It’s not hard to imagine laptops as the de-facto computer for students. After all, why not use a computer 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. Plus, pop one of the best 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
- Dell XPS Desktop – Best overall
- iMac 24 (M3) – Best all-in-one
- HP Victus 15L – Best budget option
- Lenovo Legion Tower 5i – Best for gaming
If you’re stuffing your backpack full of bulky textbooks, adding the weight of a laptop – no matter how lightweight they’ve become – can literally be the feather that breaks your back. It’s OK, though, the best prebuilt PCs aren’t portable, but they make up for that in sheer power. Something like an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 is a powerful GPU in a gaming laptop, but it’s taken to an entirely different level on desktop, where battery life just isn’t a concern.
Even a budget prebuilt PC can outperform plenty of laptops that cost exponentially more, so if you just care about getting your work done as efficiently as possible, prebuilt PCs are the best option.
1. Dell XPS Desktop
Best Prebuilt PC For Students
While the XPS brand is best known for Ultrabooks, the Dell XPS Desktop has been around for ages. This is a solid prebuilt PC, and while it looks extremely basic, you can configure it to be an absolute beast of a machine, depending on what your needs are. It starts out with just an Intel Core i5 processor, integrated graphics and just 8GB of RAM, which will be fine for light work like word processing. However, you can configure it to come with up to an Intel Core i9-14900K, an RTX 4090 GPU and 64GB of RAM, which will be absolutely overkill for the vast majority of students.
Instead, where this PC shines is somewhere in the middle, picking a Core i7, 16GB of RAM and an RTX 4060 is going to be the sweet spot for most people, easily able to work through any specialized workloads your professors throw at you. At the time of writing, that exact configuration will set you back $1,199, which can be a high price tag to swallow. But keep in mind that this PC is using standard hardware, which means you can add a graphics card or more RAM when you have the cash for it.
I love how many ports are on the front of the XPS Desktop’s case, though. While it’s true that any desktop PC is going to have a bounty of ports just by virtue of being a desktop, most of the time they’re hidden in the back of the machine. Instead, you’ll find three USB-As, a USB-C, a headphone jack and an SD card reader all on the front, lined elegantly beneath the power button. You can always just plug a device right into the front of the XPS tower, without having to wrestle with the PC to get to its rear I/O.
2. Apple iMac 24 (2023, M3)
Best All-in-One PC for Students
The 24-inch iMac was the first time Apple realized colors other than gray existed, and as a result, the all-in-one PC comes in blue, green, pink, yellow, orange, purple, and the same boring silver as every other Apple product. That’s cool and all, but these desktops are also packed with the same Apple M3 processor as the MacBook Air, which is powerful enough for most people to get through their workloads. This chip also allows the iMac to be extremely thin for a device that’s both a desktop PC and a monitor.
There is a dark side, though. This is a desktop PC, but it’s using the same chip as Apple’s laptops. While the larger design does allow Apple to funnel more power into the chip, resulting in better performance, it still won’t hold a candle to a windows PC at a similar price. Plus, because Apple is Apple, you can’t simply open the iMac and add a new SSD if you need more storage, so you need to make sure you know you will only ever need 256GB of storage before you buy the entry-level model.
That being said, if you just need a stationary Mac workstation with a gorgeous display, the iMac delivers. You get a ‘4.5K Retina’, or a 4,480 x 2,520 IPS monitor, built into the device, saving precious space on your desk. Let’s be real, you’re not going to have a lot of space for both a tower and a monitor in your dorm room, and this little AIO serves as both a PC and decoration.
The iMac also comes with a Magic Keyboard and a Magic Mouse. The keyboard is absolutely incredible, while the mouse is a bit more divisive – it has a charging port on the bottom, meaning you can’t charge it while you use it. For packaged-in peripherals, these are awesome, because you don’t have to shell out extra just to use the computer you just bought.
3. HP Victus 15L
Best Budget Prebuilt PC for Students
There are a lot of cheap desktop PCs out there, but unfortunately most of them suck in one way or another. There are a lot of ‘cheap’ PCs out there that artificially push the price down by shoving in older hardware that simply won’t last you as long. The HP Victus 15L defies this by just being a solid gaming PC that’s also very affordable.
Starting at $899, the HP Victus 15L provides an Intel Core i5-14400F, 16GB of RAM and an Intel Arc A380 graphics card – not bad for a beginning configuration. Without making any changes to the hardware, this PC can handle video editing, light AI workloads and even PC games, provided you’re comfortable sticking to 1080p gaming. It’s rare that I see an entry-level config that I actually approve of, but this little gaming PC will take you a long way.
Of course, you can upgrade it with more serious hardware. You can bump the CPU up to an Intel Core i7-14700F, which will make it much better at multitasking, and you can configure it with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060, which makes this a serious contender at 1440p. However, because of the small size of the PC case, you can’t configure it with a more powerful graphics card. More powerful graphics cards that could fit in this chassis are out there, but then you’ll run into problems with the 350W power supply HP includes.
On the front of the HP Victus 15L is a wealth of ports, with four USB-As and a USB-C among them. There are even more on the back of the PC, but having so many ports on the front panel makes connecting accessories easy, especially if it’s something you don’t always want plugged in, like a thumb drive.
4. Lenovo Legion Tower 5i
Best Prebuilt Gaming PC for Students
The Lenovo Legion Tower 5i is a mid-range gaming PC, packed with up to an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super and an Intel Core i7-14400F. That’s a totally fine spec, but what makes this PC special is how affordable it is across all of its specs. Its top-end spec is expensive, setting you back $2,299, but if you dial your expectations back a bit, you can get an extremely solid RTX 4070 spec for just $1,400 at the time of writing.
With that RTX 4070, the Lenovo Legion Tower 5i is still an awesome 1440p gaming machine, without going overboard. At 1440p, you’ll be able to get a solid 81 fps in Cyberpunk 2077 with all the ray tracing goodness enabled. In fact, compared to the RTX 4070 Super, you’re only really losing 12% performance.
The Legion Tower 5i spec with the RTX 4070 Super is equipped with 32GB of RAM instead of 16GB, but because the Legion Tower is so easy to open up, you can easily upgrade the memory later
As for the chassis, it’s a standard mid-tower case with a unique mesh design on the front that makes the RGB lighting on the front case fans look incredible. On the side, you get a tempered glass side panel that lets you peek in on the innards. For prebuilt gaming PCs around this price, having a solid tempered glass panel is rare, with many having a flimsy plastic window instead.
How to Choose a Prebuilt 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. There are a lot of features like RGB lighting and liquid cooling that, 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 2024, 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 on 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 7600 XT or Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 will be more than enough.
Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. She's been writing about gaming PCs for almost a decade and has been building them even longer. You can follow her @Jackiecobra.
