Buying local smashes Amazon for building a R20,000 gaming PC

South African PC gamers can save thousands of rands by ordering their components from local retailers instead of buying them from Amazon in the US.

Although pricing was reasonably similar for a range of components, some items ordered through Amazon carry far higher prices than what’s on offer from local retailers.

For example, Amazon’s price with shipping was only slightly higher than the most affordable local retailer for the AMD Ryzen 5 7600 CPU and XFX Speedster QICK308 Radeon RX 7600.

On the other hand, buying the Antec NX500M ARGB case from Amazon will cost nearly four times the price of ordering it from Evetech in South Africa.

While the case’s list price on Amazon was higher, the shipping costs for the case made up more than half of the total price.

Therefore, purchasing components like cases and power supplies from South African retailers is advisable.

We opted for the Asus Prime A620M-K motherboard for the build, which was available for R2,366 from local PC hardware retailers.

The exact motherboard wasn’t available through Amazon, so we selected the Asus Prime A620M-A-CSM from the international e-commerce giant. It costs R3,308 with shipping to South Africa.

We went with the AMD Ryzen 5 7600 CPU, which can be purchased for R4,499 in South Africa. Amazon’s price with shipping was only slightly higher at R4,572.

We paired the processor with an XFX Speedster QICK308 Radeon RX 7600 with 8GB of video memory. Evetech sells the card for R5,999.

Ordering the same card through Amazon won’t set you back much more, with the price including shipping totalling R6,051.

Amazon was significantly more expensive than local retailers for the SSD and power supply we chose for the build.

The Samsung 970 EVO Plus 1TB SSD is available for R2,199 in South Africa, while Amazon charges R2,641 with shipping.

Similarly, South Africans can buy the MSI MAG A550BN power supply from FirstShop for R1,105 (plus R49 shipping), while those ordering through Amazon will pay R1,616 with shipping.

Other than the motherboard, there were two other components for which we couldn’t find an exact match from Amazon — the RAM and CPU cooler.

We opted for one stick of Kingston’s Fury Beast 16GB 5,600MHz DDR5 memory for the build, which is available for R1,439 from Evetech.

The option we chose from Amazon is slightly faster but costs over R500 more. Amazon sells a 2 x 8GB Kingston Fury Beast DDR5 5,600MT/s kit for R1,987.

As the motherboards we selected each have two memory slots, the Amazon kit will take up both, while the single stick from Evetech allows for an easy upgrade.

Lastly, we opted for the ID-Cooling Frostflow X240 Lite CPU cooler from Wootware for R849.

We struggled to find any ID-Cooling Frostflow options on Amazon’s website and opted for the Thermalright Frozen Prism 240 ARGB cooler at R1,654 with shipping.

Altogether, South Africans will save almost R6,000 by buying their gaming PC components from local retailers instead of importing them from Amazon.

The table below compares the price of building a gaming PC with a local cost below R20,000 when bought from South African retailers to building a similar system via Amazon.com.