Our objective here is to enable us to explore what PC we could buy that can play Death Stranding, where we carefully find the right hardware components that can run Death Stranding and meet its gaming needs while also heavily factoring in today’s best hardware component prices. And so our expectations are that this game will confidently run with max graphics running, running 1080p as the native screen size. These hardware items found in our build will continue to have their prices checked and components will be swapped in and out as we feel better hardware for our build is released.
Getting our best PC build together today we consider some of the characteristics of this game, which will help us better select the right hardware components for Death Stranding. First and foremost we will be looking at value for money, hunting through our curated list of gaming hardware and then cherry picking the best priced items available today. As this game falls into the Adventure genre category, this can certainly influence some of the hardware selection below, especially some of the peripherals we select out, to make sure they might the games key specialities. Something else we can consider is that Death Stranding would have been built on PC hardware from around 2020 or leading up to that period, by the developers. So it is usually fairly safe to consider hardware from that period as suitable.
Component | Current Price | ||
CPU |
$143.61 | ||
Graphics Card |
$239.99 | ||
Memory |
Crucial Ballistix Sport 8GB (1x8GB) DDR4 2666MHz |
$32.99 | |
Motherboard |
MSI B360M PRO-VD Intel mATX LAG1151 |
$49.46 | |
Case |
Cooler Master MasterBox Lite 3.1 mATX |
$49.99 | |
PSU |
Corsair VS Series 650W 80+ White |
$64.98 | |
SSD |
SanDisk SSD PLUS 480GB |
$53.99 | |
HDD |
Toshiba X300 HDD 5TB |
$374.97 | |
Display |
AOC 22 inch 5ms |
$90.00 | |
Keyboard |
Redragon K552 |
$34.99 | |
Mouse |
PICTEK Gaming Mouse 7200DPI wired 7 Buttons |
$11.05 | |
Headset |
Corsair HS45-7.1 Surround |
$39.99 | |
Death Stranding PC Build Total Price | $1,186.01 |
Not wanting to pay over the odds for hardware we dont actually need, is a gamers primary objective when building their next PC. But obviously in this specific PC build we want to ensure enough we choose something with enough performance capability to run Death Stranding at 1080p ultra graphics options. We have taken a look at a whole bunch of graphics card prices today and compared them to the hardware’s gaming performance and our choice for this game is the GeForce GTX 1660 Super Asus Dual Evo OC 6GB. We will get into its expected FPS for this game a bit later in the article, but for now we know it will deliver reliable frame rates at ultra 1080p. Checking our records our lowest tracked price for this card was on 28th Nov 2019 which had it priced at $229.99. Todays price is $239.99 which is why we have identified it as a competitive performance to price ratio compared to other hardware in the marketplace today. Watching this card over the past 2 weeks we have seen its price drop by $47.68, further supporting our selection in this hardware.
When choosing the right video card for this build, you need to make sure you have a graphics card with 6GB of VRAM or more. This memory is used by the card to store image data when moving it from the video card to the CPU. Our chosen build’s card has 6GB, which will be a suitable amount for this resolution.
To fit with the above graphics card we have chosen a well priced motherboard, the MSI B360M PRO-VD Intel mATX LAG1151, that will allow us to slot in a compatible Core i5-9400F 6-Core 2.9GHz processor based around the shared LGA 1151 socket. With the chosen cpu and gpu working together we will get a great Death Stranding experience, that helps achieve steady frames at this resolution. The chosen cpu has itself been selected because it represents a good fit with the game and the price we found it at when comparing today’s cpu market prices, finding it currently priced at $143.61. Looking through our price records we noticed that this processor was seen on 16th Mar 2020 priced at $119.99.
With a price tag today of $49.46, the MSI B360M PRO-VD Intel mATX LAG1151 motherboard is certainly in good company, representing a feature rich, cost effective mobo for the Death Stranding PC. Our motherboard price records put this mobo’s price on 28th Dec 2019 at $32.99.
As one of the 3 main system components, when considering a PC built for Death Stranding, the correct RAM selection is obviously important. We are looking for something that is well priced but also capable of meeting the games requirements. The Crucial Ballistix Sport 8GB (1x8GB) DDR4 2666MHz is well priced at $32.99 and fits with the Core i5-9400F 6-Core 2.9GHz and GeForce GTX 1660 Super Asus Dual Evo OC 6GB selections to ensure solid FPS at 1080p ultra settings. A price point for this RAM was down to $29.49 on 2nd Feb 2020.
This PC build has been optimized to deliver around 62 FPS at Ultra settings for Death Stranding, while running on a 1080p screen size. While you might want to increase this to 87 FPS if you lower some of the graphics options inline with High graphics settings.
Upping the screen size to 1440p for Death Stranding using this build would return 84 frames per second on High settings. This would drop further to 60 when turning up to Ultra graphics.
While we have put a great PC build together for Death Stranding it’s important to understand how it handles some of the more popular games of today at 1080p. With this PC build we can expect that the popular game Cyberpunk 2077 will get 48FPS on Ultra settings raising to 68FPS on High. On the other hand we see that Assassins Creed: Valhalla returns 48FPS on Ultra and 68FPS when lowered to High. Lastly Outriders may see 63 FPS running at Ultra, and 88 on High graphics settings.
Not everyone is a fan of team Nvidia, so if you are after a GPU from the other side then perhaps take a look at our suggested AMD card, the Radeon RX Vega 56 8GB. It is placed at 7% better performance difference and certainly capable of delivering up Death Stranding frames on a par with our primary GPU selection. We have also selected it based on its price today, which finds it at $899.98.