The 6 Best Prebuilt PCs for Gaming & Streaming

What’s the difference between casual computer owners and enthusiasts? This isn’t the opening to a bad joke, it’s a genuine question. For casual types, a boxy desktop tower computer that handles the basics is enough. They write a document or two, update spreadsheets, keep track of home finances, then maybe have time for a game that won’t consume a lot of resources. Something like The Sims 2, let’s say. With enthusiasts, it’s a whole other story.

The streamer segment of the enthusiast market uses HD and 4K, which requires a decent capture card and software. Something like OBS Studio, for software screen recording, and Da Vinci Resolve—and there’s a powerful free version— are good options, but video workloads need RAM and processing power, plenty of processing power. Adobe products are exactly the same, if not worse. Video production can’t be done, not smoothly, without at least a mid-tier CPU and a discrete GPU. Unfortunately, a rig like this isn’t cheap. A big power supply is going to enter the buying formula as well, then a decent motherboard, cooling fans, and so on.

For gaming, it’s not that different. Modern titles use AAA graphics and higher amounts of VRAM. And this is on top of the already significant amounts of ordinary RAM. As if that’s not already a lot to absorb, all of these parts get hot when pushed hard—and games push very hard when they’re maxed out. There are environments to render, characters to load and immerse yourself in, stories to tell, quests to fulfill, complex visual effects to wrap around the scene, and on and on. Gaming PCs must handle everything in a virtual world without skipping a beat.

In short, taking all of the above into account, the best prebuilt PC for gaming and streaming needs to be a powerhouse—built to juggle the demands of high-quality gaming, professional-level streaming, and everything in between.

How to Buy a Powerhouse Prebuilt PC

It’s not that we’re a demanding team of tech reviewers, but we do want a Windows computer that won’t melt under the strain. We’ve got reviewers who rely on our game streamers for media, and there are a few of the latest graphically intense games in need of ‘testing’ after office hours; the machines we select can’t go into meltdown when software demands more speed, nor can it howl like a vintage vacuum cleaner, all fans maxed out.

Say hello to a quick guide to picking the best prebuilt PC for gaming and streaming. Use it as a quick reference to avoiding a GPU throttling dud.

• Research GPUs, both AMD and Nvidia. Intel Arc is the third option, but it’s still a developing technology. The amount of video RAM (VRAM) is also essential. Looking at new cards, 8GB of VRAM is the new minimum. 12GB or more is recommended.
• All memory (RAM) modules are not created equal. Buy 16GB or 32GB RAM to prevent memory bottlenecks, but know that different modules work at different speeds.
• An attractive chassis is all very well, but don’t prioritize aesthetics over bleeding edge supplemental features. If you have a beast of a motherboard and GPU, a reliable power supply will be needed to supply plenty of juice. And don’t forget the cooling fans, too.
• Video production workloads are slow enough when 4K footage is being processed. Don’t sabotage your efforts by relying on slow storage technology. Fit a fast SSD.
• Connectivity options should be biased towards the latest future-proof streaming technologies, including WiFi 6 or 7, a PCIe 4.0 or 5.0 high-bandwidth motherboard, and an easy-access collection of the latest and greatest physical ports, which must include standard USB 3.0 and USB-C.
• Outer system accessories to buy for your new setup include a gaming mouse and keyboard, a 1080p or 4K camera, and a broadcast-quality microphone. Inside the computer, the installation of a capture card, like the Elgato 4K60 Pro or the AverMedia Live Gamer 4K takes care of recorded player video and audio.
• Buy a prebuilt PC with a next-generation CPU from Intel or AMD. Recent generations have integrated hardware extras, such as h.265 video encoding. Pay attention to core numbers, clock frequencies, and user-friendly capabilities.
• Although not heavily covered in this post, don’t forget a monitor with a high refresh rate and a low response time. A high resolution, to partner with 1080p or 4K gaming, is also advised.

With several hard-core gamers and one game streamer among our staff, we consider the above guidelines as written-in-stone essential. Sticking with popular Intel and nVidia pairings, don’t be caught out by a rig that doesn’t have at least a 30XX or 40XX series RTX GPU, plus a 13th or 14th generation i7 CPU. Armed with all of this, it’s time to go shopping.

Best Prebuilt PC Recommendations for Gaming & Streaming

Lenovo Legion Tower 7i Gen 8 Prebuilt PC

We’ve done the heavy lifting so that you can focus on your podcast or gaming sessions without a shred of doubt cutting into the fun. The Lenovo Legion 7i Gen 8 prebuilt PC is a tall black chassis with a glass-panelled side and signature angular-mesh front, giving it a sleek, futuristic appearance. The fans on the case use RGB lighting, a feature we’ve seen on many of the best prebuilt PCs for gaming and streaming we’ve tested, but our review team was more interested in 60 FPS—and above—gaming.  

With an nVidia GeForce RTX 4080 16GB graphics processor (GPU) punching its way on to our list, this is clearly a heavyweight gamer computer. The 16GB GDDR6X super-fast memory integrated into the discrete card indicates a massive amount of VRAM, enough to render large and immersive virtual gaming realms without stutter. The 14th gen i9 CPU ably complements the graphics power, then there’s a 32GB DDR5 memory module speeding data around the motherboard.

PC enthusiast lowdown – There’s very little compromises and zero shortcuts taken in this build. The 850W power supply is big but necessary, injecting plenty of juice into this powerhouse rig. For live streamers, we liked the 1TB SSD and snappy performance from the WiFi 6E wireless. Regular USB 3.2 connectors abound, both front and rear, and there’s a single USB-C port for lightning fast data backups.

Knowing how much heat can be kicked out of the Lenovo Legion Tower 7i, the desktop build adds liquid cooling. To take advantage of fine tuning, we downloaded and installed Lenovo Vantage, a performance optimizing tool with inbuilt fan monitoring and adjusting capabilities. Runs on Windows Home, with the option to upgrade to Windows 11 Pro.

Alienware Aurora R16 Prebuilt PC

Let’s face it, every gamer has heard of Alienware. When that little extraterrestrial head is emblazoned on a computer, you’re potentially looking at the best prebuilt PC for gaming and streaming available. Just like their previous high-performance computers, the Alienware Aurora R16 upholds this legacy, delivering a 500W multipurpose desktop that sets the bar for others to beat. It’s the kind of machine that can run the most graphically demanding games at ultra settings with zero effort.

Our tester plugged in our Samsung Odyssey G70A 4K monitor into the back of the Alienware Aurora R16, in preparation for working out its gaming and streaming muscles. The middle specced system roared to life, its nVidia GeForce RTX 4070 taking advantage of the speed of the 1TB SSD buried deep within its elegant black case. A dim glass panel on the side showcased the computer’s state-of-the-art nVidia GPU, but the Intel Core i7 14700F stayed safely concealed, and cooled, behind a large 240mm liquid cooling heat exchanger, as illuminated by the cool blue glow of a large rear fan’s neon-like lighting.

PC enthusiast lowdown – Equipped with 32GB of DDR5 memory, and solid state storage, the entire rig stayed silent. Cool air entering through a deep, edge-illuminated vent on the front of the chassis. It channelled over the motherboard and out through an array of chassis-mounted hexagonal apertures, working in concert with the liquid cooling system to keep components chilled. Streamers aren’t ignored, either, with WiFi 6E bringing the wireless speed needed for smooth, uninterrupted broadcasts.

Keeping gamecasters and non-recording gamers happy, the RTX 4070 has oodles of VRAM, 12GB to be precise. Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 played well on ultra settings without annoying glitching. Moving outside the chassis,a modern array of front and rear mounted ports greeted our game-addled eyes, with USB-C and USB 3.2 connectivity dominating. Windows 11 Home is the default OS on this system. More of an everyman system manager, though, Alienware Command Center should be downloaded to monitor and optimize hardware profiles. 

HP Omen 45L Prebuilt Gaming Desktop

The HP Omen 45L boasts nVidia GeForce RTX 4060 Ti game frame-accelerating performance and a 14th gen i7 CPU that boosts to 5.6GHz when called upon for AAA gameplay smoothness at 4K. The only thing our reviewer found a little perplexing was the lower 8GB VRAM and the 16GB DDR5 RAM module. We’d expect more VRAM and at least a 32GB RAM spec. No matter, upgrades are easy to carry out thanks to the one-button, no-tool chassis side release mechanism.

It was drafty under the lead reviewers desk, with three 120mm front-mounted fans sucking in air, spinning up an attractive aRGB light show in the process. The ubiquitous transparent side panel on the tall black chassis showed good cable management. Omen Light Studio did a fine job of illuminating the HP Omen’s inner workings, which, remarkably enough, were being powered by an 800W PSU. That’s a lot of power, but the i7-14700K Intel CPU and two Kingston Fury 8GB memory modules eat through power, although not as fast as the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti does.

PC enthusiast lowdown – Other important specs that’ll tilt a buyer towards pulling out their wallet include a 1TB SSD, 2×2 WiFi 6, and Bluetooth 5.3. All three of these specs will benefit live streamers, with terabyte fast storage sucking in large RAW video files while the Intel i7 encodes them into smaller h.265 media. For gamers, especially considering the size of modern games, the 1TB device might rapidly fill to capacity, so it’s worth opting instead for a 2TB model.

Finally, we installed the Omen Gaming Hub. It’s temperature monitoring dials indicated good cooling, meaning we’d picked a good spot under the desk to place our loaner prebuilt machine. CPU temperatures hung around 58°C while the GPU temp sat at or around 66°C. Next, we downloaded 3Dmark for some benchmarking fun. All of the other desktops on this best prebuilt PC for gaming and streaming applications had similarly passed through a test on 3Dmark. The Time Spy demo looked particularly gorgeous on the machine, again rendered on our office Samsung Odyssey G70A, with system added DTS:X audio entertaining our gamer’s ears.    

CyberPowerPC Gaming PC Master Prebuilt

If you like open surfaces, the CyberPowerPC Gaming PC Master might not be your jam. It’s an AMD heavy-hitter powered by a Ryzen 7 9800X3D. The 8 core, 4.7GHz CPU is as powerful as an Intel i7 processor, and there’s every chance it’ll outperform a similarly specced Intel chip in some applications and games. As for the GPU, no change there, it’s still an nVidia GeForce RTX. In this model, we were looking at a 4070 Ti Super, equipped with GDDR6X 12GB of vram. Audio, courtesy of Asus, was 7.1 surround.

As hinted at, the chassis is loaded with cooling fans. They’re of the RGB-lit variety, and although the configuration can vary, we were seeing two 120mm fans on the front and another 120mm aRGB fan on the rear panel, all clearly seen through the tempered glass side panel. By the way, this was the Eclipse P418R mid-tower ATC chassis. It offers liquid cooling via a 240mm front radiator. Further cooling the components, the case is made of steel. As for ports, they’re conveniently located at the front-top of the chassis, so there’s no need for streamers to hunt around under a desk with their camera or mic cables.

PC enthusiast lowdown – Busying ourselves with USB-C connections, putting the games away for another day, our office streamer connected camera and mic, ready for a 4K video podcast. The Windows 11 Home OS felt snappy, the ASUS Prime B650-M-A AX6 II AM5 motherboard, built for WiFi 6 and 1Gbe wired ethernet, performed flawlessly, loading and editing video, encoding and decoding, saving the results on the fast 2TB PCIe Gen4 SSD. Even better, 32GB of DDR5 RAM hardware prevented buildups of Windows app slowdown, keeping video workloads flowing.

Never glitching, the CyberPowerPC Gaming PC Master powers its way into our best prebuilt PC for gaming and streaming list, using AMD innards in place of an Intel CPU. There’s very little between them, although driver downloads will inevitably vary. On top of that, there’s every chance of a significant discount when using AMD hardware. For gamers and live streamers who are concerned, though, nvidia still rules the roost, keeping game environments on ultra and HD recordings at a non-stuttering 4K.

Corsair Vengeance i7200 Streaming PC

An AIO (All-In-One) gaming and streaming PC is needed to give our review a little more credibility. That’s where the Corsair Vengeance i7200 comes in as a machine targeted at streamers first, gamers second. Just to double check that statement, we read through the system specifications a second time. No doubt about it, the Vengeance i7200 features an Elgato 4K60 video capture card. It’s this component that transforms a regular gaming tower into a game capturing powerhouse. It’s even ridiculously simple to use; an HDMI connector is labelled IN, then the second port, another HDMI, is labelled OUT.

The Corsair name is recognized by all computer users; they make premium memory modules. Not surprisingly then, the Corsair Vengeance i7200 is fitted with a 16GB module of Pro DDR4 rated at 3200MHz. RGB flair is implemented too, as managed by Corsair iCUE software. Expect to manage under-tempered-glass flair and all four SP120 RGB Pro cooling fans with this app. Incidentally, another Corsair device, this time their 1TB NVME SSD, pulled in streaming footage when high-resolution games got crowded with action, instantly storing the UltraHD clips.

PC enthusiast lowdown – This is another liquid-cooled system built from the ground up with the ever-popular MSI Z490-A PRO motherboard. It paired well with the Elgato 4K60, but we felt that we’d done the system a disservice by not using a better camera. To fix this issue, we hooked up a Sony Mirrorless Alpha ZV-E10, a camera that provided oversampled 4K for our face overlay. Now our audience could watch us play while our reviewers’ handsome features smushed up in an on screen overlay in deep concentration.

With an HDMI out so that we could connect a second monitor and get our editing groove on, this prebuilt desktop is well positioned to take the lead in our review. The Intel CPU syncs seamlessly with an nVidia Geforce RTX 3070, providing a decent speed bump. On the downside, however, the Intel processor is 10th generation and the GPU is a 3000 series. Closing up the review, the chassis cooling puts on a cool light show, USB connectivity is rated high, WiFi 6 is there, and the prebuilt desktop comes preinstalled with Windows.

MSI Vision Elite RS 14th Gen Prebuilt Gaming PC

The Pro Z790 motherboard buried deep inside the heavily glass and black influenced MSI Vision Elite RS 14th prebuilt gaming PC supports all kinds of advanced technologies. The computer games like the proverbial bat out of hell, allows for the installation of two m.2 SSDs, and connects all buses via blazing fast gen 5 PCIe. Keeping everything copacetic, motherboard components are encased in heatsinks, channeling parts-damaging thermal energies away from hardworking gaming components.

Building on top of the MSI motherboard, the Vision Elite we loaned boasted a top-of-the-line 24-core Intel i9-14900KF processor and an nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Super—a monster GPU with 16GB of VRAM and independent cooling fans—that can take any AAA gaming title thrown at it. More for streamers, perhaps after installing a capture card in the panoramic tempered glass tower, a 2TB NVMe SSD is on hand to store never-to-be-forgotten player streaming moments. Use it to capture entire walkthroughs or a live gaming weekend over a Twitch account. We’ve seen  some gameplay streams record super-detailed tutorials on rigs like this, using all 64GB of DDR5 RGB fitted RAM as throughput maximizing performance fuel. Retro games, off of a classic console, worked every bit as well on this setup as modern game titles.

PC enthusiast lowdown – Staffers quickly became besotted by the 270° wraparound tempered glass and deep black finish encasing the MSI gaming tower. It offered stable WiFi 7 and 2.5 Gigabit ethernet. We envision it being used in multi-monitor setups and networked systems, Twitch streaming 4K games footage smoothly between multiple systems for editing and uploading. If things do get uncomfortably hot inside, the heatsinks and cooling fans are bolstered by liquid RGB cooling; the machine basically looks good, stays cool, and performs its game streaming role with buttery smoothness.

Because the 270° wraparound tempered glass is displaying all of that RGB illuminated magic, the front port group has been shifted sideways. It was found close to the right knee of our tester, crowded with type A and C USB connectors,  and that’s where a player will connect their headsets for a casting event. As with all of the other systems in this best prebuilt PC for gaming and streaming review, an additional ports panel is located on the rear of the tower. As for audio performance, MSI had us covered in the form of Audio Boost 5, complete with a dedicated headphone amplifier.

Includes Windows 11 Pro, plenty of spare PCIe expansion slots, and an included MSI mouse and gaming keyboard as bonus extras.

Level Up Your Prebuilt PC Game

None of these systems are going to go easy on electrical power, not with some of them using 1000W PSUs. But that’s the price of keeping up with the gaming Joneses. We can’t even say for sure whether this is the end of your spending spree. You’ll need streaming software; save money by downloading OBS Studio. Another popular option is Streamlabs, which has a paid ultra version. The free edition might be all you ever need, though, casting gameplay to Twitch or YouTube.

Streaming games from a console? Are you a fan of retro titles? Keep the above software, but add a capture card and a good webcam to your setup. This isn’t an affordable solution as it sounds. Capture cards—including the Elgato and Avermedia— need to be purchased and installed. Also, audiences on twitch and YouTube already have their favorite casters bookmarked. To make any impact on these competitive platforms, you’ll need to cast in HD or preferably in 4K. Expect to add a decent webcam in order to accommodate that requirement.

After a tester conference and a few more benchmarking efforts performed by an unlocked version of 3Dmark and Cinebench, we felt ourselves leaning towards the MSI Vision Elite RS 14th prebuilt tower. Its premium components never seemed to overheat, and there was plenty of expansion space for future upgrades. The Corsair Vengeance rig was another tempting proposition, especially considering the already installed Elgato capture card.

Wrapping up, it was fun putting all of these rigs through their paces. AMD systems are certainly becoming competitive, priced to sell and built to burn through games. Intel processors, with their mature drivers and proven multi-threading technology, still have the slightest of edges, and they have that stellar reputation in the gaming community, too. Anyway, whatever you decide, any of the rigs in this best prebuilt PC for gaming and streaming review can handle the workload, turning your RGB illuminated gaming weekends into perfectly captured streams, ready for immortalization on a popular casting platform.