Precision PC Gamer a ridiculous amount of PC gaming tips all in one place!
2020 Hardware Picks
Builds don't include case, screen and peripherals
Gaming PC builds
This build features a motherboard and CPU that are pretty plentiful right now and aren't too far behind in compute performance from the modern era. A case and power supply can run you about $50 extra if you can't get one for free. This will barely run pretty much all early ps4 games and every ps3 game and pc games of the era. It's limited mostly by the GPU if you put a 70 series nvidia gpu from 7xx to 30xx or GPUs with similar performance it'll run almost any game fairly well.
Case and power supply not figured into cost, since a lot of people will have access to one or prefer picking their own.
AMD cards have random bugs especially in some of my old favorites so I've stayed away although I've used a fx6300 and 8320e CPUs with my nvidia gpu and never noticed an issue. I do have a hd 7570 on a Win7 rig with Vista theme that I use to play old mouse and keyboard games like Portal, Half Life 2 ect.
This is your High to Ultra gaming setting pc depending on the game,
Included some fancy stuff in this one, more of a dream build for me without wasting money on stuff that's just going to get outdated like large amounts of ram, storage space or lower clocked higher core counts.
Screen
I see five choices for gaming screens at the moment. The favorite though I would say is 31" 2.5k 144hz G-Sync. It seems to fit the trend while also having a bit more density than 1080, saving you performance by not being 4k and is big which I like.
[Screen Keyboard Mouse Headset and other parts pcpartpicker list]
Budget IPS LED 1080p 15-31"
2560x1440 IPS with G-Sync 24-32"
2560x1440 144hz with G-Sync 24-27"
3840 x 2160 with G-Sync 24-31"
3840 x 2160 1with G-Sync 24-31"
Portable Screens;
You can pickup a LCD screen controller kit and a laptop like display and mount it to a ATX or mATX, possibly some larger itx towers as well. This would be pretty cool although somewhat fragile and heavy but would make a great LAN rig. Probably best suited to a matx or it build without 3.5" drives. You could also mount a smaller 3.5" to 7" Pi style display to the case set it up as a second screen showing temps or fan speeds or PC usage stats.
DIY LCD Controller kit that's compatible with;
17.3" 60hz 1080p display
15.6" 60hz 1080p display
Keyboards
There are such a vast amount of keyboards now I don't think I can recommend one. But mechanical Brown switches I find to be superior here. I also like %60 keyboards as it gives you more room for the mouse. Left handed keyboards are rare but still give you that closer arm position of a %60 when gaming although the board is longer so it still affects mouse real estate by the size of the numpad and arrow key section.
Mouse
Steel Series Kana $26 - Two giant side buttons make for better fit for all hands. Very solid device in this price range.
Razer Naga Pro (wireless) $140 - This is more durable than the epic but the epic looked better and was smaller in the hand which I liked, were out of the option of a brand new epic at this point kind of sucks I'd snag a used one and spare parts if you can.
Madcatz rat air - Looks cool, sucks for mmos though, naga is a must for WoW competitive play.
Reliable brands
Kingston memory, kingston m.2 and EVGA, Corsair, SeaSonic/XFX PSUs.
Gigabyte and MSi stand out the most. Looks function and reliability.
For GPUs everything is fine, I prefer Gigabyte but if I'm not going to look at it nVIDIA, EVGA, MSi, Zotac, Asus, bfg, xfx ect. are fine.
nVIDIA I recommend for graphics cards; Fast driver fixes on game launch, working with game developers, better shaders, per game settings and a list of specs for their hardware on their site.
Apologies AMD users your cards do not run Street Fighter 4 properly on every character, over the years have had low performance shaders and heat issues so I cannot recommend them above nvidia, although they do run games if that is your goal. Also currently bang per buck performance seems to be %10-30 less when looking at the RX 5xx series and 5700.
Case
This is for you to decide, do you want; Size, Features (bays, cable management, controls) Cooling (flow, fans, cooler mounts)Looks
My case picks;
Thermaltake Commander still fairly modern and has all of that accept small size.
Bitfenix Prodigy or Prodigy M is small, affordable and feature rich.
Thermaltake Core v21 is cheap and small.
Lian-Li makes square cases which are high quality, strong and easy to modify since they're really square.
Cooling
Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO $25 - One of the longest lasting beefy air coolers on the market.
Video Game Controllers, webcam, mic.
Blue Yeti black out edition (because its more stealth to have something dark near your mouth while gaming)
Logitech c920 webcam
PCIE Avermedia capture card - I think the pcie card while it may gimp a gaming rig slightly it's a must for dual PC or console streaming.
Build your own Sanwa FightStick for $50 to $80 depending on materials used for the case.
Xbox360 plug and play controllers brand new for roughly $12.