It is a fact that, nowadays, if you want to buy a new gaming PC, you will have to invest a large amount of your budget in the Graphic card. Although it is true that the graphics card has always been one of the components in which you have to invest the most (as long as it is a gaming PC, of course), nowadays you can easily lose half of your budget or more in it. For this reason, until how much would it be reasonable to spend in it today?
In the past, saying that you had a €1,200 gaming PC was synonymous with having a real beast that could handle everything; On the contrary, today you could spend that amount of money (or more) only on the graphics card, and if you want a new TOP gaming PC you could easily go for €3,000 or €4,000. For this reason, it is always advisable to think in advance how much you want to spend, not only on the entire PC (this would be your budget), but also how much of it to invest in the graphics card.
Do you need a TOP graphics on your new PC?
This is the first question you should ask yourself. Today, high-end graphics cards cost a lot of money, and we are no longer talking about the almost €2,000 that an RTX 4090 can cost you, but even a Radeon RX 6800 family graphics card can already cost you more than €800… all nonsense.
At this point, you should think cold and ask yourself the question: do you need a top-of-the-range graphics card? Are you going to play at 4K resolution, with everything maxed out and your monitor has a high refresh rate? If you have not answered yes to these three premises, then it may be perfectly worth it with a mid-range graphics card; think that the mid-range of current generations is much, much higher than the high-end of previous generations, and for example a GeForce RTX 3060 It is a more than worthy graph to play in Full HD resolution at a high refresh rate and you can find it for just over €300.
Yes, it is clear that if you have the budget for a higher model, the games will work better for you (remember that we are thinking of building a PC to play), but we are talking about being “reasonable” and this implies trying to obtain the best possible performance for the minimum necessary money.
So, what part of the budget to invest in the graphics?
As always, this will depend on your budget, and therefore it is clear that if you intend to spend €600-800 on a PC you will have to go for an entry-level graphics card of no more than €200, while if you have around €1200 -€1500 to spend and yes, you could choose to go for a model that costs you between €500 and €600 perfectly. If, as we have mentioned before, you intend to play at 4K resolution, with all the settings at maximum and at high refresh rates, then you will have to save a lot more money, but keep in mind that you will hardly need an RTX 4090 for this (an RTX 4070 Ti already gives enough for that and it is much cheaper).
As we always say, it all depends on what you want to spend, but if you want to be reasonable, the rule is that the lower your budget, the lower percentage of it you should invest in the graphics card so that the rest of the components are neither of low quality nor that tend to bottleneck you on the PC.
Thus, continuing with the example that we have said before and again emphasizing that of being reasonable, we would say that with budgets below €1,000 you should not invest more than 30% in the graphics, while if you have up to €2,000 to spend, then Yes, you can invest 50% in the graph. Anyway, this is our point of view and also just for guidance, but it is our recommendation for when you want to invest a certain amount of money in a new PC to play.
