every year we do one of these holiday pc buyers guides and
oh my god if i ever aged a lot
that's okay that's not the point the point today is whether you're buying a
new gaming pc for yourself or for somebody on your uh nice list we've got
suggested parts at three key price points under 500 bucks around a thousand
dollars and approximately two thousand dollars so let's get to it
zotac zbox pcs are great for applications like productivity streaming
and gaming they feature 7th gen Intel core processors and they're super small
check them out at the link below so let's just dig right in with our
budget friendly just game build where if
it doesn't improve your frames per second it doesn't make the cut
when we first saw current pricing we actually thought we were going to be
stuck with an athlon x4 950 but using a
six year old CPU architecture today felt
wrong so we crunched some numbers and miraculously managed to squeeze in a
ryzen 3 1200 with its stock cooler
this did necessitate dropping down to an asrock a320m dg5 socket am4 motherboard
which doesn't support overclocking but this is still a major performance
improvement over any of the athlon options on the subject of performance
improvements we've got the same amount of RAM as last
year and for that matter the same amount of RAM as our 2013 holiday buyers guide
due to the worldwide shortage of dram
that's driving up pricing so eight gigs of whatever ddr4 2400 or
higher from a reputable vendor is what you're gonna get
and while upgradability isn't a major consideration for this build
that rear i o on the motherboard is a prime example we're going to use one
stick instead of two to give us most of our performance today with the ability
to throw another one in down the line for dual channel
for storage we've taken a page out of our 2015 guide and gone with a one
terabyte seagate fire cuda hybrid drive
for a balance of capacity price and performance and for our case we've gone
with a thermaltake v2 plus which for the money gives us both a solid enough
chassis and a power supply that while
super cheap and only capable of about 300 watts continuous probably won't
instantly vaporize thanks to its two-year warranty though you will
absolutely want to replace it if you upgrade your CPU or your graphics card
later on speaking of the graphics card this year
we're going with the MSI GeForce gtx 1050 ti 4 gig
truthfully it's a step down from what we'd like to
use if we had a bit more to spend but
a budget's a budget so overall then this year we got a much
faster CPU for overall system performance and less frame rate variance
in gaming but we're actually taking a significant hit on our GPU performance
thanks to the renewed cryptocurrency mining craze that's driving up pricing
and we couldn't really fit in an SSD as a result of the world wide manned flash
shortage which sucks but we did end up with a pretty well
balanced machine here that can handle esports titles and console quality 1080p
gaming our mid-range game now build creeps a
little higher budget-wise but picks up some significant upgrades including a
ryzen 5 1400 again paired with its stock
wraith stealth cooler not to be dissuaded by the hilariously
cheesy stock photo on MSI's website we then paired it with an MSI b350 pc mate
motherboard it's technically branded as a business board see look he's wearing a
suit but the quad RAM slots and vrm heatsinks
for better upgradeability and cooling should give us solid real world benefits
for gaming as well for RAM we've got 16 gigs of dual
channel ddr4 2400 megahertz RAM
making this build more of a platform upgrade than a performance upgrade
compared to last year's though it should be noted that these sticks run at just
1.2 volts meaning that like the CPU itself you could overclock them a little
if you choose giving you a bit of a bump over last year's model
for storage we contemplated going with a four terabyte 7200 RPM hard drive
rather than take a 30 capacity hit due
to SSD prices but ended up opting for a 525 gig
crucial mx 300 for better overall system performance
so hopefully if you're spending a thousand dollars on a system you can
then wait a month or two to save up for a hard drive or you've got an old one
lying around that you can use for bulk storage our case this year is a thermaltake
versa h21 which like last year's versa
h25 offers tool-less access and installation top ventilation holes and
unofficial radiator support if you've got a dremel
and a couple of hours on your hands for power we chose a fully modular evga
550 watt b3 which should be plenty for everything we've listed so far and the
gtx 1070 that we managed to stuff into
this about a thousand dollars budget now the 1070 isn't a step forward from
last year but it's not a step backwards either with its excellent 1080p or even
1440p performance once vega 56 availability improves a
little bit that would also be a viable option at this price point for team red
members so then compared to last year we spent a
few bucks more but we get into a fresh platform that promises solid
upgradability down the road now you could choose instead a core i5 7500 with
a b250 board which might even give you better overall performance but
you'd be even further over budget and it is less likely that you'd be able to
slot in a new CPU for a performance increase a year or two from now
let's get them to our high-end game on build
this sucker clocks in at roughly two thousand dollars and is designed with
gaming performance in mind but also as a capable workstation so it
sports a core i7 7800x six core CPU
running on an ASUS tough x299 mark ii motherboard this means that unlike last
year's core i7 6800k build we get to
take advantage of both the updated cache setup and avx-512 support that was
introduced with skylake x for a nice little productivity boost and the higher
clock speeds are just gravy we've given it a 32 gig quad channel kit
of g skill ddr4 3200 memory for optimal
performance and as for cooling we really like the Noctua nhu14s
it's a quiet solution that will allow some light overclocking while being
easier on the wallet than a high performance aio liquid cooler
storage brings us to this year's first dual drive setup a 525 gig crucial mx300
m.2 paired with a seagate barracuda 4 terabyte for bulk storage and then all
of this bolts into the Corsair carbide clear 400c a cleanly laid out case with
an acrylic windowed side panel that can optionally handle liquid cooling later
on now although we were disappointed by its
pricing compared to last year the gtx 1080 still ends up being the obvious
choice at this price point and it will comfortably handle high refresh rate
1080p or 60fps 1440p gaming and we will
power this beast with a c sonic 80 plus gold 750 watt semi-modular power supply
easily more than enough for our needs though at two thousand dollars
should be about more than just needs and overall this build was a bit of a
disappointment for us we get a generational CPU performance boost over
last year sure but we're not getting nearly the capacity of
SSD that we did then and frankly we were
really hoping that by this time there would be a bonafide competitor to the
gtx 1080 driving down not just its pricing but also the flagship 1080 ti
i mean as it is you could squeeze NVIDIA's top of the line into a high
quality build for two thousand dollars but
you would need to make a few compromises and either wait for better coffee lake
availability or settle for a quad core
so maybe next year we'll get a 2 000 system that's worth upgrading to from
our 2016 model like can we AMD and
NVIDIA if we're really good
i guess we'll see anyway guys full disclosure time we do
not get any kickbacks from manufacturers for our holiday buyers guides part
selections but we do receive a commission if you buy your stuff using
the links below so if you're shopping go check them out even if you aren't buying
exactly the same thing but if you're just using our lists as a starting point
and however many systems you're buying whether it's one or
three or you're getting a macbook and like a Linux workstation and a pc
synergy would be a great thing to add synergy is a software download that
solves the problem of having two keyboards and two mice once and for all
you can share a single set of peripherals between two or more computers even cross platform Windows
Linux and mac so you'll no longer get confused you just move the mouse across
seamlessly you start typing boom it works and features include things like
clipboard sharing dragging and dropping files between the computers the ability
to set up hotkeys and more so try it out
with our link in the video description to get your 50 off synergy today
so thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do but it was awesome get subscribed hit that like
button or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in the video description i guess i already said that
also linked in the description is our merch torch has cool shorts like this one in our community forum which you
should totally join