The overlooked parts that still build a great 1080p gaming PC

The advice you find about building a gaming PC is mostly written for a machine nobody in this article needs. It assumes 1440p, high refresh rates, and a graphics card that costs more than the rest of the build.

Most people do not play those games. They play Fortnite, Minecraft, CS2, Rocket League and Valorant, at 1080p, and the hardware that runs all of those comfortably has been sitting unwanted in the used market for years.

What does 1080p gaming actually require?

Start from the games rather than from a budget.

Fortnite is scalable to an almost absurd degree. Performance mode strips the renderer back so far that it runs on office hardware, and even on standard DirectX 11 settings a card from 2016 will hold a playable frame rate at 1080p.

Minecraft barely cares about your graphics card at all. Java Edition is bound by single-threaded CPU performance and by RAM, which is why a machine with a fast older CPU often beats a newer one with a weaker core.

CS2 wants CPU and frames, not visual fidelity. Competitive players turn settings down deliberately. A mid-range card from three generations ago pushes well past the refresh rate of the monitor most people own.

The common thread is that none of these are graphics card bound at 1080p in the way that a recent AAA release is. The parts that fail these games are old four-thread CPUs, 8GB of RAM, and mechanical hard drives, not old GPUs.

Which graphics cards are the bargains?

The used GPU market prices on desirability, and desirability tracks whatever reviewers are currently benchmarking. That leaves a band of cards that are perfectly good and quietly ignored.

RX 580 8GB. The default answer, and still the right one. Eight gigabytes of VRAM was generous when it launched and it is the reason the card aged better than its contemporaries. Buy the 8GB model specifically. The 4GB version exists, sells for barely less, and is a meaningfully worse card.

GTX 1070 and GTX 1080. More performance than the RX 580 and often not much more money, because Pascal has fallen out of fashion. The 1070’s 8GB is the sweet spot here.

RX 5700 and 5700 XT. These were poorly received at launch because of driver problems that were fixed years ago. The reputation stuck, the price never fully recovered, and the performance is a clear step above the RX 580.

GTX 980 and 980 Ti. Fast for their age, and the caveat is VRAM. Four gigabytes on the 980 is now the binding constraint, and it will bite in newer Fortnite seasons before raw performance does. The 980 Ti’s 6GB ages better. Consider these when the price is genuinely low, not as a first choice.

Two honest warnings on the older Nvidia and AMD cards. Both vendors have moved these generations onto legacy driver support, so you are no longer getting game-ready driver updates for new releases. And neither Polaris nor Maxwell supports the modern upscalers that keep newer budget cards viable. They work today for the games in question. They are not a five-year plan.

Which CPUs are still fine?

Here is where the Windows 11 problem bends the whole market, so it is worth splitting the answer.

Genuinely overlooked and still capable: the i7-4770 and i7-4790 remain strong in Minecraft and adequate in Fortnite, because four fast cores with hyperthreading was a sensible configuration for a long time. Ryzen 5 1600 and 2600 chips are cheap for their six cores. Older Xeons in workstation boxes go for very little.

The value sweet spot: Intel 8th and 9th generation, specifically the i5-8400, i5-8500, i5-9400F and i7-8700. Six real cores, plenty for everything discussed here, and, critically, on Microsoft’s supported CPU list. On the AMD side, the Ryzen 5 2600 and 3600 clear the same bar.

That second group is the answer to most people’s problem. It is old enough to be cheap and new enough to be officially supported, which is a narrow and very useful window.

Why did Windows 11 make so much hardware cheap?

Windows 11 requires TPM 2.0, Secure Boot, and a CPU from Microsoft’s approved list, which begins at Intel’s 8th generation and AMD’s Ryzen 2000 series. Everything before that line is officially unsupported, no matter how well it performs.

Windows 10 reached end of support in October 2025. The practical effect was that a large amount of perfectly functional hardware became, in the eyes of the market, obsolete overnight. Not slower. Just unsupported.

For a buyer, this is the single best thing that has happened to used part prices in a decade. An i7-4770 system is not worse at Minecraft than it was in 2024. It is just worth a fraction of what it was.

How do you get around the Windows 11 blocker?

There are four routes, in rough order of how much hassle they involve.

Buy on the supported side of the line. The simplest answer. An i5-8400 or Ryzen 5 2600 platform costs a little more than a Haswell one and removes the problem entirely. If you want a machine you will not have to think about, pay the small premium.

Bypass the check. Write the Windows 11 installer with Rufus and tick the option to remove the TPM, Secure Boot and CPU requirements. The install then proceeds normally on almost any 64-bit machine with 4GB of RAM. Microsoft states that unsupported installations are not entitled to updates, and reserves the right to stop delivering them. In practice they have continued to arrive. Go in knowing you are relying on a position Microsoft has not committed to.

Extended Security Updates. Microsoft’s consumer ESU programme extends Windows 10 security updates past the end-of-support date for a limited period, free if you link a Microsoft account and sync settings. It is a bridge rather than a destination, and the bridge has an end. Check the current cut-off before you plan around it.

Linux. For a lot of these builds this is the best answer rather than the consolation prize. Bazzite and Linux Mint both install cleanly on old hardware, and Proton runs CS2, Minecraft, Rocket League and the large majority of single-player games well, sometimes better than Windows does on the same machine.

The catch is anti-cheat. Fortnite does not run on Linux, because Epic has chosen not to enable Easy Anti-Cheat’s Linux support, and several other competitive shooters have made the same call. Check every game you actually play against ProtonDB before committing, and if Fortnite is on that list, this route is closed.

What about RAM, storage and the power supply?

RAM. 16GB of DDR4 is the target, in two sticks rather than one. Do not assume DDR4 is still the cheap component it was, because production has been winding down and prices have moved the wrong way. Price it before you build around it, and buy the pair together rather than trying to match a stick later.

Storage. A SATA SSD is a bigger upgrade to how the machine feels than any other part on this list, and at 1080p in these games the difference between SATA and NVMe is close to nothing. Never put a mechanical drive in as the boot disk. If you buy a used SSD, check its SMART data for total bytes written before you trust it.

Power supply. Buy this new. It is the one component where used is a bad trade: capacitors age whether the machine was used or not, a failing unit can take other parts with it, and a decent new 550W or 650W unit from a known brand costs less than most of the graphics cards above. A no-name PSU that came free with a case is not a saving.

Where should you look for these parts?

The cheapest supported-CPU machines are not sold as gaming PCs at all. They are ex-corporate small form factor desktops, the Dell OptiPlex, HP EliteDesk and Lenovo ThinkCentre families, which come off lease in volume with 8th and 9th generation i5s and sell for very little.

Two things to check before buying one. Small form factor cases fit only low-profile, half-height cards, which rules out most of the GPUs listed here. And many use proprietary power supplies and motherboard layouts that make upgrading awkward. Look for the full size tower variants, usually badged as “MT” or “Tower”, which take a standard card and a standard PSU.

Beyond that, the usual advice applies: price from completed and sold listings rather than asking prices, and take a handful of sales rather than one. The method for valuing a used machine works just as well in reverse when you are the one buying.

A build that answers the question

Putting it together, the machine that plays everything in the opening paragraph at 1080p looks roughly like this: an ex-corporate tower with an i5-8400 or i5-9400F, 16GB of DDR4 in two sticks, an 8GB RX 580 or GTX 1070, a SATA SSD, and a new 550W power supply.

Nothing in that list is exciting, and that is the point. Every part is cheap specifically because it stopped being interesting to people who write about hardware, not because it stopped working.

Doing this more than once

If you are buying parts like these regularly, whether to build for yourself, for family, or to resell, the hard part stops being which parts to buy and becomes keeping track of what you paid for them.

Parts bought cheap, held for a few weeks, and combined into a build get very difficult to account for. Which card went into which machine, what the total cost was, and whether the build actually made money once you count the PSU you bought new.

That is what PartPlanner is for: parts, builds, costs and sale outcomes in one place, so you know what a build cost you rather than estimating it afterwards.