Staff’s Choice
If you want to be good at any sport you’ll want your gear to match your ambitions. You don’t see the riders in the Tour de France sprinting to the finish line with an old rusty bike, for example. Of course it can’t be denied that talent and a lot of hard work are the largest factors in determining whether or not a player can rise to the top, but we cannot stress enough how important gear is: if you want to be the best gamer you can be, you need the best PC for esports.
Your PC, of course, is part of your gear. You can have the best gaming mouse and a crystal clear headset, but if your PC is struggling to keep up with the game you’re going to be at a massive disadvantage. In this guide, we’ll give you a variety of builds (as well as prebuilts) to consider so that you have a system to check out at every price and performance point.
Top Tier System
If you want to get the best framerates you’ll need the best gear, and this system is about the best you can get right now. Naturally, we’ve chosen to go for the mighty RTX 4090, and we’ve paired that up with a current top-of-the-line processor, but if you want to save a bit of money it’s definitely possible to downgrade that one a bit and get yourself an Intel Core i7-13700K or Intel Core i5-13600KF.
PC specs
We’ve really gone all out here, so if you want to save even more money you can also go for a smaller SSD (though we’d definitely recommend an SSD for those lightning-fast boot and load times) and less RAM, though we wouldn’t go lower than 32GB for this build.
It’s obviously also possible to go for a more budget-oriented case, but cases are more important than you might think so make sure to do your research so you get proper airflow to cool off all of those top-tier components.
In any case: this build should give you loads and loads of frames in all of our analyzed games, even the most demanding ones, and to top it all off you can run the latest and greatest single player games in all of their glory. This is just about the best PC for esports that money can buy right now.
Prebuilt Alternative
NZXT’s Player Three Prime is the highest tier prebuilt that they offer, so it’s a great choice for people who want to get a top tier system without building it themselves. It has reliable components and is made by a very reputable brand.
Performance System
This system is a great ‘middle of the road’ build for gamers who want to maximize their framerates in competitive games but also like to take a stroll through some beautiful environments in the latest single-player games.
PC specs
For this build we’ve gone for a Ryzen setup; AMD has really been rocking it and the 7800X3D is not only one of the best bang-for-your-buck offers out right now; it’s also quite simply one of the best CPUs on the market for gaming.
With this build, you can downgrade somewhat, but we wouldn’t recommend a whole lot of downgrades if you want this build to last well into the future. Games are getting bigger and bigger so we wouldn’t go for a very small SSD, and 32 gigabytes of RAM is definitely something you’ll want in the near future.
Still, with these components you’re getting a fantastic system to game on, and this is what we would recommend to people who are just starting out with competitive gaming, or for people who just want a really nicely balanced PC for single player and multiplayer games without going for the absolute best of the best.
Prebuilt Alternatives
The CyberpowerPC Xtreme VR is a very reliable prebuilt platform that looks great to boot, so if you want a prebuilt PC with a similar performance, you can always go for that one. Alternatively, the NZXT Player Two line is also a fantastic option if you’re someone who doesn’t want to build their own PC.
Budget System
A lot of competitive games are fairly easy to run at 60 frames per second, and that’s by design. If you’re a developer and you want your game to be played by as many people as possible, you need to make sure that people with budget-friendly systems can run the game as well.
PC specs
This budget build is one such budget system. It is a more than decent budget system that can run all of our analyzed games at 60 frames per second with ease and, provided you’re not against lowering some (or a bunch of, depending on the game) settings, you can also easily use this as a 144Hz setup.
Do note that, for some of the more demanding games, it’ll be a bit of a close one and your frames might drop below the 144 mark during particularly intensive fights where there’s a lot going on, even with the graphics settings on low. Still, if you’re a dedicated competitive gamer on a budget and you need a reliable and well-performing machine, this could very well be it.
Contrary to our mid-tier build, this one doesn’t offer as much wiggle room as far as in-game settings go (unless your goal is 60 fps) and you’ll obviously have to turn your settings down if you want to play the latest graphical wonder games, so keep that in mind.
Prebuilt Alternatives
NZXT’s Player One is one of the best budget-oriented prebuilt PCs on the market if you ask us. Skytech is a relatively unknown player in the prebuilt PC business, but they do make reliable and well-performing prebuilt machines, so you can also consider their Nebula.
What Makes a Gaming PC Worth It?
At this point in time, the competitive ‘standard refresh rate‘ is 240 frames per second. Following that, if you’re even a little bit serious about playing fast-paced multiplayer games like the ones that we specialize in here at ProSettings, you will absolutely want to focus on a system that can deliver, at the very least, 144 frames per second in your game of choice.
Don’t take our word for it: 100% of our analyzed gamers are using a monitor (and thus PC) capable of pushing at least 144 frames per second, with 80% using a 240Hz setup. As such, if you want to be competitive, you won’t want to be left behind using an old family PC that can barely push 20 frames each second.
Of course if your budget is low or you just want to casually play some games every now and then you don’t absolutely need to go for a super beefy PC, but you will always want to game on a system that can at least reach 60 frames per second (the standard refresh rate of monitors that aren’t focused on competitive gaming) in your game(s) of choice.
Building your own PC is almost always cheaper and not hard at all, so we’ve focused on finding the right components at the right price that you can gather and assemble yourself. That way you can swap out a thing or two if certain manufacturers are cheaper in your area, or if you want to downgrade or upgrade your build a bit. We’ve also included prebuilt options in case you don’t want to build the whole thing for yourself.
Things to Consider
A PC is the sum of its parts: you will want a balanced build with components that aren’t bottlenecking each other, and you will of course want quality components across the board. We know that power supplies (PSUs) and motherboards are less fancy and exciting elements of a PC build, but we’ve seen far too many great setups being fried by a faulty PSU to even count, so when budgeting for a PC it’s of great importance that you consider every element to be of equal importance. Do not go cheap on any essential components: there’s a great chance that you’ll regret it afterwards.
As far as aesthetics go, we can be short: it doesn’t matter. If you want to get a display case and fill it with RGB RAM and RGB strips that’s your choice (and we do love some shiny, coordinated builds) but these things do nothing for performance and there’s no reason that a regular black case filled with mismatched components can’t match the performance of a shiny, Instagram-worthy PC.
With that said: there’s also a flipside to this coin. It’s quite possible to go overboard for your needs when building a PC. If you’ve got a ton of money to spend that’s no issue of course, but if you’re being conscious about your budget it’s a good idea to consider your needs. You don’t need 64GB of RAM to play competitive shooters at low settings, for example, nor do you need a custom liquid cooling setup to cool a midrange CPU that isn’t being overclocked. If you’re on any kind of budget, moderation is key.
Best PC for Esports – Conclusion
Gaming isn’t necessarily the cheapest hobby on the planet, doubly so when you want the best gear in order to compete with the best players, but luckily for us PC gamers, there’s a myriad of options out there so that we can configure a system that suits our needs exactly.
With these builds we hope that we’ve given you sufficient ideas to come up with a build that suits your budget and the games that you like to play.
Currently (July 2023) they use AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D and Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080. But what are the remaining components they use (motherboard, cooler, case, psu, ssd, memory)?