Best Gaming PC for 2025

Delivering good performance and 4K gaming without a sky-high price, Lenovo's midrange Legion T7i runs quietly at top speeds and looks stylish while doing so -- even without jumping to the more recent RTX 50-class GPUs. 

But even in 2024 we'd have expected more than one USB-C port, especially since lots of gaming accessories have been switching over, and some better dust filtering would be welcome.

It's a decent gaming system and configuration that should last you a while, and there's a cheaper configuration with an RTX 4070 Ti that might also serve you well if you're looking for something reasonable from a major manufacturer.

Our top gaming system recommendation will probably always be from a custom builder, simply because a top-end gaming PC will have a lot of upgrade options and an upgrade-friendly design, in addition to excellent performance. Even most ready-to-ship systems from custom builders have great upgradability because they're built from off-the-shelf parts. Velocity Micro is an almost 30-year veteran in the business, and while it doesn't create the glitziest gaming systems -- for that, you want builders like Maingear, Origin PC, iBuyPower and the like -- it knows how to build a top-flight gaming performer. The Raptor Z95A we tested uses some of the fastest components available (the "A" is for AMD, and there's a Z95 built around Intel CPUs) and has a clean internal layout for easy fiddling and sleek appearance.

The downside: You pay for it, since they're generally more expensive compared to prebuilt PCs from the big players or building one from scratch yourself. We also aren't terribly thrilled by the dearth of front connections -- a common and frustrating issue for many desktops, and extra disappointing given the size of the PC. You can frequently compensate by using a hub for connections that aren't latency sensitive, if necessary.

With enough power for your most demanding games and graphics-heavy generative AI, this Velocity Micro system has our stamp of approval. If you need something with more oomph for CPU-intensive games or AI, you should bump up to a Ryzen 9 or Intel Core Ultra 9 class of processor.

Alienware drew a little further away from its roots in 2024, redesigning its Aurora desktop to look novel and stylish but not as out-of-this-world as it was. That allowed the company to shrink its overlarge footprint as well as introducing tool-free access and parts to what's still a fast and quiet system.

But it's still relatively expensive for its configuration -- and that's before tariffs factor in whenever you decide to buy -- with a quirky, proprietary layout that may make upgrades more expensive or awkward than they might be in other systems. And the new design has unfiltered intakes, which our reviewer thinks might require above-average vigilance for you to keep under control.

Though Alienware has repositioned the Aurora as its "entry" line, you still don't go to Alienware looking for bargains; it's an entry to Alienware, and you should expect to pay a little more to get its novel looks, but it's not a great choice if you want to tinker a lot or live in a dusty environment.

The model we tested has subsequently been refreshed with Core Ultra CPUs and RTX 50-series GPUs and renamed simply "Aurora." I recommend the $2,150 Core Ultra 9 285, RTX 5060 Ti configuration, which is comparably priced and should deliver equivalent performance.

The Omen 35L configuration we tested was overpriced, especially given its somewhat unbalanced match of a midrange Ryzen 7 7700G CPU with higher-end options like 64GB RAM and an RTX 4080 Super GPU. But if you configure it with the memory and GPU matching the level of the CPU -- an RTX 5060 Ti (with a matching upgrade to an 850W power supply), 1TB SSD and 32GB RAM -- it should grant you a pretty nice mainstream 1080p/1440p system for around $1,500. The system has a solid build quality with an uncluttered design visible behind the glass.

It's not the cheapest you'll find for the configuration, but HP's a solid manufacturer. And while it has a reasonable number of connections for gaming, it lacks high-speed connections for data transfer.

Note that we've scored it here for the lower price configuration, since it has a much better price/performance balance than the configuration we reviewed.

If you want to run AAA games on the Mac you don't have a lot of choice: It's either the Mac Mini or the Mac Studio (you need the more powerful GPU that you don't get with the base M4 for decent performance, which leaves out the iMac). I err on the side of the Studio because you can get the M4 Max chip and it has a higher power cooling system than the Mini -- since you can't upgrade the either of the systems, you need to buy as much as you can afford now -- but bumping up the Mini to the M4 Pro may be a solid alternative. A lot of non-AAA games that support the Mac don't need as much graphics power but if you're planning to hold on to the system for a while, you might want to assume you'll need more at some point before you're ready to give it up.

That said, there still aren't a ton of Mac games, despite Apple's best efforts to attract developers. And a lot of the ones that are available tend to be mobile games adapted or emulated, or free-to-play cloud-based games -- none of which require a lot of power. If that's the case, you don't need a gaming system, and a Mini or iMac should suffice.