I'm putting together a new gaming PC and would appreciate advice before buying. My main games will be demanding titles such as Cyberpunk 2077, Baldur's Gate 3, and Resident Evil Requiem. The current build comes to roughly $4,400 CAD, but I've been told that several components may be overpriced. I'm aiming for strong gaming performance and want to know whether the parts are well balanced, where I could save money, and whether the budget would support a more powerful graphics card.
3 Answers
The build can be brought down substantially. A Ryzen 7 9800X3D makes sense for a high-end gaming system, but you don’t need an expensive cooler or an oversized motherboard to support it. A basic Thermalright tower cooler, a reasonably priced B850 board, 32 GB of DDR5-6000 memory, and a good 2 TB NVMe drive would be enough. The suggested parts list comes to around $3,500 CAD and still includes a powerful RTX 5070 Ti, so the original total appears quite inflated.
I’d avoid paying premium prices for 64 GB of RAM unless you know you need it for modded games, content creation, virtual machines, or other memory-heavy workloads. For gaming, 32 GB of DDR5-6000 is generally the better value. The graphics card is also where the budget should be focused; an RX 9070 XT offers strong performance for less money, and the savings could potentially be used to move up to an RTX 5080 if that fits your priorities.
Before ordering, compare bundle and combo deals from major Canadian computer retailers. The CPU, motherboard, and memory are often cheaper when purchased together. Also check the prices of the SSD and power supply across several stores, because the listed storage price in particular looks unusually high. An 850 W quality Gold-rated PSU is fine for a high-end card, though a 750 W model may be sufficient depending on the final GPU and its recommendations.
With the savings from the memory, SSD, and other components, it may be worth considering an RTX 5080 rather than spending the full budget on the current selection of parts.
That’s helpful. I was mainly considering 64 GB for future-proofing, but I’d rather put the money toward graphics performance if 32 GB is enough for these games.