For those interested in plunging their toes into the waters of PC gaming, but not quite ready to take the plunge, NZXT has a pretty solid offering as part of its new update to its Starter series of prefabricated machines that were first introduced last year. For $ 699 you can buy a solid capable gaming PC with one of NZXT’s sleek look tower boxes, in white or black.
For that money, you get an Intel Core i3 processor and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 graphics card, which the company says is good enough to get you stable 60 frames per second at 1080p on most PC games that have a fresh PC player might want to try, as well Fortnite, League of Legends, of Valorant. (As someone who still uses an Intel i5 / GTX 970 combo, I can attest to how far even a half-decade-old Intel CPU and Nvidia GPU can still take you.)
There are some drawbacks. The processor, for one, is pretty underpowered, and that allows you to play more intense games at higher settings bottleneck. (This is not a Microsoft Flight Simulator-ready rig.) The front end also comes with only 8 GB of RAM, which is good for those above-mentioned free-to-play games designed to run on a wide range of machines, but not free enough to play some newer titles and demanding players for one player without compromise.
But for that price, plus the convenience of having it pre-built and ready to go, this is a pretty solid value. I put together an almost identical machine at PC Part Picker and it came out to about $ 727, mainly by adding extra RAM, because it’s more costly to buy two 8GB sticks instead of just one, like the prebuilt one. NZXT offers. But hey, for a machine you can just plug in and play, which is not bad at all.
If you want to upgrade a bit and still want the convenience of a pre-built NZXT, the company has shifted its standard and pro models from the Starter series to occupy the existing price points of $ 899 and $ 999. The cheaper of those two, which now has the Plus name introduced last year, gets you an Intel i5, a GTX 1660, and twice the memory, while still holding the 512GB SSD. The more expensive one, which now has a new Starter Pro label, gets you the same Intel CPU, a GTX 1660 Ti graphics card, and a 1TB SSD.
Both sound like decent deals, especially if you are looking for a prefabricated one, but at that point it might make more sense to invest in your own list of custom parts and the knowledge it takes to put it together yourself.
