Best gaming PC 2024

Not only does this Acer gaming rig look the business with its bright RGB fans and glowing Predator logo, but it also offers great gaming performance for the money. Its 20-core Intel Core i7 14700F CPU is great for both gaming and content creation, as is the 32GB allocation of DDR5 RAM, and its Nvidia RTX 4070 Super graphics card raced through our gaming benchmark suite.

Even without any help from DLSS, we had this machine running Cyberpunk 2077 at 1080p with the Ultra ray tracing preset at 71fps, and this nearly doubles to 114fps with DLSS 3 frame generation enabled. It can even average 72fps at 1440p in this game with these settings, and it happily played F1 2023 at Ultra High settings at 75fps at 1440p too, and 102fps at 1080p.

That’s a decent amount of gaming power for this machine’s usual $1,749.99 asking price, but this gaming rig can also often be found on offer at Best Buy for just $1,499.99, which is a great price for the spec on offer. There is some evidence of corner-cutting on some aspects of this PC, such as the basic micro-ATX motherboard, comparatively slow DDR5 RAM, and blower cooler on the GPU, but this is otherwise a solid mid-range gaming system for a reasonable price, particularly if you can find it on offer.

Read our Acer Predator Orion 5000 review.

While it’s true that PC gaming can be expensive, that doesn’t mean that it has to break the bank, and the HP Pavilion TG01-2170m is proof of that. It comes with an AMD Ryzen 3 5300G and Radeon RX 5500 which act as a plenty powerful combo for those starting their journey into the hobby or anyone with a smaller budget.

HP lists the Pavilion TG01-2170m with a starting price of $699.99, but you can often find it on sale with extras like a gaming mouse and keyboard, netting yourself a proper bargain.

Corsair has outdone itself with the design of the super-compact One i500. With a footprint of just 187 x 300mm, it’s gorgeous, with wooden panels flanked by strips of RGB lighting and superb build quality. There’s a serious PC beneath this classy exterior too, with an Intel Core i9 14900K CPU and a choice of either an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Super or RTX 4090 GPU. That’s about as serious as you can get when it comes to specs, and Corsair has even managed to water-cool both the CPU and GPU inside this compact case.

This mini PC shows that there’s no need to sacrifice gaming performance in your mission to cut down on desk space. We tested the RTX 4080 Super version, which happily ran Cyberpunk 2077 at 2,560 x 1,440 with the Ultra ray tracing preset at 106fps, thanks to some help from the frame-generation tech in Nvidia DLSS 3. You can even run F1 23 at 4K with Ultra High settings on this rig, which averaged 94fps in our tests.

There are a couple of caveats. The 120mm AIO cooler on the CPU doesn’t have enough cooling power to enable the Core i9 14900K to hit its peak boost speeds, though it still runs quickly enough for gaming. It can also make quite a lot of fan noise when running games. Otherwise, this is a fantastic mini machine with amazing gaming performance under its wooden hood.

Read our Corsair One i500 review.

You don’t need bleeding-edge specs to be a successful streamer, but it certainly helps. The NZXT Streaming Pro PC packs an AMD Ryzen 7 5800X with eight capable and powerful cores that make it one of the best gaming CPUs for playing games and running a stream simultaneously.

It also comes with one of the best graphics cards, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080, allowing you to make use of features such as Nvidia DLSS, NVENC encoding, and Nvidia Broadcast to spruce up your stream.

If you’re looking for an altogether cooler system in every sense of the word, the Maingear Apex Rush may be just what you’re looking for. It features a custom PC water cooling solution, which in addition to being stunning to look at also offers better noise and thermals than even the very best CPU coolers.

By bringing your system’s temperatures as low as possible, the Maingear Apex Rush allows you to unlock the maximum potential of its top-tier specs without fear of thermal throttling. Better still, you can choose to kit out your personal rig with either soft tubing or several styles of hardline cooling, allowing you to craft a system that will feel right at home on your gaming desk.

HP’s Omen 40L has a suitably demonic look to match its name, with its dark black glossy chassis, and eerily glowing rings of RGB lighting on the front. You get even more lighting from the Kingston Fury RGB memory and CPU cooler too, but this rig isn’t just about good looks. Under that easily-removed tempered glass side panel you’ll find some serious specs.

We tested the GT21-1324 model for our review, which comes with an eight-core AMD Ryzen 7 7700 CPU, based on the powerful Zen 4 architecture. You also get an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 Ti GPU, which makes light work of gaming at 1080p, and also supports the latest Nvidia DLSS 3.5 tech, which includes AI frame generation to massively increase frame rates.

Indeed, in our tests, we had this machine running Cyberpunk 2077 at 70fps with the Ultra ray tracing preset on this rig. However, while the 8GB of VRAM on this graphics card is fine for 1080p gaming right now, you may find it becomes a limit in the future, as the latest games are starting to use more VRAM at high settings. You get a decent-sized 1TB WD SSD for storing games as well, and while the 16GB of RAM is the bare minimum we’d recommend for a gaming system right now, you can always upgrade the memory later.

It’s well worth keeping an eye on the price of this machine for a good deal. It’s overpriced at its $1,823.99 MSRP, but you can often find it much cheaper. At the time of writing, it’s going for $1,179.99 at Best Buy, which is a great price for the spec on offer.

Read our HP Omen 40L review.

Most gaming PCs can be configured to include top-tier hardware but the MSI MEG Trident X2 has the most powerful components in a PC we’ve yet tested. Its Intel Core i9-14900KF processor and Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 graphics make it as fast as a gaming PC can get. You also get a massive 64GB of RAM and 4TB of total storage. The latter is one of the slightly weaker points of the machine but it’s easy to add more storage later.

The case has an interesting angular design but doesn’t include any glass or see-through panels. Instead, this gaming PC concentrates on delivering huge performance with a clever and efficient cooling system that ducts cool air to the GPU and uses just three other main system fans. Set the PC to Silent mode and it stays remarkably quiet. The touchscreen lets you change volume, control multimedia, switch between Silent, Balanced, and Extreme cooling modes, but we didn’t find that kit a hugely useful feature.

Despite already packing in over $2,000 worth of CPU and GPU, this PC comes in at around $4,000, which is a lot but decent value for the components you get. It’ll deliver over 150fps in most games at 1440p and well over 60fps at 4K in even the most demanding titles. Buy it if you need the fastest machine that’ll be fast for years.

Read our MSI MEG Trident X2 14th review.