Loadout Builder

The upgrade ladders are built from our published rankings: the SSD roundup, the monitor rankings, the headset rankings and the capture card guide. Products we advise against never enter the ladders, whatever your budget. Scoring rules live on the methodology page; if you only need to know whether your current setup survives launch day, run the PS5 Readiness Check first.

How this tool works

There is no percentage split. The builder does not reserve 40 percent for a display or 20 percent for storage. Each of the four categories is a fixed, ordered ladder of specific products taken from the rankings above, and the allocation falls out of the prices of those rungs rather than out of a weighting table.

Step one is the floor. Every category you leave ticked starts on its first rung, and those prices are added up. With all four ticked the floor is $564: Crucial T500 2TB at $135, Dell G2724D at $199, Razer Barracuda X at $70 and Elgato HD60 X at $160. If that total is above your budget, the builder stops and tells you the size of the gap. It will not substitute something cheaper, because anything cheaper is gear that did not make the rankings.

Step two is a greedy climb. The builder compares the next rung on every ladder against the rung you are on and takes the single cheapest price difference that still fits the budget, then repeats, re-checking all four ladders each pass, until no move fits. So cheap steps get bought before expensive ones regardless of category: a $20 step between two capture cards is taken long before a $201 step from a 1440p monitor to a better one.

Two quirks follow from that. Ladders are ordered by rank, not by price, so a step can cost less than nothing: the audio ladder runs Barracuda X at $70, PULSE Elite at $150, Cloud Alpha Wireless at $120, Arctis Nova 7P at $129, and the second step is minus $30. The loop treats a negative step as the cheapest available move and takes it, so the running total can drop while the loadout climbs. The second quirk is that leftover money is never forced into anything. When no move fits, the report shows the headroom and names the cheapest remaining step so you know what to save for.

Storage deserves a specific note, and the honest answer is not the flattering one. The code gives storage no priority, weighting or bonus. It sits first in the list, it has the cheapest floor, and it has only two rungs, so it tends to complete early and cheaply. That is arithmetic, not judgement. Our editorial view that storage is the thing to sort first for a launch title lives in the storage math article; the algorithm does not encode it.

The numbers behind it

• Prices come from data/products.json in this site's repo. They are indicative US street prices in dollars, checked by hand when a guide is published or updated, not scraped live and not fed by an API. Nothing here calls a retailer at runtime, so a total is exactly as fresh as the last edit to that file.
• Ladder membership and order come from our published rankings. A product we advise against never appears at any rung, which is why a low budget gets refused rather than filled.
• Every spec on the product cards is a manufacturer rating. The 7,400 MB/s read figure on the T500, the 38 hour battery on the Arctis Nova 7P, the 4K144 passthrough on the AVerMedia: vendor figures, cross-checked but not measured by us. We do not run a hardware bench, and no part of this tool rests on our own load-time or thermal numbers.
• No commission weighting. Price is the only variable in the loop. The links carry our Amazon Associates tag and the payout has no input into the ordering.
• Nothing GTA 6 specific is in the math. The confirmed facts we build around elsewhere on the site are the 19 November 2026 release on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, live pre-orders, $79.99 Standard and $99.99 Ultimate. The install size has not been announced, so no install estimate is used here at all.

A worked example: $900, all four categories

The $564 floor clears, leaving $336 of headroom. The available first steps are storage plus $54, display plus $201, audio plus $80 and capture plus $39, so the loop starts with capture and works down the list of cheapest moves:

1. Capture, plus $39 to the Elgato 4K X. Total $603.
2. Capture, plus $20 to the AVerMedia Live Gamer Ultra 2.1. Total $623, ladder finished.
3. Storage, plus $54 to the Samsung 990 Pro 2TB. Total $677, ladder finished.
4. Audio, plus $80 to the Sony PULSE Elite. Total $757.
5. Audio, minus $30 to the HyperX Cloud Alpha Wireless. Total $727.
6. Audio, plus $9 to the SteelSeries Arctis Nova 7P. Total $736, ladder finished.

Only display is left, and its next step costs $201, which would push the total to $937. That is over budget, so the loop stops. The report reads Samsung 990 Pro 2TB at $189, Dell G2724D at $199, Arctis Nova 7P at $129 and AVerMedia Live Gamer Ultra 2.1 at $219: $736 spent, $164 left, next upgrade the BenQ MOBIUZ EX2710Q at plus $201.

Now look at what that actually bought. The same $900 with capture unticked returns the Samsung 990 Pro, a Gigabyte M28U 4K 144Hz monitor and the Arctis Nova 7P for $767. If you never stream, the second loadout is obviously the better one for you, and the only way to reach it is to untick the box. The builder cannot make that call on your behalf.

Limitations

• It is greedy, not optimal. It takes the cheapest next step and never evaluates combinations, so it can finish with money unspent while some other split would have fitted. The $900 run above leaves $164 on the table.
• Price is standing in for value. The only thing the loop knows about a step is what it costs. It has no idea that the display you look at every session might matter more to you than a better capture card. Ticking and unticking categories is the only way to express that, and it changes the result far more than the algorithm does.
• The ladders are short and they stop. Storage has two rungs and tops out at $189, so no amount of extra budget buys 4TB, a larger drive, or an external HDD for cold storage. The same is true everywhere else: once a ladder reaches its top rung, the rest of your money simply sits there.
• Prices go stale, and sales invert the order. Because they are checked by hand at publish, a discounted monitor can genuinely cost less than the rung below it, which turns the cheapest-next-step logic upside down. Check the retailer price first, and if the real numbers have moved a lot, ignore the loadout and spend the difference where you want it.
• It checks nothing about your setup. It does not know your PS5 model, whether the expansion slot is already occupied, whether your TV has a spare HDMI 2.1 port, or that all three capture cards on the list encode on a host PC and are no use without one. For the compatibility side, run the PS5 Readiness Check first.
• US dollars, US listings. Totals are pre-tax and ignore shipping, and availability outside the US is not modelled.
• The refusal is deliberate, and it can be irritating. Below the floor for your selection, the builder reports the gap instead of dropping to gear we would not buy ourselves. If that is where you are, the useful move is to buy in stages rather than all at once.