PC gaming can be a really, really expensive hobby. But for those looking for a budget starter setup for either yourself, or perhaps a loved one, I reckon you can’t beat the combination I’ve put together here when it comes to bang for your buck right now.
For a touch under $800, you can get a great budget gaming PC, a 27-inch display, and even a keyboard and mouse thrown in for good measure. That’s virtually everything you need to get going, making this an all-in-one starter kit for anyone looking to get into the wonderful world of PC gaming.
👉 We’re curating the best Black Friday gaming laptop deals right here 👈
We make it our mission to find the best deals on all sorts of PC hardware, not just in the sales, but all year round, and that means I spend a large portion of my working week hunting for deals just like this. Even with Black Friday looming in front of us, I’m confident that you’ll struggle to beat the sheer value for money you get out of these two excellent hardware picks.
So without further ado, let’s take a look at what $800 gets you right now, shall we?
A budget gaming PC with bite
First up, you’re going to need a well-specced and properly built PC from a known manufacturer. This iBuypower Scale model ticks all the right boxes, and it’s a pretty astonishing amount of hardware for $700 at Best Buy.
The Intel Core i5 14400F processor at the heart of this machine might not be much of an upgrade on the older model, but luckily it’s still a great budget gaming performer in 2024, and will be for a while to come yet. It’s a 10-core (six Performance, four Efficient) little beastie with a max boost clock of 4.7 GHz, making for a great balance between price and gaming performance.
It’s paired here with 16 GB of nicely speedy DDR5. While gaming RAM requirements are gradually creeping towards 32 GB, 16 GB is still more than good enough for most games, and it’s a trivially easy thing to upgrade in future. Seriously, two screws, a couple of clips, and you’re all done—meaning this is a great starter PC to learn how to upgrade later on.
Of course, you’ll need a decent gaming graphics card to get started with, and that’s where things can get pricey for a single component. Here though, you’ve got the RTX 4060 sitting in pride of place. While it’s not a mega-fast GPU, it’s got the distinct advantage of being able to use DLSS 3 upscaling and Frame Generation to chuck out pixels at a considerable rate in modern games.
Rounding things off is a 1 TB SSD, which should give you plenty of space for both the included Windows 11 install and lots of games. There’s a spare M.2 slot for upgrades here, and again it’s a really simple procedure to add extra storage in future. We hunt for bargains on these too, so take a look at our Black Friday SSD deals page for ideas as to what you could slot in later on.
This is a seriously good gaming PC for the cash, but it’s all a bit redundant unless you’ve got the extras. So here, I should point out that it comes with a keyboard and mouse as part of the deal. They’re not going to be all-singing, all-dancing models, but again, plenty good enough to get started with.
We’re not quite finished, though. If a starter kit is what you desire, you’re going to need an excellent monitor to make those games really pop. Luckily, I’ve got another bargain up my sleeve..
A speedy 27-inch monitor
It’s pretty astounding that you can get a good-sized, high refresh rate modern IPS display for under $100, but here we are. While you can find VA panels aplenty at this sort of price, personally I’d usually pick an IPS unit to avoid some of the caveats of VA tech if I had the money to spend. Luckily, this one’s the same price as a budget VA panel, so no worries here!
Monitors can quickly becoming a blinding array of specs and figures that get very confusing, very quickly, so (as this is a starter guide), allow me give you the cliff notes: This is a speedy panel with good color reproduction, FreeSync support for smooth frame rate/refresh rate syncing, and comes from a manufacturer known for making great budget screens.
It’s only a 1080p resolution display, which might sound a bit low to some. However, 1080p is still the most popular resolution for a reason, as it puts much less stress on the graphics card and allows for smooth framerates while maintaining good image quality. That RTX 4060 GPU above is best suited to this resolution, and at a 27-inch panel size your games should still look great.
Plus, if competitive multiplayer games like Counter Strike 2 and Valorant are your goal, that 165 Hz refresh rate should mean that those undemanding titles can be displayed in gloriously smooth motion. It also comes with an HDMI and DisplayPort cable, so it’s all ready to plug straight in to that PC above.
About the only thing else you’d need is something for audio, but you can always plug in any wired headphones you already own into the aux port. Or even pick up a Black Friday deal on a gaming headset, if you don’t mind spending just a touch more cash.
Ta da, voilà, and bon appétit. A proper PC gaming setup for about as cheap as we’d go right now, and the perfect starter kit for anyone wanting to get into PC gaming with very few drawbacks. I’ll be trying to beat this setup over the entire Black Friday period, but honestly, I think I’ll have my work cut out for me. I can’t see it getting much better than this for the money.
