between the nan flash shortages dram price fixing and the GPU mining boom and
subsequent bust 2018 has been one heck of a ride but now
as the holidays approach it's looking like a fantastic time all of a sudden to
build a new gaming pc and it's my job to
find the best deals at five hundred dollars a thousand dollars and two
thousand dollars for you so naturally i didn't do it i had
Anthony do it but it's okay he did a great job
speaking of great our sponsor ifixit give the gift of fixing this holiday
season with ifixit's pro-tech toolkit visit ifixit.com forward slash Linus at
the link below and get yours today
before we begin a note about our part selections we decided not to use sale
pricing except where components are more or less perpetually on sale where we
used the price that it was available at most often this way you guys can expect
these prices or less so if you see
better deals on these parts or on other parts go for it this video is just meant
to be a guideline so let's start with our budget just game
pc with only 500 bucks to spend every
dollar needs to contribute to gaming performance in some way and when we look
at last year's wow 2017 was rough
we just barely managed a ryzen processor
and we had a meh case with an even more meh power supply
this year we're able to use the much faster not to mention cheaper ryzen 3
2200g and this time we also get a b350 chipset
motherboard which means we can actually overclock it a little bit
now sadly we are still stuck with eight gigs of RAM but since we've got four
slots on our board we can get a dual channel kit to improve the performance
of our bandwidth hungry ryzen CPU without sacrificing future upgradability
but wait there's more this time around we swung a separate
case and 80 plus bronze power supply with its own three-year warranty and for
storage well this was kind of a no-brainer so our sshd unfortunately ended up almost
10 more expensive for the capacity this year
but it's fast enough that you're not gonna feel the crunch too quickly while you're
gaming so we had to make a compromise there and it was a worthwhile one
because you will be gaming we're picking up a Radeon rx 570 this year the four
gig model of course but that gtx 1050 ti
from yesteryear is finally gone and we've got performance more akin to a gtx
1060 three gig this is one of those it's
always on sale cases because newegg claims it's on sale but looking at the
pricing history it's been on sale for the entire month of november and it sold
for not much more going all the way back to october so the heavens have opened up
and smiled upon the budget gamers this year because by our math you can grab
this setup for just over 501 on newegg
or just under 500 if you spread your purchases to other vendors
moving on we've got our game now mid-range pc
and last year we were in pretty rough shape on this one too if i'm being
honest yeah we managed to Ryzen five but it was a quad core this year we're
up to six cores thanks to the most versatile CPU in our recent CPU buyer's
guide the ryzen 5 2600 which
it's even it's even five dollars cheaper by the way thanks AMD
and what's more we're able to get proper ddr4 3200 memory to feed the beast for
less than what we paid for 2400 megahertz last year i am so glad that
whole RAM thing is over this time for our boot drive we're sticking with
solid-state storage and this is crazy we
are getting double the capacity this time around for five dollars less making
this easily the biggest SSD that this segment has ever been able to afford an
extra bonus is that at one terabyte you're not going to have to burn as many
erase cycles swapping games around to fit in a more confined SSD and it's even
m.2 moving on our case doesn't have a window
to show off the clean interior but the Corsair carbide 270r offers both build
quality and creature comfort improvements over the thermaltake versa
complete with easier to clean removable dust filters and then going into it is
the bigger 650 watt variant of the evga
b3 power supply that we used last year giving us a bit of room to upgrade later
on remember guys this is evga's like actually good even though it's 80 plus
bronze psu line and it should serve you well for years to come
finally we also picked up a gtx 1070 ti
for a cool 20 less than we paid for the 1070 that got us through the last two
years by the way it's not likely that these things will stick around for too much
longer the existing 10 series stock is slowly but surely disappearing from the
top down so either move fast or hopefully the rtx gtx whatever it is
2060 ends up being a decent replacement only time will tell what we do know
right now though is that in total this build weighed in at a hair over a grand
but that's less than five percent of the budget and many of these parts regularly
go on sale and it's freaking awesome so happy shopping
finally we haven't forgotten about you mega ballers out there you so for you
guys we've got the game on high-end gaming rig which at two thousand dollars
should last you quite a while now looking at every other year's game on
build you might think that us going from an hedt or high-end desktop socket down
to a core i7 on the consumer socket is a
downgrade and in terms of pci express
lanes you'd be right but in terms of processing power we're actually gaining
two cores that are each faster than any
previous CPU that we've used in these builds which more than makes up for
their lower thread count due to the loss of hyper threading
we also lose quad channel memory but we keep our 32 gigs of ddr4 3200 RAM this
time in the form of a dual channel kit that leaves two slots open for future
expansion our storage improvement this time around
is in picking up the SSD that we used in our game now build the wd blue one
terabyte m.2 SATA which gives us one terabyte of fast storage to go along
with our four terabytes of 5400 RPM spinning iron so the os and commonly
used apps and games go on the SSD and the longer term storage and lesser used
games go on the hard drive with plenty of room on both or you can even check
out a software caching solution like primocash split up your SSD and kind of
divide and conquer that way now we're keeping our sea sonic 80 plus
gold power supply and our knock to a cooler from last year because they're
great deals and the cooler in particular is good enough to handle quite a bit
more than our core i7 9700k can put out and then for our case we've splurged on
the tempered glass Corsair crystal 460x with all of its RGB goodness
now in light of the case choice some folks might prefer a liquid cooler for
aesthetics but just be prepared to spend a little extra for the privilege to get
comparable cooling capacity to what we've already got
which leads us then to our most controversial pick this time
around last year we practically begged AMD and
NVIDIA to give us a solid upgrade of some sort 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
and we've got it the rtx 2070 yes i know
rtx is nowhere near worth it at this time but that doesn't mean that the rtx
2070 isn't a good graphics card it's
just an overpriced graphics card and by the
time we wrote up this buyer's guide brand new stock of gtx 1080s and 1080
ti's was essentially depleted
so unless you want to buy those used which by the way is a valid option one
that we'd recommend these guides only include products that
you can buy brand new in a store so this is the best performance for gaming that
we could get into this price bracket and it ain't bad for productivity either
on that subject this video is about gaming pcs and of course that was the
goal but as it turns out all of our builds across the board ended up pretty
well balanced for either gaming or productivity tasks and we ended up
inadvertently following some of our own advice from our recent CPU buyer's guide
so as it always is with custom pcs the sky
is the limit in terms of configurability but we think that our rigs make a great
starting point for almost anyone who isn't looking for a hyper specialized
build so now we'll wrap up then with full disclosure time we don't get any
kickbacks for manufacturers for our holiday buyer's guide parts but what we
do get is a commission if you buy them using the links below so if you're in
the market go ahead and check them out it truly is a great time to buy a pc
especially a value one 2018 was like a real roller coaster of pricing and
availability but here we are finally at the end of it with a tangible
improvement across the board over previous years so may your holidays be
filled with tech and gaming cheer is this even visible in the frame let's
bring some springs holiday cheer yeah
and may your holidays also be filled with screwdriver kits ifixit's manta kit
has 112 steel bits comes complete with standard bits like phillips and flathead
but also torques tripoint and game bits as well and includes not one but two
aluminum screwdriver handles a hefty quarter inch drive for full size
applications and a smaller four millimeter for precision work both
drivers feature magnetic bit sockets knurled grips and silky smooth spinning
tops and all ifixit tools are backed by a lifetime warranty so if something
breaks they'll fix it for free that is how warranties work
visit ifixit.com forward slash Linus and pick up the new mantakit today
because if you don't then when tomorrow rolls around and you
need it you won't have it
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it's all good