Building a High-Performance PC for Gaming and Content Creation: A Comprehensive Guide

When it comes to building a high-performance PC, there are several factors to consider, including the components you choose, their quality, and your budget. In this article, we'll explore the parts I've chosen for my latest PC build, and provide recommendations for those looking to build a similar system.

First, let's take a look at the case. I've chosen the NZXT H510, which is a great value at $70. This case offers a clean and minimalist design, with tempered glass side panels and a sleek, modern aesthetic. The H510 also comes with a few fans included, which are decent quality and help to keep the system cool. While cases are subjective, I believe that this is a great option for those looking for a high-quality ATX case without breaking the bank.

Next, let's talk about the power supply. For this build, I've chosen an 80+ Gold certified EVGA power supply, which offers excellent efficiency and performance. The power supply I've selected costs $73 at Newegg after rebate, which is a great value considering its high-quality components and certification. While some may prefer a fully modular power supply, I believe that the benefits of an 80+ Gold certified unit outweigh the drawbacks. Plus, with a basement setup, it's easy to tuck away excess cables and keep the system looking clean and organized.

Now, let's take a look at the motherboard. For this build, I've chosen the ASRock X570M Steel Legend Micro ATX, which offers excellent performance and features for its price. The 3700X processor is also a great choice, with six cores and twelve threads providing plenty of power for gaming and content creation. However, if you're looking to upgrade your CPU in the future, I'd recommend considering other options.

Finally, let's talk about the graphics card. For this build, I've chosen the EVGA RTX 3080 Ti, which offers excellent performance and features. While the RTX 3080 Super is a great alternative, it costs significantly more than the RTX 3080 Ti. With six cores and twelve threads from the 3700X processor and an 80+ Gold certified power supply, this build should be able to handle demanding workloads like video editing, rendering, and transcoding with ease.

Building a PC for $1200

If you're looking to build a high-performance PC on a budget of $1200, here's the parts list I would recommend:

* NZXT H510 case: $70

* EVGA 650 GA, 80+ Gold power supply: $73 after rebate

* ASRock X570M Steel Legend Micro ATX motherboard: $130

* AMD Ryzen 7 3700X processor: $329

* EVGA RTX 3080 Ti graphics card: $1099

Total Cost: $1192

Building a PC for $1500

If you're looking to build a high-performance PC on a budget of $1500, here's the parts list I would recommend:

* NZXT H510 case: $70

* EVGA 650 GA, 80+ Gold power supply: $73 after rebate

* ASRock X570M Steel Legend Micro ATX motherboard: $130

* AMD Ryzen 9 5900X processor: $699

* NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Super graphics card: $1099

Total Cost: $1472

Conclusion

Building a high-performance PC requires careful consideration of the components you choose, their quality, and your budget. While there are many great options available, I've provided recommendations for those looking to build a similar system on a budget of $1200 or $1500. Whether you're a gamer, content creator, or simply someone who wants a high-performance PC, these builds should provide excellent performance and features at an affordable price.

Additional Recommendations

If you're looking to add any additional components to your build, I'd recommend considering the following options:

* CPU cooler: A nice aftermarket CPU cooler can provide even better cooling and overclocking capabilities than the stock cooler on the 3700X processor.

* RAM: Adding more RAM to your system can help improve performance and multitasking capabilities. I'd recommend at least 16 GB of DDR4 RAM.

Final Thoughts

Building a PC is a fun and rewarding experience, and with these recommendations, you should be able to create a high-performance system that meets your needs. Whether you're looking for excellent gaming performance or the ability to handle demanding workloads like video editing and rendering, I believe that this build provides an excellent balance of features and price.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat's up you guys welcome back to Pauls hardware I am bringing back my monthly build series because it's been a little bit of a weird past month or two and the last time I did this was the beginning of March it seems like a lifetime ago at that time I had some ideas that I was pitching to you guys for sort of revamping this series the main idea is that at the beginning of every month I'd do a couple PC parts lists for those of you who might want to build a computer but aren't sure what parts to use I base the builds on your feedback and then I usually choose one of them to build and then test every month usually however 2020 has been all sorts of chaos so far so I have not been keeping up with that regular rotation case-in-point right now it's more towards the end of April versus the beginning of April and due to all the stuff going on in the world I haven't really had time to sort of reassess this series so I'm doing more of the traditional style that I've done in the past which means that I'm not building any systems today so check the description for a link to my builds playlist where I have a bunch of systems that I've actually built if you want to watch me doing that and also if you want to know how to build a system yourself check out my how to build a gaming PC series there's one in 2019 that's a three-part series or there's a more recent one where I built a $550 system and I'll link all of those down in the video's description today I will be going over a $1200 system build and the $1200 price is specific for a reason if you live in the United States and you meet the qualifications you're eligible for a $1200 stimulus check right now because a lot of people are out of work because of the ongoing pandemic now I want to be very careful to point out right from the get-go I know a lot of people are not in a position right now to be buying parts for a new system build this is absolutely not an essential thing at all so for any of you who are about to say Paul why are you telling people to do this they should be spending the money on food and rent and necessities for their family I understand and I completely agree with that and I'm in no way recommending that anyone dip into their savings or do anything irresponsible with the money right now especially since a lot of people have very limited income at the same time though there are people out there who have savings stashed away who are eligible to get the stimulus payment who might see it as more of extra money that they can spend on something versus money they need to just keep their family and home afloat so if you happen to be one of those people this is my April 20 2012 hundred dollar stimulus PC builds but before I go over the parts a real quick mention that if you want to vote for next month's build down in the video subscription there is a straw poll link and you can vote on what builds you want to see in May I had to base this a lot on upcoming products that we aren't 100% sure launching there is a couple new rise in the CPUs that are scheduled to launch May 21st there's rumors about Intel's LGA 1200 motherboards and comment like s desktop processors coming out soon so I might be able to do something based on that or we have a couple other options there for Rison or threader for three builds and while I'm at it here's the straw poll from last month just so you guys can see the results I allowed people to choose multiple things and I think it got a little muddled so I wasn't really able to derive exactly what people want other than people want to see if an submitted parts lists that I ain't critique and possibly improve and I feel like that could potentially be a completely different series or segment so I might look into doing something like that really soon back to the build though and I had an idea in mind for what I wanted to put together here but it ended up being more expensive to do what I wanted to do so I wanted to stay under 1,200 bucks including mail and rebates here it'll one thousand one hundred and eighty three dollars and ninety one cents right now according to PC part picker if you buy from all of these retailers Amazon Best Buy and Newegg but what we have here is a thirty six hundred X based system and my original intent was to use a 3700 X which is an 8 core 16 thread processor whereas a 3600 X is a six core 12 thread 3600 X is selling for 200 bucks right now though so that's pretty nice the 3600 you can get for a hundred and seventy five right now also quite nice and either of those CPUs would be a nice pairing for the system so consider the 3600 if you want to save 25 bucks or so the remainder of the parts are based on choosing stuff that will match up with sort of a higher-end build in the $1,200 ish range and also to get you the maximum amount of performance and features especially since this risin platform supports a lot of cool new features such as PCI Express 4.0 to that end I went with an x5 70 motherboard and the tough gaming x5 70 plus Wi-Fi is a great option there it's less than $200 it has really good power delivery for overclocking I feel like the only thing that's really missing is a USB 3 point to Gen 2 front panel header but it's got some RGB LEDs it's got Wi-Fi integrated a couple MDOT two slots and overall just a really well reviewed boards that is a very solid choice for memory we just have a 16 gig kits of the recommended ddr4 speed for horizon 3000 series which is ddr4 3600 I have actually used this kits and tested it and it works with XMP settings its ddr4 3600 castling Z 16 1919 something so not too bad in the timings either and it's about 85 bucks for the kits no RGB LEDs or anything it's straightforward Ripjaws 5 set but our DB LEDs do not make the system any faster despite popular belief so that's why I left it out for storage I'm usually recommending about a 500 gig Class SSD for your main operating system drive and it's really nice to be able to get an nvme SSD right now because they're quite a bit faster than your standard SATA SSDs if you're looking at read and write speeds practically speaking when it comes to gaming performance this isn't really going to affect too much other than perhaps shaving a few seconds off of load times this also isn't necessarily the fastest nvme SSD because it does use ql scene and so for extensive read and writes it's not necessarily going to be a workhorse but it is going to give you a little bit better responsiveness it has the nvme features that to say the SSDs lack and it's only 65 bucks right now on nuoc now for a graphics card in my opinion right now once you get above the $500 price points there isn't a whole lot of competition from AMD Radeon so you're looking at in video cards and that's just fine and basically they stack up for 500 bucks 2070 super for 600 bucks you can get a 20 80 actually a little bit more than 600 bucks for 700 bucks you can get a 20 80 super and then you gotta jump up to 1200 dollars if you want a 20 80 TI the performance scales along that price climb as you go up higher and higher none of these is necessarily a bad deal when you compare the performance you get to the dollar amount spent and they do have the newer env ink encoder that you get with the Archie x-series which is really really nice for both video encoding on the fly' as well as using along with the gaming streaming recording software such as OBS there are several models available for 500 bucks I chose this gigabyte one because it's got a really nice triple fan cooler on it and I know this is a good performing card you can also get the NVIDIA founder's edition for I believe for the same price if you like the look of that one and that's a good performer too but again this is just kind of the amount of money you have to pay if you want to get this level of performance that you get with the higher-end r-tx cards for a case I have yet again chosen the N xdh 510 because it's a $70 case really easy to build in well-designed gives you a nice clean finished product tempered glass side panel basement down on the bottom comes with a couple fans included that are pretty decent quality fans and yeah nice clean look for seventy dollars you don't really need too much more than this in a case of course cases are very subjective to your aesthetic tastes often so any standard ATX case that's decent should work for this bill if you wanna swap out a different one for a power supply I went with an 80 plus gold one because again I was just trying to go for a little bit of a nicer set up for this EVGA is power supply series have been doing quite well and they're GD series from 2019 allows you to get an 80 plus gold certified power supply which is going to save you money and use a little bit less power for your overall system in the long run it's available for $73 at Newegg after a male and rebate does not have modular cables or anything so that's the trade-off here but in my personal opinion especially if you have a basement in the case that you're building in really easy to tuck away excess cables down there and still have a pretty clean looking finish build whereas if you went for a fully modular power supply but it was 80 plus bronze for example you're gonna get 80 plus bronze performance out of it so you're gonna end up paying a little bit more for that over time when it comes to your power bill it's pretty marginal but I like efficiency when it's available so there it is you guys all the parts that I have chosen for just under twelve hundred dollars and basically if someone was to come to me right now and say hey I've got 1,200 bucks to spend on a computer right now and assuming you already have an operating system and a keyboard and mouse and all that good stuff this is the parts list that I would recommend however there are a few things I would want to also recommend but they would add to the price so I did a another parts list that's just a little bit better I will point out though that if there's one thing that you'd want to add to this maybe an aftermarket CPU cooler like a nice air cooler or even a liquid cooler would be a decent add-on for this for the 30 600 X just don't spend too much on it because once you spend too much on that you should just upgrade your CPU which is what I did with this same PC build but as if you had about 300 bucks more to spend so we're coming in just shy of $1500 and I've only made two changes here swapped out the CPU so we're spending closer to $300 on the 3700 X but we're getting two more cores and four more threads and then I upgraded our graphics card to the RT X supera and you can find those for just shy of $700 right now this is the EVGA r-tx 180 super black so swapping those two parts in is going to ramp up your performance a decent amount I couldn't say exactly how much shots on top of my head but you're gonna get more cores and threads to work with while you're doing video editing rendering transcoding and you're gonna have just a nicer graphics card although you still have an 8 gig buffer so again guys if you want links to any of the parts I talked about today they are down in the video's description these are the systems I would recommend you build if you were spending $1,200 maybe $1,500 depending on the parts list that you look at but again since I know a lot of people are shorter on money right now check out the how to build a PC video I did last month for a really solid five hundred and fifty dollar builds and then I've got another video coming out in a couple days where I'm gonna go over budget CPU options because there's actually a pretty good amount of them from AMD but there's a little bit of confusion there so I wanted to help explain things better so people can make the right choice for their needs thank you guys so much for watching this video though hit the subscribe button if you want to see that video on the budget CPUs when it comes out check out my store at Paul's Harbor net I've got shirts mugs pint glasses and a lot of other high quality merchandise that you can buy and get yourself some nice stuff and help me and my channel out at the same time thanks again for watching guys and we'll see you in the next onewhat's up you guys welcome back to Pauls hardware I am bringing back my monthly build series because it's been a little bit of a weird past month or two and the last time I did this was the beginning of March it seems like a lifetime ago at that time I had some ideas that I was pitching to you guys for sort of revamping this series the main idea is that at the beginning of every month I'd do a couple PC parts lists for those of you who might want to build a computer but aren't sure what parts to use I base the builds on your feedback and then I usually choose one of them to build and then test every month usually however 2020 has been all sorts of chaos so far so I have not been keeping up with that regular rotation case-in-point right now it's more towards the end of April versus the beginning of April and due to all the stuff going on in the world I haven't really had time to sort of reassess this series so I'm doing more of the traditional style that I've done in the past which means that I'm not building any systems today so check the description for a link to my builds playlist where I have a bunch of systems that I've actually built if you want to watch me doing that and also if you want to know how to build a system yourself check out my how to build a gaming PC series there's one in 2019 that's a three-part series or there's a more recent one where I built a $550 system and I'll link all of those down in the video's description today I will be going over a $1200 system build and the $1200 price is specific for a reason if you live in the United States and you meet the qualifications you're eligible for a $1200 stimulus check right now because a lot of people are out of work because of the ongoing pandemic now I want to be very careful to point out right from the get-go I know a lot of people are not in a position right now to be buying parts for a new system build this is absolutely not an essential thing at all so for any of you who are about to say Paul why are you telling people to do this they should be spending the money on food and rent and necessities for their family I understand and I completely agree with that and I'm in no way recommending that anyone dip into their savings or do anything irresponsible with the money right now especially since a lot of people have very limited income at the same time though there are people out there who have savings stashed away who are eligible to get the stimulus payment who might see it as more of extra money that they can spend on something versus money they need to just keep their family and home afloat so if you happen to be one of those people this is my April 20 2012 hundred dollar stimulus PC builds but before I go over the parts a real quick mention that if you want to vote for next month's build down in the video subscription there is a straw poll link and you can vote on what builds you want to see in May I had to base this a lot on upcoming products that we aren't 100% sure launching there is a couple new rise in the CPUs that are scheduled to launch May 21st there's rumors about Intel's LGA 1200 motherboards and comment like s desktop processors coming out soon so I might be able to do something based on that or we have a couple other options there for Rison or threader for three builds and while I'm at it here's the straw poll from last month just so you guys can see the results I allowed people to choose multiple things and I think it got a little muddled so I wasn't really able to derive exactly what people want other than people want to see if an submitted parts lists that I ain't critique and possibly improve and I feel like that could potentially be a completely different series or segment so I might look into doing something like that really soon back to the build though and I had an idea in mind for what I wanted to put together here but it ended up being more expensive to do what I wanted to do so I wanted to stay under 1,200 bucks including mail and rebates here it'll one thousand one hundred and eighty three dollars and ninety one cents right now according to PC part picker if you buy from all of these retailers Amazon Best Buy and Newegg but what we have here is a thirty six hundred X based system and my original intent was to use a 3700 X which is an 8 core 16 thread processor whereas a 3600 X is a six core 12 thread 3600 X is selling for 200 bucks right now though so that's pretty nice the 3600 you can get for a hundred and seventy five right now also quite nice and either of those CPUs would be a nice pairing for the system so consider the 3600 if you want to save 25 bucks or so the remainder of the parts are based on choosing stuff that will match up with sort of a higher-end build in the $1,200 ish range and also to get you the maximum amount of performance and features especially since this risin platform supports a lot of cool new features such as PCI Express 4.0 to that end I went with an x5 70 motherboard and the tough gaming x5 70 plus Wi-Fi is a great option there it's less than $200 it has really good power delivery for overclocking I feel like the only thing that's really missing is a USB 3 point to Gen 2 front panel header but it's got some RGB LEDs it's got Wi-Fi integrated a couple MDOT two slots and overall just a really well reviewed boards that is a very solid choice for memory we just have a 16 gig kits of the recommended ddr4 speed for horizon 3000 series which is ddr4 3600 I have actually used this kits and tested it and it works with XMP settings its ddr4 3600 castling Z 16 1919 something so not too bad in the timings either and it's about 85 bucks for the kits no RGB LEDs or anything it's straightforward Ripjaws 5 set but our DB LEDs do not make the system any faster despite popular belief so that's why I left it out for storage I'm usually recommending about a 500 gig Class SSD for your main operating system drive and it's really nice to be able to get an nvme SSD right now because they're quite a bit faster than your standard SATA SSDs if you're looking at read and write speeds practically speaking when it comes to gaming performance this isn't really going to affect too much other than perhaps shaving a few seconds off of load times this also isn't necessarily the fastest nvme SSD because it does use ql scene and so for extensive read and writes it's not necessarily going to be a workhorse but it is going to give you a little bit better responsiveness it has the nvme features that to say the SSDs lack and it's only 65 bucks right now on nuoc now for a graphics card in my opinion right now once you get above the $500 price points there isn't a whole lot of competition from AMD Radeon so you're looking at in video cards and that's just fine and basically they stack up for 500 bucks 2070 super for 600 bucks you can get a 20 80 actually a little bit more than 600 bucks for 700 bucks you can get a 20 80 super and then you gotta jump up to 1200 dollars if you want a 20 80 TI the performance scales along that price climb as you go up higher and higher none of these is necessarily a bad deal when you compare the performance you get to the dollar amount spent and they do have the newer env ink encoder that you get with the Archie x-series which is really really nice for both video encoding on the fly' as well as using along with the gaming streaming recording software such as OBS there are several models available for 500 bucks I chose this gigabyte one because it's got a really nice triple fan cooler on it and I know this is a good performing card you can also get the NVIDIA founder's edition for I believe for the same price if you like the look of that one and that's a good performer too but again this is just kind of the amount of money you have to pay if you want to get this level of performance that you get with the higher-end r-tx cards for a case I have yet again chosen the N xdh 510 because it's a $70 case really easy to build in well-designed gives you a nice clean finished product tempered glass side panel basement down on the bottom comes with a couple fans included that are pretty decent quality fans and yeah nice clean look for seventy dollars you don't really need too much more than this in a case of course cases are very subjective to your aesthetic tastes often so any standard ATX case that's decent should work for this bill if you wanna swap out a different one for a power supply I went with an 80 plus gold one because again I was just trying to go for a little bit of a nicer set up for this EVGA is power supply series have been doing quite well and they're GD series from 2019 allows you to get an 80 plus gold certified power supply which is going to save you money and use a little bit less power for your overall system in the long run it's available for $73 at Newegg after a male and rebate does not have modular cables or anything so that's the trade-off here but in my personal opinion especially if you have a basement in the case that you're building in really easy to tuck away excess cables down there and still have a pretty clean looking finish build whereas if you went for a fully modular power supply but it was 80 plus bronze for example you're gonna get 80 plus bronze performance out of it so you're gonna end up paying a little bit more for that over time when it comes to your power bill it's pretty marginal but I like efficiency when it's available so there it is you guys all the parts that I have chosen for just under twelve hundred dollars and basically if someone was to come to me right now and say hey I've got 1,200 bucks to spend on a computer right now and assuming you already have an operating system and a keyboard and mouse and all that good stuff this is the parts list that I would recommend however there are a few things I would want to also recommend but they would add to the price so I did a another parts list that's just a little bit better I will point out though that if there's one thing that you'd want to add to this maybe an aftermarket CPU cooler like a nice air cooler or even a liquid cooler would be a decent add-on for this for the 30 600 X just don't spend too much on it because once you spend too much on that you should just upgrade your CPU which is what I did with this same PC build but as if you had about 300 bucks more to spend so we're coming in just shy of $1500 and I've only made two changes here swapped out the CPU so we're spending closer to $300 on the 3700 X but we're getting two more cores and four more threads and then I upgraded our graphics card to the RT X supera and you can find those for just shy of $700 right now this is the EVGA r-tx 180 super black so swapping those two parts in is going to ramp up your performance a decent amount I couldn't say exactly how much shots on top of my head but you're gonna get more cores and threads to work with while you're doing video editing rendering transcoding and you're gonna have just a nicer graphics card although you still have an 8 gig buffer so again guys if you want links to any of the parts I talked about today they are down in the video's description these are the systems I would recommend you build if you were spending $1,200 maybe $1,500 depending on the parts list that you look at but again since I know a lot of people are shorter on money right now check out the how to build a PC video I did last month for a really solid five hundred and fifty dollar builds and then I've got another video coming out in a couple days where I'm gonna go over budget CPU options because there's actually a pretty good amount of them from AMD but there's a little bit of confusion there so I wanted to help explain things better so people can make the right choice for their needs thank you guys so much for watching this video though hit the subscribe button if you want to see that video on the budget CPUs when it comes out check out my store at Paul's Harbor net I've got shirts mugs pint glasses and a lot of other high quality merchandise that you can buy and get yourself some nice stuff and help me and my channel out at the same time thanks again for watching guys and we'll see you in the next one\n"