Best $1200 Gaming PC Build in 2024

$1200 is a solid budget for those looking to build a brand new gaming PC. Consumers have a plethora of budget and mid-range components available to choose from, allowing you to build a powerful gaming-focused system with ease. In order to help with the decision making process, we’ve rounded up a number of parts in a full gaming PC build that can be put together, for roughly $1200.

This system has a more of focus on performance over design, due to the restrictive nature of our chosen budget. Despite this, we’ve still kept aesthetic in mind, securing some components that provide additional flair and lighting for your system. Either way, this system is more than capable of hitting excellent framerates at 1440p, with some legroom at 4K too.

While Intel’s 12th-Gen is somewhat older now, this generation of CPUs still offers a very compelling value-proposition versus the rest of the market. The 12600KF in particular, is still one of Intel’s strongest options for those building a budget or mid-range system.

The 12600KF comes in with 10 cores and 16 threads, so this CPU is more than capable of handling 1440p and 4K gaming, while offering a reasonable core count for productivity applications. The boost clock speed also sits just below the 5GHz mark, so gaming should be very strong here.

In terms of pricing, the 12600KF sits close to the $200 mark, and is likely to drop further in time.

Be Quiet’s Pure Rock 2 is a CPU cooler that provides an excellent balance of performance, and noise levels. The Pure Rock 2 is a single tower cooler, sporting a tightly knit fin stack designed to dissipate any heat your CPU is pushing out, as quickly as possible. Alongside the heatsink, there are four 6mm heat pipes, which should further enhance the cooling capability of the Pure Rock 2.

Be Quiet has used a Pure Wings 2 120mm PWM fan here, which should keep noise levels to a minimum even under an intense workload. It is also worth noting that the Pure Rock 2 has a vast amount of mounting hardware.

Gigabyte’s B760 Gaming X AX is an awesome budget motherboard that we’ve used in a number of budget builds in the past. While this motherboard does have more of a barebones look to it, there’s a larger focus on features that makes this board a worthwhile pickup.

Although you won’t be able to overclock your 12600KF with this motherboard, the Gaming X AX does support 7600MT/s speeds on the RAM, which is great to see. On the expansion front, consumers can leverage a Gen4 PCI-E x16 slot, along with two other Gen3 slots running at x1 speeds.

Our choice of RAM for this build is Corsair’s Vengeance RGB Black DDR5 kit. This 32GB set of DIMMs comes in with a megatransfer speed of 5600MT/s, and a latency of CL36. Admittedly, this isn’t the strongest kit that we have in the GeekaWhat office, but we don’t need the best performing DIMMs for gaming.

Because DDR5 is still pricey, if you’re on a budget, picking up a kit of CL36 latency or lower is preferable, and will still out perform DDR5 in most instances, especially if you’ve got a megatransfer speed of 6000MT/s or higher.

Samsung’s 990 Pro SSD is our choice of storage medium for this build, and there are a few reasons as to why. While we could have picked out a Gen5 drive, our motherboard doesn’t offer a Gen5 slot, and PCI-E 5.0 SSDs aren’t in a great state right now. A high capacity Gen4 SSD seems like a better bet, especially as these drives are almost sitting at price parity with Gen3 options.

Although the 990 Pro is a bit of an outlier based on performance metrics, we’ve seen this drive sit below $150 from a variety of vendors. The 990 Pro is a long-lasting option, and will be perfect for new games that utilise DirectStorage. It is also worth highlighting that we’ve picked out a 2TB SSD specifically to avoid any massive storage upgrades in the future.

AMD’s Radeon RX 7800 XT is a massive winner for the Radeon 7000 range of graphics cards, undercutting the competition in the mid-range market. The 7800 XT is a firm favourite in the GeekaWhat office, and our definitive recommendation for consumers looking to pick up a 1440p and 4K capable graphics card. The main reason why we’ve picked out the Gigabyte AIB is value-proposition. The MSRP of the 7800 XT is the principal selling point of this GPU, as it beats out pretty much every other card in this price class.

And because Gigabyte’s OC variant also sits at MSRP, it makes sense to secure an options that comes with better thermal capability, alongside an improvement to the clock speed.

Housing all of our components, is Deepcool’s CH560. This chassis is a airflow-focused design that offers an aesthetic akin to one of Deepcool’s previous cases, the CK560. The CH560 offers a mesh front and perforated side panel, maximising airflow across the entirety of the case. The perforations on the side panel are a welcome change, as this should allow air to freely ventilate out of the side. Ventilation aside, the CH560 is an awesome looking case.

The CH560 comes with four RGB fans (three 140mm fans at the front, and one 120mm at the back).

Thermaltake’s Smart BM3 750W unit is powering this PC build. This power supply is on the cheaper side versus some of the alternatives that we could have picked, so grabbing a cheaper option allows us to save a bit of money. The most important areas to note about the Smart BM3 is that it is semi-modular, and that it sports a bronze efficiency rating.

A semi-modular power supply has a set of cables that are built into the unit, while offering a few extras that can be plugged into the power supply, such as SATA power, and PCI Express cables for graphics cards.