What PC do you need? Spec builder

What it gives you — example results

These are the builder's own results for a few picks (desktop, 30% headroom), recalculated every time the site is built, so they change when the requirement data changes. CPUs and graphics cards are one per brand, not ranked against each other. When you pick more than one, each part follows the higher requirement and storage adds up, as in the last example. Storage also includes Windows 11's official minimum of 64 GB and 250 GB for your own files (an assumption).

Made for people who do not know part names

Shopping for a PC usually starts with a wall of CPU and graphics card names. That helps people who can read them, and leaves everyone else asking "so what do I actually buy?". The spec builder turns the question around. Pick what you want to do, and it works backwards from the official requirements to the parts you need.

You get three columns. Minimum is where the software launches and runs. Recommendedis where it runs as the publisher intended. Headroom is the recommended spec plus the margin you choose. For the CPU and graphics card we show one pick per brand. We do not compare brands with each other, so the one listed first is not necessarily faster.

What the headroom is for

Recommended specs describe the current version. Games get heavier with updates, CAD programs with every new release, and many people keep a browser or streaming software open while they play. Headroom is room set aside for that.

At 30% headroom, RAM is raised to the next size you can actually buy: 16 GB recommended becomes 20.8 GB, and since nobody sells that, you get 24 GB. Video memory, storage and core count are raised the same way.

How the CPU and graphics card are picked

We look only at the last few generations of retail product lines and find the parts that thespec checker marks OK for everything you picked. For each brand we show the one with the lowest public rendering measurement (Blender Open Data). Because the builder uses the checker's own rules, putting its pick into the checker gives OK on the CPU and graphics card rows.

For CPUs, among the parts within 10% of the lowest measurement we pick the one with thelowest tier number (the "5" in Core i5, Ultra 5 or Ryzen 5). The same laptop chip measures differently depending on the power limit each laptop maker sets, so a gap of a few percent does not tell you which is lower. Going by the measurement alone put the power-limited Core Ultra 9 288V ahead of a Core i5, which read as if the minimum requirements needed a top-tier chip.

The headroom column takes the part from the recommended column and moves up to the lowestsame-brand part that measures higher by the headroom. Rendering is not the same as gaming, so 30% means "a class that measures 30% higher", not "30% more frames". The checker only compares graphics cards within a brand, so a brand gets no pick when the official requirements name no card from it, or when we have no measurement data for the card they name.

Do not push the headroom too far

Parts get expensive quickly as the headroom rises, and whether you ever use that extra depends on what you do. For light work like League of Legends or 2D drafting, the recommended column is already plenty. If you raise the headroom and the parts do not change, the recommended parts already have that much to spare, and there is no reason to go higher.

We do not say how many years a build will last. Nobody knows how much the next update will ask for. The headroom slider lets you decide how generous to be instead.

Picking several at once

If you pick a game and a CAD program together, each item follows the higher requirement. When the game asks more of the graphics card and the CAD program more of the RAM, the graphics card follows the game and the RAM follows the CAD program. Storage is the exception: it isadded up, because installing both needs room for both.

When the requirements do not name a part

Many CAD programs describe the CPU only as "3 GHz or faster". When we have set a reference part that clearly meets that wording, we compare against it. Otherwise we do not invent a part: we say we could not find one and show the official wording. Once you settle on a build, the link under each column opens it in the spec checker so you can see the verdict part by part.