I have a Steam Deck that is connected to my TV 90% of the time. I’d like to replace this with a PC that has maybe slightly higher specs than the Steam Deck. Are there any pre-built solutions that are really affordable?
If you’re looking for the best bang for your buck nothing beats assembling it yourself. A pre-built is always much more expensive to pay for assembly.
That’s not “out of the box” though
Define affordable, and also what you want out of it, 4K? High framerates? 1080p?
In general I’d say, unless you’re willing and able to spend 7-800+, the steam deck is giving you the best value to performance for “out of the box”/prebuilt.
If you want something better with any hope of approaching the price point of a steam deck you’ll have to build your own PC
You’ll need to define a budget for “really affordable”, but it’s going to be hard regardless to match the price performance of the deck. Is $700-$1000 affordable? That’s probably the ball park for a mid-tier prebuilt. You maybe be able to get lower with an Intel Arc option (HP has some of these at $600)
Yeah, you have to define affordable. For some, that’s $300, others $3000.
Quick answer is just go to pcpartpicker.com and look at other people’s builds for your budget.
Bang for your buck… Just go midrange AMD cpu, don’t worry about core count. Most games aren’t cpu bottlenecked like they used to be.
Motherboard, just grab a reliable brand, don’t overspend.
16gb ram, speed won’t matter much and it’s not that much more than 8gb.
1tb m.2 ssd drive. You can always get more storage later
Cheap case, good quality power supply probably 600 watt would get 90% use cases.
Don’t forget to budget for windows or use Linux if you go that path, your monitor, mouse/keyboard, speakers or headphones.
After all that, than buy the highest end graphics card left in your budget.
