It’s not hard to imagine laptops as the de-facto computer for students. After all, why not use a computer that you can haul around to all of your classes, right? Well, if you do most of your work at a desk, whether it’s in a dorm or at home, prebuilt PCs offer better performance, and are great for creating a productive environment for you to focus on your schoolwork. Pop a good graphics cards in there, and you can start playing the best PC games the minute you’re done with your homework.
TL;DR – These Are the Best Prebuilt PCs for Students:
For a lot of people, having a computer you can haul around to all of your classes is super important, and could even be required depending on your courseload. But students aren't a monolith, and with the rise of online coursework, you could be doing a lot of assignments at home. If portability isn't a concern, a desktop offers huge advantages to performance. Because system manufacturers don't need to factor in battery life, you get the full performance your components are capable of (at least most of the time).
It's definitely a trade-off, but it could be worth it, especially if you're serious about playing games in your downtime and don't want to settle for the weaker performance that laptops offer.
Best Prebuilt PC for Students
Best All-in-One PC for Students
Best Budget Prebuilt PC for Students
Best Prebuilt Gaming PC for Students
If you’re in school, it’s unlikely that you have thousands of dollars to spend on meaningless fluff, so when setting out to buy a prebuilt PC, you need to make sure you get what you pay for. A lot of features like RGB lighting and liquid cooling, while nice to have, don’t really make the computer any better at actually getting work done. You need to have a budget set ahead of time, but what’s perhaps most important is knowing where that money is going to go.
For most people an Intel Core i5 or Core i7 (or the AMD Ryzen equivalent) is going to be more than enough. Some folks in STEM fields might be able to use the extra power you can squeeze out of a Ryzen 9 or Core i9 chip, but even then, the Core i7 is going to save you hundreds of dollars, which may be more important.
Picking the right amount of RAM is crucial, though. Because of how heavy Windows 11 has grown in recent years, 16GB of memory is the minimum you should aim for. That way, your computer won’t lock up when you open 50 Chrome tabs in a mad studying session. Again, if you’re a STEM student, or you’re doing something involving a lot of video editing, 32GB of RAM should be your target.
In 2025, you need an SSD, period. The days of spinning drives as system drives are over. As for the capacity, though, it really depends on how you use your computer. If you’re saving most of your work in the cloud, you can probably get away with a 512GB system drive and be fine. However, if you need to store most of your data locally, a 1TB drive isn’t going to break the bank.
As for your graphics card, it’s a luxury when you’re in school. Unless you’re working with large data models or working in video production, you can probably get away with integrated graphics or a low-end discrete GPU. Though, if you want to use your computer to play PC games in your downtime – you are reading IGN, after all – figure out what resolution you want to play games at and then go from there. If you’re using a 1080p monitor an AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT or Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 will be more than enough.
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