How to build a white gaming PC 2024: part selection, deal-finding and more

I've always wanted to build a white gaming PC, and over the Christmas '23 holidays I had the chance to do just that with a build designed to excel at high refresh rate 1440p gaming.

Along the way, I discovered the best way to find the perfect components to fit your theme and budget, a brilliant PC case worth considering and a whole load of reasons why these white-coloured builds are so popular nowadays - despite white-coloured components often coming at a premium!

Without further ado then, here's the Digital Foundry guide to building a white gaming PC. Feel free to jump to the sections you're most interested in via the links below, or scroll on for the full-fat experience.

Component selection and deal-finding

The first step to any PC build is choosing your components, and going for a white theme narrows your options considerably. The vast majority of components come in black, grey or red, so finding lighter shades that harmonise well together can be a challenge. However, there are some good resources and tips to follow that can make that initial build document easier.

PCPartPicker should be your first port of call

One resource I turned to when assembling my white PC was PCPartPicker. This site is well known for its ability to sanity check a build for you, identifying compatible components based on what you've selected so far, but perhaps less well known is its powerful filtering system. This allows you to restrict your choices to only white components, giving you a list of items that will match the theme that you can sort by price to find the cheapest option in your region or filter further if you have a specific manufacturer or performance tier in mind.

For example, I knew that I needed to complete my build with a white graphics card and had about £400 to spend, so I popped those parameters into the graphics card selector and looked for the fastest option available. This turned out to be a Gigabyte RTX 4060 Ti in white and silver, and the end result turned out quite striking - and performant, as we'll see later.

Unfortunately, PCPartPicker isn't quite the perfect all-in-one solution to pricing out a build. Its prices aren't updated every hour or even every day, so you won't be seeing many limited time deals or necessarily even the same price as the retailer listed is currently offering. Its colour filtering could also stand to be improved, as selecting every permutation of white with another colour is way more laborious than it ought to be.

Still, to get an idea of what options are available, PCPartPicker is at least worth that initial visit to scope out the skeleton of your build with items that aren't frequently discounted, like cases and water coolers - and then you can do your own investigations on the most costly items, like GPUs, CPUs and RAM.

Loyalty breeds simplicity - albeit at a cost

Another way to narrow down your options and make your build more manageable is to pick a single company for as many components as possible - NZXT and Corsair come to mind as being great choices thanks to their extremely wide product ecosystems and generally excellent quality for individual items, but plenty of companies that make PC cases also make AiO coolers and fans, for example.

I went with NZXT for the majority of my build, as shown below, with the Californian firm supplying the case, CPU cooler, power supply, motherboard and fans. That's a load of components that are more or less guaranteed to play nicely together, both in terms of physical compatibility, software compatibility and colour, making for a cohesive and easy-to-use build.

You do tend to pay a little extra when you go with only components from a single company - after all, you can't just go for the cheapest item that fits your needs in every category - but in this case, the benefits of a more unified selection outweighed the extra cost.

Be patient and pay attention to deals aggregators

Once you have your ideal build specced out, it could be time to get everything ordered - but it could also be prudent to wait. Seasonal sales like Prime Day and Black Friday offer the largest swathe of discounts, but prices for most items fluctuate year-round in response to new product launches and retailer initiatives - so buying at the right time can save you a bundle, freeing up more budget for important items like graphics cards and processors.

With that in mind, it's worth at least looking at the price history for a given item on Amazon using websites or browser extensions like Keepa and Camel Camel Camel. I tend to look at prices over the past year to see when the item I'm interested in has been discounted before, and how the current price relates to the historic best price. If you're a few weeks or months away from a major shopping holiday - or the release of new components in the same category - then waiting might be the best move. On the other hand, if the price is already close to the lowest it's ever been, then it could be a great time to buy.

Similarly, deals aggregators like our own @dealsfoundry are worth following for alerts on discounted items that we at Digital Foundry recommend - and there are plenty more websites, subreddits and Discord servers that continuously share the best deals on PC components. For the UK, I'm a big fan of HotUKDeals - though its Electronics category is also home to plenty of non-PC items - while in the US I prefer the /r/buildapcsales subreddit for deals spotting.