With Blizzard’s arena first person shooter Overwatch steadily growing to be one of the biggest of it’s kind on the e-sports scene, it’s also been rapidly growing in popularity among gamers, overtaking the likes of CS:GO, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds and Battlefield 1 as the games our customers ask us about most on a day to day basis.
So with that in mind we’re going to run down our recommendations for building a custom gaming PC specifically with Overwatch in mind.
Now if you’ve read any of our previous recommendations when it comes to building a custom gaming PC for a specific game, you will know the core components to focus on are the GPU, CPU and RAM when it comes down to performance.
Overwatch is both modest at the entry level but we’re going to focus on hitting 60+ FPS consistently at 1080P under the high graphics presets for this particular recommendation as this is what most of our customers tell us they are looking for.
THE CPU
As long as this doesn’t bottleneck the GPU, the frame rate is largely dependent on the video card. A quad core i5 7400 would be our recommendation but if you were on a tighter budget, an i3 7100 would get you 95% of the way there with minimum sacrifices to performance.
THE RAM
8GB is plenty for the majority of games and adding more RAM that just doesn’t get used, won’t boost your frame rates! The only exceptions might be the larger open world games or some un-optimized early access titles, or if you have a lot of background apps running when your gaming which is typically not advised anyway.
THE GPU (Video Card)
Now this is what does most of the heavy lifting, and for 1080P, high settings. For this a GTX 1050 TI would be our recommendation for those who are happy with approx 60FPS but if you wanted strictly above 60FPS at all times, the GTX 1060 3G would be enough to get you there.
AND EVERYTHING ELSE
For the most part all the other components do not really effect gaming performance. Any motherboard will get the job done, even the entry level H110 series. An SSD storage drive would give you better load times but once you are actually in the game won’t have any discernible effects. A 500w PSU is all you would need if you followed the recommendations above as none of the components are overly power hungry or run overly hot meaning additional fans or big fat CPU coolers would also be unnecessary. All the rest is is up to you, choose a case that suits your budget and aesthetic taste, choose if you need a DVD drive or not and select a WiFi adapter if you need one.
That being said, a cabled Ethernet connection will always be more reliable, faster and have a lower latency than a WiFi network so if it’s at all possible, run a cable!
Figuring out the right balance for you
Here is an approx $1500 Overwatch optimized gaming PC configuration we put together based on the recommendations above.
If you are on a bit of a tighter budget and happy with dialing a couple of the high settings down to mid to get your desired performance here is a $1250 Overwatch ready PC configuration that would get the job done.
Last but not least, on the flip side, if budget was not your main concern and you want to go all out at ULTRA (‘EPIC’) settings / 4K take a look at this Overwatch 4K ready gaming PC configuration here.
Feel free to jump in and make any changes you like or shoot us an email or phone call if you need any further assistance.