It had been cheaper to wait for component sales. But certain components are getting so expensive that my local Memory Express shop stopped putting the price tag on their RAM and graphics cards, so it’s market price as if it’s fancy whole lobster at a restaurant. So now it’s not much different and a good deal on a pre-built might get you the best bang for buck at this moment. I think I’ve seen decent quality/price builds at Costco.

Canadian examples: https://www.costco.ca/.product.4201008598.html for 1700 CAD (1200 USD) as of today.

https://www.memoryexpress.com/Products/MX00138751 same price, slightly better CPU.

For what you want (arc raiders and gmod) these will work great. An 8 gb card will do great for all except maybe some games’ “Ultra” settings with textures filling up all your vram. 16 gb of DRAM is about the standard for games, gmod is old so it doesn’t need much at base, the modded servers it depends but it will probably handle okay unless you go super overboard with it. Luckily RAM is one of the easiest components to upgrade on most desktops, it’s just being hoarded between AI companies and the greedy cartel of companies that make memory.

For a new CPU I’d recommend i5 12th generation or later, or AMD Ryzen 5 3600 or later, but newer is better, these are the oldest ‘minimums’ I could recommend picking up. I use cpubenchmark.net to know the relative score between chips.