Best Budget Gaming PCs

There are two key components that any gaming PC needs if it wants to play the latest games, and that’s a great processor, and a powerful graphics card. This Horizon gaming PC has that and a whole lot more for a price well below £1,000.

At its heart, this gaming PC has the Intel Core i5-12400F, which comes with six high-performance Alder Lake cores and support for up to 12 simultaneous threads, each able to boost up to 4.4GHz. That’s plenty fast for playing esports games, indie games, and even some of the latest AAA games. This CPU is a couple of generations old, but it’s still one of the best budget gaming CPUs available today, and it has a fantastic upgrade path, since the motherboard in this PC is compatible with the Intel 13th and 14th generations too.

If in a year or two you feel like you want more processor performance, you can upgrade it to anything from Intel’s latest generations for a big boost in performance in both gaming and productivity tasks, like photo and video editing.

The CPU can’t do it all alone, though. This PC backs it up with the excellent Nvidia RTX 4060 graphics card. With 8GB of GDDR6 memory, there’s plenty of room for high resolution textures and other high-end visual features. With this combination of processor and graphics, you can play AAA games at 1080p or 1440p in some cases, and enjoy support for advanced features like hardware accelerated ray tracing. It also supports Nvidia’s DLSS 3 dynamic upscaling, which can massively boost performance in supporting games. Even more so with frame generation, where only Nvidia’s RTX 40-series GPUs can take full advantage.

This PC also comes with strong cooling to keep it running cool and quiet, and looks stellar in its CiT Level 2 Mesh chassis, with RGB lighting to make it stand out from the crowd. There’s even a terabyte of fast SSD storage, so you can install your whole game library with ease, and know that the PC will boost fast, and the games even faster.

Best £500 gaming PC

Horizon Launchpad and Royale

OK, so we might be cheating on this one a little as it’s not quite £500, but tell sales we sent you and they might knock another £20 off. Even if they don’t, though, the Horizon Launchpad is the perfect gaming PC for around a £500 budget. It combines a strong six core processor with some of the best onboard graphics you can get, for a lean, affordable gaming machine which can play esports games and older AAA games at great frame rates.

The six-core, AMD Ryzen 5600G is one of the best mid-range processors of its generation, combining its Zen 3 processor cores with AMD Radeon Vega onboard graphics for an all-in-one solution. This is the same kind of hardware you’ll find in the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5, showing just how capable it can be with the right games.

It comes with half a terabyte of fast SSD storage and 16GB of nippy DDR4 memory, so whatever you do play it’ll launch fast and stay snappy and responsive, even when you have a bunch of web browser tabs open at the same time.

This PC doesn’t have a graphics card, but it’s got plenty of scope to add one later if you want to. The motherboard has a PCIe 3.0 x16 slot which is ready to take any of the latest generations of graphics card for a big boost in graphical performance. But only if you need it. The onboard graphics are more than enough to play most PC games and play them well, making this a great entry-level gaming PC for a young gamer, or for someone who wants a great gaming PC now, and a better gaming PC later.

And hey, if the person you’re buying this for is a Fornite fan, they might enjoy this custom paint job  version for just £5 more.

Best budget gaming PC for high-end graphics

Horizon Thunder Ryzen 5 gaming PC

If you want to maximize your gaming PC’s graphical power but still want to work within a tight budget, then the Horizon Thunder Ryzen 5 gaming PC is the best tool for the job. Despite only costing just over £1,000 with its latest discount, it comes with one of the best graphics cards of its generation and a true performance monster: The Nvidia RTX 4070.

This GPU is part of Nvidia’s top-tier lineup of cutting-edge graphics cards, sporting the latest generation Ada Lovelace graphics architecture, the latest generation of Tensor and RT cores for upscaling and ray tracing, and some of the fastest GDDR6X memory ever made. It goes toe to toe with some of the best GPUs from the previous generation, and thanks to its new feature support, in select games it can easily surpass them.

Alongside being a performance powerhouse in its own right, the RTX 4070 has full support for DLSS 3 and frame generation, meaning in compatible games it can practically double your frame rate for very little in the way of visual artifacts. This is an exclusive feature of the RTX 40 generation and can make a massive difference to your frame rates – especially if you’re also enabling ray tracing.

Just because this PC focuses on the graphics, though, doesn’t mean it slacks elsewhere. The RTX 4070 is paired with an AMD Ryzen 5600 CPU, with six high-performance Zen 3 cores. That’s plenty for the average gamer, though if you want to upgrade in the future you could swap it out for the best gaming CPU of its generation: The legendary Ryzen 5800X3D.

There’s also 16GB of fast DDR4 memory, and a snappy Gen 4 NVMe SSD to give you full support for DirectStorage in compatible games. Like all CCL gaming PCs, it also comes with a three year on-site warranty, with the option to extend it if you wish.

Best high-end budget gaming PC

Horizon Ryzen 5 Super gaming PC

You can get a very powerful gaming PC without spending thousands of pounds. A perfect example of that is the Horizon Ryzen 5 super gaming PC. It brings the raw power of a refreshed-generation of Nvidia’s Lovelace graphics cards, in the form of the RTX 4070 Super. This supercharges the already-excellent RTX 4070 with more cores, helping it nip at the heels of much more high-end graphics cards, and offer the kind of power you need to play the latest games at high frame rates at 1440p – and even a little 4K if you keep some of the other settings turned down.

The processor is a little more modest, but the Ryzen 5 7600X is no slouch. It has six cores built around the latest AMD Zen 4 architecture, running as high as 5.3GHz for incredible performance in any game. What’s just as exciting with this CPU, though is its future upgradeability. It’s based on the AMD AM5 socket, which means as new generations of CPUs are released in the years to come, this PC will be fully compatible and you’ll be able to upgrade it simply by slotting in a new processor for a big performance boost, and no need to upgrade your motherboard or memory.

You wouldn’t want to, anyway, as this PC comes fully equipped with 16GB of some of the fastest DDR5 memory you can buy in 2024. Paired with one of the latest generation SSDs, and you have a gaming PC that feels incredibly snappy and responsive, whether you’re installing games, or browsing the web.

Since this PC is more of a premium design, it also enjoys advanced water cooling on the CPU for quiet and effective cooling – great if you want to overclock your CPU for a little added performance. That comes fitted inside the gorgeous Corsair 3000D RGB Airflow case, too, which has impressive system cooling and an attractive aesthetic, with RGB lighting available if you want to color code your PC with the rest of your gaming space. There’s a tempered glass side window for eyeing up all your new components, too.

All this despite the price barely nudging over £1,500. That’s a stellar price for a stellar gaming PC, with heaps of scope for the future.

Cheapest budget gaming PC

Horizon Ryzen 5 gaming PC

If you want a gaming PC but your budget is as tight as can be, then don’t fret: There’s still an amazing gaming PC for you. The Horizon Ryzen 5 is priced at just £454, and yet comes with absolutely everything you need to get gaming right away. It features a Ryzen 5 4600G with six cores built on AMD’s Zen 2 architecture, and support for up to 12 simultaneous threads for strong multi-threaded performance.

The real selling point of this CPU, though is that it comes complete with AMD’s onboard Radeon Vega graphics, with enough cores and power to deliver credible gaming performance in most casual games. It’ll even play some older AAA games if you keep to 1080p resolution and modest settings. In esports and indie games, though, you could see very high frame rates, despite the lack of a dedicated graphics card.

If you want to add one in the future, though, you can. This Horizon Ryzen 5 gaming PC is an excellent foundation for a future gaming PC upgrade, with scope for more memory, faster processors, and more capable graphics cards to name but a few of the potential options.

In the here and now, though, this PC comes fitted with fast DDR4 memory, 500GB of some of the fastest SSD performance money can buy, and a capable air cooling system which will keep your components cool and the noise levels low. It even has an efficient, 550W Bronze power supply, helping you to save money on your energy bills and improving energy efficiency for a greener gaming experience.

Conclusion

These are just a handful of the fantastic gaming PCs that CCL has on offer, built by both our own in-house teams, and some of the PC building experts at our partners Chillblast. If you like what you see here, or if you have something else in mind, feel free to get in touch with us here at CCL and one of our expert system builders will walk you through building you the perfect gaming PC to fit within your budget.