Best gaming PC under $1000 build 2024

With this build, our main goal was to provide the best gaming PC for under $1,000! It’s at this price range that you start to make fewer and fewer compromises and can instead focus on gaming performance. You’re now officially at the higher end of the mid-range category where maxing out AAA titles at 1440p becomes a doddle, with a decent foray into 4k performance too.

The great thing about this build is that the GPU and storage will be sufficient for years. While the CPU and motherboard offer reliability and solid performance too – they are from the previous generation and may be the first part of the build you want to upgrade in the future. Overall, we believe this is one of the best all-around builds for around the 1000-dollar mark. Please note that prices of the hardware do fluctuate daily, our team works tirelessly to try and ensure the price is as close to $1,000 as possible.

Build of the month

This is the ultimate 1000-dollar gaming PC, packed full of the most advanced hardware possible primed to give you an edge in whatever workload you undertake. The Ryzen 5 5600X gives unparalleled performance for a CPU at this price point and offers plenty of go-power to support the RTX 4070. Speaking of, the RTX 4070 has more than enough power to play games at 60 FPS in 1440p, you might be able to get some 4k gameplay out of this GPU if you’re playing older titles or turn down the graphics. The inclusion of DLSS 3 makes 4k upscaled gameplay evermore achievable for less and less money. 

You might be a little worried about the fact that we’re choosing to build this $1000 gaming PC on the AM4 platform, well don’t worry. AM4 is here to stay, at least for the next 3 years, and there’s still plenty of room for a CPU upgrade beyond the 5600X, which should suit your needs for some time. However, if there were something we’d suggest you upgrade to future-proof your system, it would be the upgrade to AM5, but this upgrade will be costly. 

How we test

We build our office PCs from scratch to make sure all the parts we recommend work well together and fit comfortably into the recommended case. Once built, our custom-built PCs are used in the office every single working day. We also get a good amount of testing in for games – from light to heavy-duty. In the process of testing, we also conduct some benchmarking tests to see how well our builds perform, all while keeping an eye on component temperate and general stability of the system.

If at any point you’re ever worried about the performance of your system, you can always dabble in the world of overclocking, we have selected components in this build that can all easily be overclocked to squeeze a bit extra performance from them. A word of caution though, please read our how-to overclock guide before trying to over-task your new custom build.

Now you have chosen your desired build, there are a few things to discuss before you make that all-important purchase. To take any stress away, we have outlined a few different factors for your consideration below.