrading your investment over time, keep this in mind.
In our search to find the best gaming PC, we run every model we review through a standardized gauntlet of real-world and benchmark tests, in order to measure how each desktop stacks up as both a gaming machine and as an everyday computer.
As far as hard numbers go, we currently run the framerate benchmark utilities for Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Far Cry: New Dawn, Red Dead Redemption 2 and Grand Theft Auto V at 1920 x 1080 with graphics maxed out, as well as at 2560 x 1440 and 4K if a system allows for it. On top of that, we play tons of graphics-intensive games in order to give you a sense of how these gaming desktops hold up anecdotally.
When you're in the market for a gaming PC, there's a lot to consider: power, size, components and what resolution you want to play at. If all you need is to play a few AAA titles at 1080p, you won't need a high-end CPU and graphics card.
But if you want to play at 1440p or 4K, then you need to start thinking about saving more for your rig. CPU horsepower is also tied to gaming acumen, but branching out into anything much over a quad-core processor will primarily see performance gains in multi-threaded workloads such as video processing, rendering and encoding, not games.Because component shortages have become less of a problem, you may now be able to get a prebuilt gaming PC with one of the best graphics cards for gaming without paying a hefty premium or having to wait weeks or months for you system to arrive.
It's that time of year where new CPUs are starting to come out. AMD recently launched its Ryzen 7000 processors, which have proven to be their strongest gaming chips yet. Not to be outdone, Intel's 13th Gen "Raptor Lake" chips, have generally been more impressive for the price.
On the graphics front, Nvidia is in the process of rolling out its latest RTX 40-series cards, starting with the RTX 4090. Those will coexist with the current RTX 30-series, and presumably mid-range 40-series cards will come out sometime soon. Intel launched its Arc A770 and A750, providing power on the low-end and mid-range, and AMD's high-end 7900 XT and 7900 XTX are also recent powerful performers in the mix.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.
If you're looking for the best of the best, the MSI Infinite RS 13th delivers top-of-the-line performance, as long as you're willing to pay for it. Between the 13th Gen Intel Core i9 and a liquid-cooled Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090, this system delivers awesome performance, while still being quiet and upgradeable down the line.All of the parts are standard, and the case (the MSI Prospect 700RL) is roomy. In fact, for some it may be too roomy! But it can fit the two radiators and nine fans that made this system all but silent in our testing.A keyboard and mouse are included, though you'll likely want to get something a bit nicer.In our testing, we got some incredible performance out of the Infinite. If you value smooth gameplay and upgradeability out of your prebuilt and will sacrifice room on or under your desk, this is the one to consider.Read: MSI Infinite RS 13th review
The Alienware Aurora R15's biggest updates are all about cooling. Alienware parent Dell has added in a 240 mm radiator, finally moving on from a 120 mm cooler, which should allow for much better CPU performance. There is also more ventilation on the side, and this all made for a quieter PC to our ears.It's not much of a surprise that with an Intel Core i9-13900KF and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090, the Aurora plowed through our benchmarks measuring gaming and productivity performance.On the one hand, we really like how many ports are accessible on the front of the Aurora, including three USB Type-A ports, a USB Type-C port and a 3.5 mm headphone jack. The downside is that Alienware is using a proprietary motherboard to achieve that, making it difficult to fully upgrade the system in the future.The GPU, RAM and CPU are accessible on our model, and there's room for additional storage. (Our review unit was maxed out, so there wouldn't be much of a reason to make many changes outside of storage anytime soon).Read: Alienware Aurora R15 Review 041b061a72