A machine that plays every current title at 1080p starts around R15,000 to R18,000. Comfortable 1440p gaming sits in the R25,000 to R35,000 range, and 4K or streaming builds run from R45,000 upward.

Those figures are for the tower alone. Budget another R3,000 to R7,000 if you also need a monitor, keyboard and mouse. Our PC Builder prices a complete machine live, so you can see exactly where your money goes before you commit.

Building is usually 10 to 15 percent cheaper on parts, and you choose every component rather than accepting whatever the manufacturer had cheapest that month. Pre-builts win on convenience and a single warranty contact.

We sit in the middle: you pick the parts, we assemble, cable-manage and stress-test the machine, and you deal with one supplier if anything goes wrong. You get build-it pricing without the risk of bending a CPU pin at your kitchen table.

The graphics card, by a distance. It decides more of your frame rate than every other component combined, so it deserves the largest slice of the budget in any gaming build.

The place people under-spend and regret it is the power supply. A cheap unit driving an expensive card is the single most common cause of the crashes and dead hardware we see come through the workshop. Buy a decent 80+ Gold unit once and it will outlive two or three builds.

For 1080p at high settings, an RTX 5060 or 5060 Ti handles everything currently released and will stay useful for years. For 1440p, look at the RTX 5070 or RX 9070. For 4K, or if you stream and render as well as play, the RTX 5080 and 5090 are where it starts to make sense.

Match the card to your monitor, not to your ambitions. A 5080 driving a 1080p 60Hz screen is money you will never see again.

NVIDIA leads on ray tracing and DLSS upscaling, and its drivers tend to be better supported in streaming and creative software. AMD generally gives you more raw performance and more VRAM per Rand at the same price point.

If you mostly play competitive titles at high frame rates, AMD is excellent value. If you want ray tracing, or you stream and edit alongside gaming, NVIDIA is the safer pick.

At 1080p, yes — 8GB still runs current titles at high settings without trouble. At 1440p it is becoming the limiting factor, and several recent releases will force you to drop texture quality to stay smooth.

If you are buying for 1440p and intend to keep the card three years or more, 12GB or 16GB is the more sensible buy. Check the memory figure as carefully as the model number — the same card name often ships in two capacities.

A laptop costs roughly 30 to 40 percent more for the same frame rate, because the same chip names run at lower power in a thin chassis. A laptop RTX 5070 is not a desktop RTX 5070.

Buy the laptop if you genuinely need to move it — student, shared space, frequent travel. If it will live on one desk, a desktop gives you more performance now, quieter running, and the ability to upgrade later instead of replacing the whole thing.

Usually yes for both, but check the specific model first. Most gaming laptops have at least one accessible M.2 slot and one or two SODIMM memory slots.

The catch is soldered memory. Thinner models increasingly solder some or all of the RAM to the board, which caps you permanently at the configuration you bought. The CPU and graphics chip are never upgradeable in a laptop. If you are unsure about a model, ask us before you buy — we open these machines every week.

Grey imports. A laptop brought in outside the official channel is often noticeably cheaper, and then carries no local warranty, so a fault means shipping it overseas at your own cost or paying for the repair yourself.

Check the unit is a South African stocked model with local warranty support before you pay. Also check the screen refresh rate — a 144Hz or faster panel is worth far more to your experience than a marginally better graphics chip behind a 60Hz screen.

Yes. Stock levels on this site come from our own inventory, not a supplier catalogue, and our PC Builder shows when stock was last checked so you can see for yourself how current it is.

Where an item is on order rather than on the shelf, we say so and give you an estimated lead time. We would rather lose the sale than take your money for something we cannot ship.

Parts in stock are dispatched by courier within one to two working days. Cape Town and Johannesburg metro deliveries typically arrive the next day, with other areas taking two to four working days.

A complete PC build takes longer because we assemble it and run a 24-hour stress test before it leaves us. Allow three to five working days from confirmed order to dispatch.

We build it. Assembly, cable management, BIOS setup, a 24-hour stress test and Windows installation are all handled here before the machine ships.

If you would rather assemble it yourself, order the parts and we will ship them individually — the compatibility checking in our PC Builder works the same either way.

Every component carries its full South African manufacturer warranty, which ranges from one year on most parts to five or ten years on quality power supplies and some SSDs.

Beyond that, you have our workshop. We spent twelve years repairing computers before we started building them, so when something goes wrong you are talking to people who diagnose hardware daily rather than reading from a script.

Card payments through Yoco, PayFast, PayFlex, and direct EFT. Prices shown include VAT, and there is no surcharge for paying by card.

For larger builds we can arrange a deposit and balance on completion — message us on WhatsApp and we will sort it out.

Yes, and we design builds with that in mind. On an AM5 or LGA1851 board you can drop in a faster processor years later without replacing the motherboard or memory — the graphics card, case, power supply and drives all carry over.

Our PC Builder tells you what each build upgrades to before you buy, including the honest answer when a platform is near the end of its life. That is worth knowing at purchase time, not two years later.

Please do. WhatsApp us on 066 217 4150 or email sales@pcgamingsa.co.za and you will get a person who works on this hardware, not a call centre.

Send us your budget and what you play, and we will put a build together for you. There is no obligation and no pressure — we would rather you buy the right machine than the expensive one.