Build Yourself A PS5 Pro Quality Gaming PC That Looks Great In Your Living Room

Look, we know it's tempting if you're a gamer with the requisite $700, but please don't buy a PS5 Pro. It's an awful lot of money for a toy that can only play the games that Sony says you can play. It doesn't even have the excuse of being a really high-quality Blu-Ray player like the PS3 did—there's no disc drive at all, in fact.

Speaking as gaming and hardware enthusiasts, there are so many ways in which gaming on PS5 is just a worse experience than gaming on PC. The PS5 barely even has working VRR, with no support for Low Framerate Compensation—which you'll need in many games. It's just a worse experience for gaming, and that's before we even talk about the other things a PC can do. The tiny bit of convenience that you gain is simply not worth the sacrifices that you have to make in terms of customization and versatility.

Instead, let's build a gaming PC. To be clear, you can't match the gaming prowess of the PS5 Pro for the same price (yet), but that's a given when we're comparing a built-for-purpose game console against a general-purpose PC built from off-the-shelf parts at retail pricing. However, you can get a lot closer than you think, and the resulting system is going to have a lot of advantages over the PS5. We dug up parts for two AMD systems and two Intel machines, with a smattering of motherboards, video cards, and other components. Check 'em out!


For AMD CPUs, we've selected the AMD Ryzen 7 5700X3D and the AMD Ryzen 5 7600. These parts are both affordable and offer plenty of CPU horsepower for gaming workloads. The Ryzen 7 5700X3D will have an advantage in games that are sensitive to memory latency thanks to its big 96MB of L3 cache, but the Ryzen 5 7600's advanced Zen 4 CPU cores and higher clock rates will help in games that prefer those qualities. Either way, they're a lot faster than the old Zen 2 cores in the PS5 Pro.


For the Intel side of things, we've picked a pair of Core i5 processors. Core i5s have long been synonymous with "best gaming value" and both of these parts have their merits for a gaming system. The Core i5-12600K offers you six Golden Cove P-cores and four Gracemont E-cores for a total of 16 threads -- an awesome value for just $149. Meanwhile, the Core i5-13600K will generally offer the best overall performance on this page, but it's also the most expensive CPU on this list by a fair margin.


For cooling, we've selected a couple of Thermalright apparatuses, both from the "Assassin" lineup, so-named for its efficient and quiet cooling performance. The Assassin X 120 is a single-tower cooler that will suffice for everything here with the possible exception of the Core i5-13600K if you start running multi-core workloads on it. In that case, we suggest the dual-tower Peerless Assassin 120 SE instead. However, the Ryzen 5 7600 actually comes with a stock cooler that is completely serviceable for that CPU.


We've got one motherboard each for Socket AM4 and Socket AM5. The Gigabyte B550M-K is a recent release that supports the Ryzen 7 5700X3D out of the box. It boasts PCIe 4.0 for both graphics and storage, which isn't a given on budget AM4 motherboards. It also has a second M.2 socket for additional storage. Meanwhile, the ASRock B650M-H/M.2+ is a similarly trim Socket AM5 motherboard, but it does support PCIe 5.0 on one of its two M.2 sockets, as well as a USB 3.2 Type-C port in the back.


On the Intel side of things, we have another pair of boards depending on whether you'd like to use DDR4 or DDR5 memory. The MSI PRO B760M-P gets the job done with dual PCIe 4.0 M.2 sockets and 7.1-channel audio, while the ASRock B760M PG Riptide board is a little more upmarket, with RGB LED accents, 2.5-Gigabit Ethernet, and a third M.2 socket so that you can add a Wi-Fi card if you like. It does miss the VGA and dual PS/2 ports of the MSI board, though, if that's your thing.


The PS5 Pro only has the same 16GB of unified memory as the base PS5, but given that PCs run a full operating system and that you're likely to be multi-tasking, we went ahead for 32GB. We picked out a pair of memory kits; one each for DDR4 and DDR5 platforms. Both are low-latency kits, although the DDR5 set is literally twice as fast as the DDR4 set in terms of transfer rate. So it goes with DDR4 vs. DDR5, but the DDR5 modules are actually lower latency, too. We strongly recommend splashing out for the DDR5 kit if you're building around that Core i5-12600K, by the way; the smaller cache on Alder Lake means it gains more from faster RAM than Raptor Lake does.


Sony's new box comes with 2TB of fast solid-state storage, so we chose a pair of potent PCIe SSDs for your new gaming rig. Both are PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs with 2TB of capacity, and it basically comes down to which brand you want. The Orico drive is a little cheaper, but Orico hasn't been in the storage game as long as Addlink, so some folks may prefer the established brand. Both drives claim over 7000 MB/second on sequential transfers, so we're sure either is more than fast enough.


Obviously, the graphics card is going to be the most expensive component in a gaming rig, and indeed, if you want to match the GPU grunt of the PS5 Pro, you're going to need a pretty decent GPU. Based purely on its specifications, it looks like the Radeon RX 7800 XT is probably the closest match, so we went with that. However, Sony's talked up a big game about upscaling and ray-tracing—qualities PC gamers usually associate more with NVIDIA. With that in mind, we also picked out a perfectly-priced GeForce RTX 4070 card if you prefer.


If you don't mind buying last-gen hardware, you can snag an amazing deal by picking up one of these Radeon RX 6000 boards that are still floating around. The Radeon RX 6950 XT competes well with the GeForce RTX 3090, and it was priced at $1099 when it came out. Meanwhile, the Radeon RX 6800 XT is a workhorse with enough grunt that it can still push most 4K games to around 60 FPS, or high framerates in 1440p. Both of these cards are comically discounted, but do be aware of their relatively limited ray-tracing capabilities—if that matters to you.


Two options for chassis, as well. We went with Micro-ATX as it offers a great balance of compact dimensions and expansive performance, and we didn't want our gaming PC to be a towering monolith compared to the svelte PS5 Pro. The Lian-Li A3-mATX was designed in cooperation with DanCase, and it looks the part. It'll be a more challenging build than the spacious MasterBox, but the Q300L has its own charms, like its transparent side window and magnetic dust filters. Both are great cases for the money, and we recommend either for your build.


Your choice of power supplies, too. The Enermax Revolution is ready to go for any combination of the parts, and it'll even fit in the tiny Lian-Li case above just fine, so you don't have to feel obligated to spend out for the expensive Thermaltake PSU. However, that Toughpower unit is more efficient, more capable, and quite a bit smaller physically. Enermax warranties its unit for 10 years; you get 7 years on the smaller Thermaltake. Either one makes a great choice, but if you're eyeing that little Lian-Li box, the Toughpower will be an easier build.


Finally, we wanted to wrap up with a couple of killer OLED gaming monitor deals we found. Neither of these displays is cheap, but you get what you pay for. The KTC is a more typical flat gaming monitor with a 240-Hz refresh rate, a USB hub including Type-C input with 65W charging, and HDR10 support. Meanwhile, the MSI monitor is a 21:9 ultrawide with VESA TrueBlack400 HDR certification and a glossy screen surface. Either one will give you an unbelievable visual experience in combination with the rest of the hardware in this post.

Setting aside the OLED monitors for the time being, our final prices for these builds ranged from about $1050 for the Ryzen 7 5700X3D system with the Radeon RX 6800 XT all the way up to about $1350 for the machine with the Core i5-13600K and GeForce RTX 4070 GPU. The extra money largely goes toward the faster CPU and GPU, but the gaming experience across all of these parts will be broadly similar.

In exchange for an extra chunk of cash over the PS5 Pro's cost, you get a full-on gaming PC. We probably don't need to proselytize to our audience, but it bears repeating: there are tens of thousands of games available on the PC, and that's just talking about native PC games—we don't even need to get into the realm of emulation. You can use whatever controller you want, you can fix buggy games with mods, you can do your schoolwork or work from home, and so on, and so forth. It may be more money, but it's cash well spent.

If you spot any hardware deals that we didn't, point them out for us in the comments below. We're always keen to see killer values on PC parts.