The best gaming PC in 2024: top prebuilt gaming PCs for serious gaming (2024)

Finding the best gaming PC can elevate your gaming experience to the next level by offering exceptional performance at a competitive price.

If you're searching for the best prebuilt gaming PC, look no further than our top pick, the Corsair One i500. This powerhouse machine features cutting-edge specs, including the best graphics card and best processor available, all wrapped in a stylish design that’s perfect for both home setups and streaming. Despite its high-end components, the Corsair One i500 is surprisingly affordable for what it offers.

For those who prefer a more compact setup, options like the HP Victus 15L or Asus ROG G22CH are excellent choices. If you need a more robust system, the Acer Predator Orion 7000 or Alienware Aurora R16 might be right up your alley. Our comprehensive list includes these models and many more, ensuring you find the best gaming PC tailored to your needs and budget.

We've tested hundreds of PCs over the past 15 years, so we know our way around a gaming rig. We're here to leverage all of that collective knowledge earned through years of rigorous testing with the latest PC games and other benchmarking tools to help you find the best gaming PC for you hard-earned money.

The quick list

The best gaming PC in 2024

Below you'll find full write-ups for each of the best gaming PC picks on our list. We've tested each one extensively, so you can be sure that our recommendations can be trusted.

The best gaming PC overall

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The Corsair One i500 gaming PC is a remarkable product, bringing fantastic gaming performance and design together into a single, small-form-factor PC that fits as easily into your living room's decor as it does with your existing PC gaming setup.

Featuring an eye-catching wooden front panel with fabric side panels reminiscent of a stereo speaker, this showpiece gaming PC isn't cheap to say the least. Starting at $3,599.99/£3,499.99, you could probably find a gaming PC with an Intel Core i9-14900K and Nvidia RTX 4090 for less, but it definitely won't look this good or come with AIO liquid cooling for both the CPU and GPU.

While you can upgrade the RAM and SSD easily enough by removing a few screws, upgrading the CPU and GPU is going to be a much taller order, so this is really only for those who want a one-and-done PC gaming solution that they won't need to tinker with for many years to come.

Read our full Corsair One i500 review

The best budget gaming PC

The HP Victus 15L doesn't hide the fact that it's a budget gaming PC. It's less robust, less flashy, and the available configurations are a bit less powerful than the other systems on this list. That doesn't have to be a bad thing, though: it means the starting price is a lot lower (and even the more powerful versions remain affordable), and its compact size makes it good for setups where desktop real-estate is in short supply.

Despite its budget status, we found in our testing process that the HP Victus 15L offers solid 1080p gaming performance, only requiring some modest fiddling in the graphical settings to ensure good frame rates. Stay away from Ultra presets and ray tracing, and you should be fine for the vast majority of games at 1080p. Combined with decent upgradability and a good selection of ports on the front panel, this is an excellent pick for anyone who needs a gaming PC for cheap.

Read our full HP Victus 15L review

The best gaming PC for upgraders

The Acer Predator Orion 7000 (2023) is a luxurious choice of gaming desktop, a refresh of the excellent 2022 model that continues to offer performance and style in equal measure. It sports a stunning design (with striking ARGB lighting), and more importantly, high-end specs built for 4K gaming that meant we were able to comfortably set the graphics to maximum in just about any game and enjoy smooth frame rates. In Final Fantasy VII Remake, we got a staggering 256fps at 4K Ultra with ray tracing on.

Naturally, all that power has its drawbacks: it's a pricey unit, and the fans go absolutely nuts when you're playing a graphically demanding title. That being said, those fans do a good job of keeping the system cool, and any of the best gaming headsets will shut out that noise. The chassis is great in general, easily openable for upgrades and maintenance and offering an elegant cable management solution along with plenty of I/O ports, but it's not all function and no form: this PC looks fantastic too.

Read our full Acer Predator Orion 7000 (2023) review

The best high performance gaming PC

Behold! The Alienware Aurora is dead; long live the Alienware Aurora. Yes, Dell has ditched its bizarre space-age aesthetic for its Aurora gaming desktop line, instead opting for a sleek redesign that still offers a unique aesthetic without being quite so... strange.

The new chassis is sleeker and incorporates the RGB light ring seen on the rear of laptops like the Alienware x16, but the components inside are no less powerful than before. During our tests, it powered through titles like Cyberpunk 2077 and Dirt 5 at QHD resolution, and even 4K was an option in most games if you used Nvidia DLSS 3. Despite the newly shrunken case, the Aurora R16 offers excellent ventilation that ensured cool and quiet gaming throughout our lengthy testing process. A standout product reboot from Dell.

Read our full Alienware Aurora R16 review

The best compact gaming PC

The Intel NUC Extreme long held the title of the best compact gaming PC for many years. However, now that it has been discontinued, Asus has taken up the mantle where Intel left it and has produced one of the best gaming PCs going, especially for those who don't have a lot of desk space.

The ROG G22CH starts at an accessible price point (though its entry-level specs are a bit outdated), and can max out at a respectable level of hardware and performance without costing too much money.

In our tests, this little desktop gaming PC was able to chew through 1080p gaming with ease and put up very good 1440p gaming numbers. All in all, then, this is a very cleverly designed compact box of tricks, but the trade-off here is that given the form-factor, this Asus gaming PC is going to be almost impossible to upgrade. Furthermore, its mesh-paneled chassis means you're going to hear the whine of fans under load, such as when playing demanding PC games.

Read our full Asus ROG G22CH review

The best customizable gaming PC

Customizable gaming PCs can be very expensive items, and for many of Maingear's high-end systems, that is definitely the case. But the Maingear MG-1 is a unique proposition where you don't necessarily have to spend a fortune to get a custom build.

The MG-1 starts out at a damn-near budget price of $1,099.99, and its specs aren't terrible for the price. The great thing about this PC is that you can swap parts in and out on Maingear's website to build the exact gaming PC you want, and trust that it will be put together by professionals who will extensively test the PC before it leaves their shop.

And if you're an international buyer outside the US, you can even arrange international shipping, so you don't have to miss out either. You might have to pay additional shipping fees, but it's worth it.

As far as performance goes, the AMD Advantage version of the MG-1 we reviewed got some of the highest scores on our various gaming and synthetic benchmarks, but your performance will obviously vary depending on which specs your configure your system with.

Read our full Maingear MG-1 review

The best gaming PC: FAQs

How to choose the best gaming PC for you

Since building your own PC can be pricey and/or a bit of a hassle, buying the best gaming PC you can afford definitely makes the whole process easier. And with some recent offerings from companies like HP and Dell, you don't even necessarily have to spend a fortune either. Still, it's always good to go in knowing what you're looking for within your budget.

Whether you’re playing the best PC games or the best free games to save a bit of coin, your priority should be choosing something that manages to be within your budget without compromising on performance or scrimping on vital features like a healthy port selection and appealing RGB lighting.

That could very well mean the very best prebuilt gaming PC that will see you through 4K gaming at high frame rates, or one of the best budget gaming PCs that will give you a smooth 1080p gaming experience at an accessible price point. Don’t worry so much about the frills and the design unless your budget is flexible or you’ve got deep pockets.

Once you’ve decided on your budget, you should pick a computer with the best GPU you can afford. You’ll want at least an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 if you plan on gaming in 4K while an RTX 3060 Ti can handle 1440p gaming. While you want a CPU that can keep up like Intel Core i5 or i7, pre-built PCs won’t come with underperforming CPUs.

You should also make sure you have enough speedy RAM and fast storage capable of keeping up. These days, an 8GB DDR4 memory is the bare minimum, but upgrade to 16GB if you can. Plenty of SSD storage is ideal as well, since many top titles take up a lot of space, although you can always get an additional drive later down the line.

Finally, make sure you have enough money for quality peripherals as well. After all, a gaming PC is only as good as its peripherals. Only when coupled with the best gaming monitor and the best gaming keyboards will yours be the stuff of legends.

How we tested out best gaming PC picks

A gaming PC is a big purchase that shouldn’t be taken lightly, which is why we don’t take our testing lightly either. Testing gaming PCs is always a comprehensive undertaking for us, using it to play not only the latest or hottest games but also older yet still demanding titles as well, noting things like performance – especially in gaming – as well as noise and thermal efficiency. We also run synthetic benchmarks like PCMark 10, 3DMark, and Geekbench 6.

Furthermore, we take a look at its design: things like number of available ports, expandability and upgradability, RGB lighting, and accessibility that its chassis offers. Build quality is an important factor in the best prebuilt gaming PC, and so we also look at a PC's price and if any piece of hardware feels cheap or flimsy in an expensive product, it's going to get marked down.

For good measure, we’ll also check how it does with daily tasks, because most of us don’t only use our gaming PCs for gaming; it serves as our everyday computer as well.

We then take everything we’ve learned about the gaming PC and compare it to its price – whether or not its performance and features are worth that price tag, and whether or not it offers the best value to customers.

For more information about our process, see how we test.

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