The Best Gaming PC Build for $800 in 2018

Trying to build yourself the best $800 gaming PC possible? With that kind of budget you can easily build a powerful gaming PC that won’t need any upgrades for a long time! This $800 build is fully loaded with an Intel i5 8400, a 6GB GTX 1060, 8GB of DDR4 RAM and 1TB of storage, just to make sure you don’t fall short anytime soon!

All of that hardware gives you a seriously awesome custom gaming PC that will help you destroy your competition without doing the same to your wallet! It’ll easily be able to handle AAA games in 1080p at 60fps or better and it’ll even give you solid 1440p performance as well!

A budget of $800 is going to get you the core parts you need to build a really solid mid-level gaming PC with a lot of gaming potential – one that won’t need any kind of upgrades for quite a while. This beast won’t go obsolete for at least 1-2 years, which is saying something when you’re talking about technology in 2018.

Have a question? Ask me in the comment section!

Below you’ll find some suggested add-ons for this build, some I’ll mention more in-depth further down this page, but some are pretty self-explanatory like optical (DVD/CD) drives. Although not entirely necessary, optical drives can sometimes come in handy and I strongly recommended having one; if you have an old PC kicking around, it’s optical drive will more than likely work for you and you won’t need to buy a new one.

Prebuilt Desktops

Not interested in building your own gaming PC? No problem! Take a look at these hand-picked desktops that offer similar performance to the DIY build listed above – only you don’t have to assemble a thing!

• Dell Inspiron 5680
  – i5 8400 + GTX 1060 (3GB) + 8GB RAM
• CyberPowerPC GXIVR8020A5
  – i5 8400 + RX 580 (4GB) + 8GB RAM
• CyberPowerPC GXiVR8060A5
  – i5 8400 + GTX 1060 (3GB) + 8GB RAM
• CyberPowerPC GXiVR8040A5
  – i7 8700 + RX 580 (4GB) + 8GB RAM

When you’re picking parts to build yourself a gaming PC there are lots of things to consider. For instance, do you plan on upgrading it in the future? Do you just want what you can get now, or do you want to eventually overclock your processor? Each path gives you a lot of new things to consider to effectively balance price with performance. But, why do all that when you could have me do it for you?!

Keep in mind that the price listed above is for the core components only, you will still need an operating system, and any other peripherals you don’t currently have.

Corsair’s Carbide Spec 02 is an great mid tower ATX case for an equally awesome price. It comes with 1x 120mm red LED fan mounted in the front and 1x 120mm fan in the rear. It’ll easily support a 240mm radiator if you want to run a liquid cooling setup and will easily support the largest graphics cards. The Spec 02 will also support a 160mm CPU cooler meaning that big aftermarket coolers like the Hyper 212 EVO will fit without an issue. That all said, pretty much any mid tower ATX case will work perfectly for this build.

The Gigabyte B360M DS3H is a great mATX motherboard for the price and it’s giving you all of the features that you’ll need for an LGA 1151 socket build; like integrated audio, a built-in ethernet controller, 6x USB ports, 6x SATA headers, support for up to 4 sticks of DDR4 RAM and lots of room for future expansion. The B360 chipset does not support overclocking, but that’s not a problem since the i5 8400 cannot be overclocked.

Intel’s powerful 6-core/6-thread i5 8400 is an awesome processor that won’t have any issues with gaming, light content creation, or anything else. The i5 8400 has a base core clock of 2.8GHz that can extend all the way to 4.0GHz under load; that’s a lot of processing power slapped across 6 high-performance cores! Since the i5 8400 does not support overclocking, the need for an aftermarket CPU cooler isn’t tremendous. But, I could completely understand if you wanted to upgrade from the stock Intel cooler. If that’s you, check out the 5 best CPU coolers!

The GTX 1060 is great graphics card in terms of both price and performance, it’s easily the best options at this level without going too crazy on cost. Zotac’s GTX 1060 AMP Edition (6GB) runs great, overclocks well and doesn’t get too hot when being pushed hard. It offers 6GB of GDDR5 VRAM, 5 display outputs, and a small-ish profile that’ll fit inside practically any case out there.  Long story short, a 6GB GTX 1060 is easily capable of supporting VR headsets like the Vive or Rift as well as playing most AAA games in 1080p or 1440p at 60fps+ without an issue.

When it comes to RAM, 8GB is all you need for gaming this far into 2018, really. There will come a time (definitely sooner than later) when most games will demand 12GB or more, but that time hasn’t come quite yet. Even some of the very few games that currently “require” 16GB run perfectly fine with an 8GB setup. With that in mind, if you’re like me and you end up running Chrome with 100 different tabs open while gaming at the same time, you might want to consider upgrading to 16GB.

There are a lot of high performance parts in this build, so its fair if you’re assuming its going to need a gigantic power supply, but luckily it won’t! At most this build will only use a few hundred watts of power, so an 80% efficiency 550W supply will do the trick just fine. I’ve picked EVGA’s 500 BQ which is an awesome semi-modular supply offering more than enough connections for everything you need, it also comes with a decent 3-year warranty just in-case the worst were to happen.

Due to how crazy prices have been lately, I could really only include a 1TB HDD in this build without sacrificing lots of performance elsewhere. That being said, if you have another $50-$60 kicking around, adding a 120GB SSD would be a great idea. The SSD would, in theory, be used as your “boot drive” or where your OS and startup programs are prioritized to be installed.

I didn’t pull any punches when it came to squeezing every ounce of power from your $800 budget, and you will not be disappointed! This build is easily capable of running pretty much whatever you throw at it on at least high settings in 1080p at 60fps or better!

When it comes to picking an operating system, you have quite a few options laid out before you. But, the best / easiest two are either Windows or something Linux-based.

If you’re really strapped for cash, or you really just don’t like Windows, Ubuntu is a great option because it’s entirely free, and it’s really solid/secure. It’s a Linux-based OS and can play any game that supports Linux. More and more games are adding Linux support, but it definitely sucks when a game you’ve been waiting forever for ends up being Windows only…

The more expensive option is buying a copy of Windows. With DirectX 12 becoming more common and the Skylake-based processors basically demanding Windows 10, you might want to consider jumping on that right away, but it’s ultimately your call.

Installing your operating system can be done in a couple of different ways, either by DVD or a USB flash drive that you either create yourself or buy. Either will get the job done, but going for Windows & using the retail DVD (or USB flash drive) is going to be the easiest – any cheap DVD drive will work.

If you want to create your own USB flash drive to install something like Ubuntu from, you can find some decent instructions here.

If this is your very first gaming PC, you probably need almost everything on this list. If that’s you, set aside another few hundred for these additional peripherals. 

If that’s the situation you’re in, then I have some really awesome suggestions for you to consider. Each peripheral was hand-picked for this build and they’re all guaranteed high quality.

When it comes to picking a display, you really want it to be perfectly suited to your usage, that’s why I’ve put together a guide on how to pick the best monitor.

Chairs are no different, to fully enjoy your gaming experience you really need to find the best gaming chair possible. Due to the insane amount of options, I’ve put together this in-depth gaming chair buyers guide, check it out! 

If you came here looking to build yourself an awesome $800 gaming PC, I KNOW you found what you were looking for! This build puts out a lot of power for the price and, in my opinion, it’s probably the best value when it comes to a 1080p 60fps gaming PC, or even 1440p 60fps!

Like I said at the beginning of this build guide, it’s going to take more than a year for this build to need any kind of serious upgrades; and even then, you might only need to throw in some more RAM or something else easy like that. 

All-in-all, you will be hard pressed to build a better 1080p gaming PC for $800 in 2018; unless you’re building it with a specific game or purpose in mind! The power this build is packing is more than enough to handle all of your favorite AAA games in 1080p at 60fps without a problem! 

Have a question about this build? Wondering how you could customize it? Running into problems during the build process? Let me know in the comment section below and I’ll do my best to assist!