If you’re looking at building your gaming PC, then look no further! This guide will help you choose what components may fit your preference, whether it be purely for gaming or strictly designed towards productivity and workstation use. We do want to also mention that this guide will help you out in terms of compatibility of the platform you will be choosing, which is very important when building a gaming PC.
It is very important to form your gaming PC build around the main five components your system will mainly utilize: your processor, graphics card, motherboard, power supply and case. All five components will affect the way you use your system and may have compatibility with other components, such as a motherboard supporting an m.2 NVME solid-state drive by having an M.2 NVME SSD compatible slot available, or not. Budget will also have a huge impact on the options that you able to choose from. One of the most common ways as the first step in the gaming pc building process is to form your gaming PC around a certain “tier’ which will allow you to select the appropriate parts for your system within your budget range. You can learn more about budgeting and gaming PC tiers in our Best Gaming Desktop for the Money guide.
Choosing the correct processor for your system is crucial as this will allow your system to perform to its potential alongside your graphics card during gaming sessions and other normal workload utilisation. We would recommend choosing a mid-tier processor such as the Intel Core i5 or an AMD Ryzen 5 if you’re budgeting, but if there aren’t any limits then going for an Intel Core i7 or i9 or AMD Ryzen 7 or 9 processor is highly recommended for the best gaming performance. If it’s an entry level system you’re looking for, there is outstanding value for money to be found in the Ryzen 3 and Intel Core i3
To pair with the CPU of your choosing, you’ll need a compatible motherboard. We’ve started each motherboard as a recommended chipset level, and you can upgrade if you see fit. If you’ve selected an Intel Core i5 CPU like the i5 14400F or 14600KF, then the Intel B760 motherboard would be a recommended starting point – rock solid, good feature set and delivers value for money. The Intel Z series motherboards like Z790 are a big step up in features and price, and generally intended for the higher tier, overclockable processors, whose unlocked nature is denoted by the “K” suffix like the Intel Core i7 14700KF and i9 14900KF chips. While lower chipsets will allow the processor to reach its maximum boost frequency, only the Z790 offers true overclocking ability on these CPUs. In addition, the Z790 allows for faster RAM speeds than lower chipsets (although this is somewhat confusing with Intel’s 14th gen CPUs having mixed max RAM speeds), and feature superior chipset cooling solutions and other functionality, so while you’re paying more, you’re getting more for your money.
This follows the same gaming pc assembling philosophy for AMD Ryzen 5 processors such as Ryzen 5 5500 or 5600, where we would recommend an AMD B550 motherboard. The X series motherboards like the AMD X670 are designed for the best thermal TDP regulation, similar to Intel’s Z series platform, which ensures high tier processors such as the Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 9 CPUs sit within desirable temperatures ranges under load. We recommend the X670 platform if you’ve selected a high-tier AMD Ryzen processor, but both the B450, B550 and B650 motherboards are robust, feature-packed platforms for use with up to Ryzen 7 processors. The B550, B650, X670 and X670-E chipsets have added future-proofing advantages too. AMD still continue to release CPU models available for the B450 and B550 chipset to this day, even as they push forward with Ryzen 7000 series and the newly annoucned Ryzen 9000 series platform supporting newer generational CPUs up until 2027.
We believe it’s important to match your graphics card to your processor’s tier to ensure your system will perform to its maximum capability when gaming, as a potential CPU bottleneck may be possible if you don’t select correctly. If you’ve selected a mid-tier processor, such as the Ryzen 5 5500 or Core i5 12400F, then we recommend up to an RTX 4060 Ti 8GB graphics card which is a great pairing in real-time gaming situations. Any further up the GPU scale than that, and we would recommend the high-tier which would be the Ryzen 5 7500F/Core i5 14400F, Ryzen 7/Core i7 or Ryzen 9/Core i9 to pair with an RTX 4080 SUPER 16GB or RTX 4090 24GB, as you won’t be leaving any performance on the table with those CPUs.
Power consumption is a crucial factor within a system and choosing the correct power supply to fit within your PC’s wattage consumption or future potential wattage consumption after upgrading is something you need to consider. Future-proofing a system would be selecting a high wattage power supply as you may want to upgrade your system’s graphics card or add on another one in the future. Power supplies are fortunately very interchangeable and are compatible with all relatively new PC parts, therefore it’s fairly easy to swap out your old one for a newer, higher wattage power supply.
Most low to mid-tier processors and graphics cards don’t have high wattage consumption, therefore you could select a 550W power supply and have no issues at all. However, when you select a high-tier processor and graphics card, you will have to consider higher wattage power supplies such as 650W or higher to ensure there is headroom for more power-hungry components. If you add a second graphics card, then power consumption can increase up to 1000W or higher (depending on the GPU model) as your system will have a high power consumption while under full load. We recommend choosing an 80+ Gold or higher rating for high-tier gaming PCs.
Each Allied case is designed to deliver unique aesthetics and premium performance, across three sizes:
Allied Stinger: Compatible with M-ATX (micro-ATX) motherboards. Compact in size yet roomy enough to house powerful components.
Allied Patriot: Fitted with M-ATX or ATX motherboards, dependent on specification selected. Versatile enough to house single or dual graphics cards and top-mounted 360mm all-in-one liquid coolers.
Allied M.O.A.B: Super-tower in size, fitted with ATX or E-ATX motherboards, dependent on specification selected. Cavernous interior with compatiblity for up to 360mm liquid coolers.
Now that we’ve listed the main five parts within your gaming PC build, we’ll move onto last few components which include your DDR4 Memory (RAM), CPU cooler, main operating system drive (SSD) and storage drive (SSD/HDD).
Your RAM is important as it is required for your system to boot, while also assists with most of the work that the processor requests such as opening a browser tab or launching your favourite game. Our recommendation is to have a minimum 16GB DDR4/DDR5 RAM in your build for an optimal gaming experience which should allow you to have applications open in the background while playing a game such as Discord to chat to your friends or a few browser tabs you might want to alt-tab into to look up something. More intense graphical or video applications, rendering or other such applications generally benefit from 32GB or more. At present, few games truly benefit from more than 16GB of RAM. AMD Ryzen processors do though benefit from faster RAM speeds, so selecting 3200/5200MHz or higher speeds will gain additional % performance boosts. Intel chips benefit from faster, but not in the same performance gain that you may seen on AMD's platform.
Your system cooling gaming peripherals or CPU cooler may already be sorted out if you’ve selected an AMD Ryzen processor as the stock cooler is included. A stock cooler is also present on Intel processors except those with the K suffix, which are not bundled with coolers when they come from Intel. For most processors, we recommend an eviquivlant air cooler to our Allied Sidewinder ARGB model to be used with most CPU models. However, if you are selecting a high-tier Intel or AMD processor, we highly recommended to look into dedicated liquid cooling solutions as they will provide stable, low temperatures for the processor while under load as they are quiet, efficient and better for the longevity for the system. Liquid cooling solutions compatiability is based upon the case design, so this will need to be kept in mind when looking for an available model.
All Allied systems are bundled with a solid-state drive as its main operating system drive, by default. Solid-state drives provide faster loading times and overall improved system performance over a standard mechanical hard drive. The form-factor of this solid-state drive can be either a 2.5” an M.2 NVME drive, with transfer protocols being SATA 3 or M.2 NVME Gen4 and Gen5. SATA 3 is significantly faster than mechanical hard drives, while the NVME protocol is faster again, so if lightning-fast load times and file access is important to you, choose an M.2 NVME drive. For your storage drive(s), this can either be a standard large capacity hard drive for bulk files, videos, etc or additional solid states (2.5”/M.2 NVME) which you could use as a gaming drive or as a scratch disk for video editing, etc.
Overall, we hope our guide has helped you with what parts you’re needing for your new gaming PC setup. With the information you’ve learnt, you should now know to select the correct components to build a PC that matches your requirements We have configurations which allow you to select the parts we’ve mentioned above, so if you would like to check them out then please visit our gaming desktop PC range.
