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The original was posted on /r/paradoxplaza by /u/r3dh4ck3r on 2025-07-17 03:00:31+00:00.

I play just about every modern paradox game, all the way from EU4, Stellaris, and Vic3 to even Imperator: Rome.

I’ve been playing on a shitty laptop for the longest time, and I’m planning to build a PC in anticipation of EU5. I kept joking to my friends that since all I play are paradox games and indie games that really don’t need much rendering power at all, I could just get myself a 9800x3d and pair it with a 1080Ti and call it a day xd some friends who are serious builders are telling me that I’d 100% get bottlenecked regardless though.

I’m really not very well versed when it comes to PC specs and how they fit together, how they bottleneck each other, etc. All I know is that the x3d series from AMD are some of the best for running paradox games and that’s about it xd

So, PC builders of r/paradoxplaza, as a mental exercise, what would the cheapest/worst possible GPU I can pair with one of the best CPUs and still play every modern paradox game without any problems be? 144fps would be a nice target frame rate (I don’t mind 60fps though if it brings down the cost significantly) and I don’t mind playing lower graphics settings either if there’s anything in there that provides a significant boost to performance, it’s all I know anyways xd

If this isn’t the best place to post smth like this, could someone point me to somewhere that would be better?