Gaming PC you can build for the price of a PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X

South African gaming fans can build a decently powerful gaming PC for the same price as an Xbox Series X console.

MyBroadband used the price of the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 Digital Consoles as a benchmark for building a powerful gaming PC.

While our build didn’t exceed the Xbox Series X’s budget of R13,999, it was just under R1,400 more expensive than the PlayStation 5 Digital Edition console.

For reference, the PlayStation 5 Digital Edition is commonly available for between R11,999 and R12,499. However, shopping around for better deals could get you a lower price.

Altogether, the components making up our gaming PC build a total of R13,897. This excludes a Windows licence, gaming peripherals, and a monitor.

The graphics card contributed roughly 41% to the build’s total price. We chose the MSI Gaming GeForce RTX 3060 2X OC graphics card with 12GB of video memory, which is available for R5,699 from Evetech.

The motherboard, CPU, and RAM kit was the next-most significant contributor to the total build price.

The kit includes an MSI B550 Gaming Gen 3 ATX AM4 motherboard, AMD Ryzen 5 5500 CPU, and a single 16GB stick of Klevv 3200MHz DDR4 RAM.

The kit is available for R4,999 from Evetech.

For storage, we opted for a Patriot P300 512GB M.2 PCI-e 3.0 x 4NVMe Internal SSD, which is available for R619 from Bob Shop.

Despite this being a fairly low-spec gaming PC, we chose to include a CPU cooler. We selected the Gamdias Boreas E1 410 Lite CPU Air Cooler from Evetech for R499.

The build draws around 340W overall. However, we opted for a 550W Thermaltake Toughpower GF PSU, priced at R1,399, to allow for future upgrades.

Our build cost R1,398 more than the PlayStation 5 Digital Edition console and R102 less than the Xbox Series X console.

It should be noted that, based on benchmarks, the gaming PC build likely won’t perform as well as the consoles in newer, resource-intensive titles.

However, PC gamers should be able to reduce graphics settings to get smooth frame rates and a great gaming experience.

The table below lists gaming PC build components and compares the build’s total price to that of buying the PlayStation 5 Digital Edition or Xbox Series X.