For those who have never used a PC for anything other than typical work, printing Word documents, sending emails, or freelance writing, a gaming computer might be a foreign concept, at least in terms of its capability. 

Gaming PCs are always associated with their moniker—games. No one orders parts to build the ultimate work computer, unless “work” is graphics design. Even then, most graphic designers will purchase a PC with capabilities focused on that aspect. 

If you are getting into gaming PCs and want to know if it will work as a work-from-home computer as well, you don’t have to worry.

Can I Use a Gaming PC as a Workstation?

A good gaming PC will be far more powerful than most regular PCs and can be used as a workstation, up to a point, at least. Tasks like light to medium-duty video editing won’t trouble most gaming PCs, but heavy-duty workstation tasks like rendering 3D models or editing videos in 8K, will likely be too resource-intensive for a gaming PC.

Gaming PCs are usually great all-rounders. Because they are built with cooling and ventilation in mind for their powerful components (at least they should be) and they are designed to play a whole host of games, including some pretty demanding titles, good gaming PCs are blazingly fast at web browsing, office type work and practicality any reasonable tasks you might want to carry out with your PC.

Workstations, however, are often built to have the immense processing power for specific workloads. They may not even have a GPU powerful enough to smoothly play the latest AAA games, but they will be absolutely awesome for whatever CPU-intensive task they were designed for.

The CPU alone in some workstations can cost twice as much or more than an entire gaming PC setup.

That’s because the number crunching, rendering and other types of work that specialized workstations do are often so valuable that the economics behind them are very different to gaming PC setups that are primarily designed for entertainment.

As long as you’re not getting too specialized, a gaming PC will make light work of any task you throw at it.

Related Article: Are Gaming PCs Expensive To Run? (And How To Cut Costs)

You can still jump on Microsoft Word, and Google Docs, multitask and browse the web with a ton of browser tabs open at the same time, download and use just about any kind of software you might need, do graphics design, photography work, marketing, administration, you name it. 

In fact, if you can do it on a standard computer, you’ll just do it all a lot faster on a gaming PC. Gaming computers typically have a lot of RAM, so multitasking will be a breeze. 

For a gaming computer, having multiple windows up, with music in the background, and a video playing in the top right corner is worth yawning over. It won’t struggle to do that or a hundred other things. 

Zoom calls will be a breeze and if you teach online classes, you will never have to worry about anything, unless you have slow internet service. Gaming computers are more than capable of running professional software and handling virtualisation. 

Some software programs that make a middling computer get pretty warm are nothing on a gaming computer. If productivity is the name of the game, you can do all you need to do on a gaming computer and you’ll be lucky if you ever hear the cooling fan kick on.

Benefits of Using a Gaming Computer for Work

Who said you couldn’t have entertainment while you’re at work? Gaming PCs have excellent graphics, even though you might not be running programs that take advantage of them. They feature excellent audio (in most cases), so find yourself some quality speakers. 

They’re excellent for streaming and video conferences, so you can stream YouTube TV, Netflix, or HBO MAX in the background without missing a beat. If the time comes when it needs to cool itself, a gaming PC is more than capable of handling that as well.

Bottom Line

There should be no confusion where gaming PCs are concerned. The only thing different about a gaming PC is its suped-up RAM, GPU, and CPU. All of these things are found in standard computers, just not in a superior form. 

If you camouflaged your gaming computer in ordinariness, no one would know that it’s a gaming computer if they spent time working on it. They might marvel at how speedy everything is but that’s about it.