has it been a year already apparently so it's holiday PC
buyer guide time again as usual we'll be
targeting three different price points in US Dollars before operating system
under $500 900 to 1,000 is and about
$2,000 I'll be using pricing from Newegg us and amazon.com and I'll have a where
to buy Link in the video description let's go
gfuel is having a buy one get one free deal event this Black Friday on their 40
serving tubs check it out now at the link in the video
description so first up is our decent
quality 1080p gaming box we won't be
sweating small stuff like upgradeability
or future proofness for this one we've got 500 bucks to spend so if it doesn't
make the FPS number go up it's out so
there are 145 CPUs on newegg.com from $50 to
$75 too bad that when you filter out the Dual cores you're left with a whopping
one option at the price we paid last year the Athlon X4
845 non overclockable and slower than
the 860k we chose last year that goes
for $78 now I mean if I'm going to spend
that much I might as well go with the no
nope no there's nothing bloody hell is it a bad time to be a budget CPU buyer
but at least I get AMD's wraith stock cooler for my extra $8 right oh wait I
don't that part number costs an extra $20 on top so 860k with a normal cooler
and paying more for it it is anyway
shopping for RAM is easy I opted for a single stick trading a little bit of
performance for the option to upgrade to 16 gigs down the road and last year for
the motherboard I went with a super basic MSI board for $47 cheap right this
year ASUS has a similar one for 40 bucks
sold moving on to the case after 2 years
of dominance The Cooler Master Elite 350
has finally been dethroned in my $500
system by Cooler Master the elite
342 drops compatibility with full ATX
motherboards and you get a 400 watt instead of a 500 wat power supply but
just save a few bucks and from Hardware secrets's review the included 400 watt
unit made by fsp can actually deliver its rated output as long as you're not
concerned with efficiency and I will definitely be
using that $6 I saved to get a balling
Out video card the rad RX 484 gig has
double the frame buffer but more importantly is way faster than the GTX
962 gig that I recommended for this system last year and it costs only 20
bucks more for the cheapest variant I could find on New Egg with civilization
6 included to boot our storage is going to be a lot faster too scrolling past
some of the very random cheap SSD options I mean Hyundai really reveals
240 gig products from a handful of reputable brands for as little as 65
bucks we can always add a hard drive for more storage later so I chose a SanDisk
z410 so in summary we spent about $20
more than last year for the same CPU and
RAM load out but we are deep into double
digigit gains when it comes to GPU performance at 1080P and ditching the
mechanical hard drive will make a huge difference to the day-to-day usability
even if it means we might need a storage space upgrade in a little while for our
next system at $11,000 future
expandability features and usability
Beyond gaming are much bigger considerations but instead of spending
extra on chasing overclocking Headroom I'll be focused on the best outof the-
boox performance I can get so we'll start with an Intel quadcore and this
year for the same price we get a big upgrade to a Skylake cor I 5 64 400 that
wait a minute this thing is only
marginally faster than the core i54460
we used last time aha I get it the
i56500 is The Sweet Spot this year much
faster and only $15 more oh inel you
devious little Scoundrels oh well at
least for our lunch money we also get a faster DMI support for 64 gig of ddr4
RAM and some power savings speaking of
RAM the best deals I found while writing this were on a vexere or Corsair 2x8 gig
kits of ddr4 I didn't stress about speed
for the reasons I outlined in this video and I picked the ASUS b150m a m.2 to
install them on no USB 3.1 support but
it's got four dim slots for RAM expansion and with all the SSD inovation
moving forward on the m.2 slot I
consider that a musthave for a storage upgrade down the road the EVGA B1 500 W
power supply held its Crown this year it's even a few bucks cheaper and so is
our case it was a toss up for me between the NZXT Source 210 and the thermal take
Versa H25 both at 40 bucks but the Versa
has free shipping with prime so that put it over the top storage got got a big
shakeup at this price point this year ssds are cheaper so I got 750 gigs for
what I paid for 500 gigs last year but I
actually ditched the 4 tbte hard drive
so you'll have to add one later if 750
gigs isn't enough for you bringing us finally to the video card the reason
that I pinched every penny in ,000 build
up until this point I managed to squeeze a GTX 1070 here making this rig a
perfect match for a cheap 1440p or even
ultrawide monitor off eBay or high-end
VR Gaming and I even threw in a DVD drive just to show off bam so compared
to last year's model we spent marginally less but we gained some CPU horsepower
got a bigger SSD but sacrificed our hard drive and we added anywhere from 40 to
80% to our gaming performance depending on the game and resolution not too bad
for a year later note that our Amazon
buildout includes an oem CPU since even with a hyper T2 thrown in it's cheaper
there and CPUs rarely fail anyway our
last system assumes a buyer who is willing to pay more for Creature
Comforts like sleeved cables RGB lighting overclocking and quiet
operation it also assumes that a buyer who requires high performance outside of
purely gaming applications let's say video editing or 3D modeling well it
sure is easy to choose a CPU when you have $2,000 to spend isn't it actually
no it kind of gets harder while I could
drop $1,000 on an 8 core 6900k unless I am heavy into content
creation and unlocked six core is going to do me just fine and that money would
be better spent elsewhere so I'm going to go with the
6800k a slightly faster six core than
last year here the 6850k would be strongly recommended as
an upgrade if you're adding a lot of PCI Express storage or expansion cards along
with the same SLI support solid build quality for overclocking and USB 3.1 the
.2 slot LED lighting and type c port on
the x99 A2 for an extra 15 bucks put it
over the top versus the older board we chose last year then for RAM thanks to
Falling prices we make up that 15 bucks and get a slightly faster 32 gig kit of
Vengeance lpx quad Channel ddr4 than we did last year plenty for the time being
with the option to upgrade to 64 gigs down the road for case and cooling I
went for a slightly different strategy this year I downgraded my case to an
NZXT s340 which is basically a small as
you can get while still fitting my upgraded cooling a Noctua NHD 14
compared to last year it won't be as roomy to work in but should yield a
significant Improvement in CPU clock speeds for
overclocking power comes courtesy of an EVGA Supernova G2 850 wat fully modular
unit 80 plus gold 100 Watts more than last year's rmx series and a few bucks
cheaper nice onto storage the only real
difference is that instead of a Bargain Basement 1 TB SSD and a 4 TB hard drive
we're getting a Samsung 850 Evo 1 TB SSD
and a 4 TB hard drive I went with a 2 and 1/2 in SSD even though it's the same
price as one that would go in an m.2 slot because in a tower case we don't
really need the space savings and that'll leave my m.2 slots open for an
NVMe drive upgrade in the future right
now that m.2 drive unless you want to pay a lot for it is going to be running
over the SATA interface anyway also I checked a DVD drive in there boohoo this
video card time last year I actually
downgraded the 3D gaming performance of the $2,000 system to make room for that
six core CPU double the memory and double the SSD storage compared to the
2014 edition this year I'll be able to
keep all of those things with a faster CPU and SSD better Cooling and better IO
and get better gaming performance thanks to the GTX 1080 all of this while
staying about $80 is cheaper than the 2015 Edition which brings us then to the
end of this year's holiday buyers guide remember as always these aren't hard and
fast rules and daily pricing fluctuations especially on categories
like RAM or video cards can affect the exact part that I would recommend a lot
but if you follow these guidelines I'm sure you'll end up with a kickass system
that you'll enjoy for years to come interesting fact this is the first year
that all three systems come out cheaper on Amazon than newa if you buy Windows
10 and have Prime for free shipping so
be sure to check out our Prime Membership link below and the links to
where to buy using our affiliate code clicking through those links regardless
of what you buy lets Amazon know that we helped you with your purchasing decision
which gives us a commission I fix it they got a lot of
talking points 19,000 free step-by-step repair guides lots of tools you can buy
on their site lifetime warranty on the tools but I'm going to get off the
script for a little bit here because I don't need to tell you guys I Fixit tool
gets so great and they allow you to take apart and reassemble pretty much any
device and I'm going to go what is it late November ah yes fullon holiday
messaging got a geek in your life who doesn't have a toolkit yet bam perfect
present I fix it tool kit you'll actually be giving them the gift of
saving money and tinkering tinkering tinkering and tinkering with electronics
what could possibly be better I know a discount so also you use our discount
code so you can save a few bucks on your order and uh you can feel good they can
feel good I'll feel good I fix it'll feel good everyone's feeling good that's
a Christmas spirit or holiday spirit
sorry so thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do
but if it was awesome get subscribed hit that like button or check out the link
to where to buy the stuff we featured at Amazon in the video I kind of already said that but whatever it's down there
also linked in the video description is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community Forum
which you should totally join now that you're done doing all that you're probably wondering H gee what should I
watch next maybe check out our latest video over on Channel Super Fun see you
next time I keep vowing to do more of these
buyer guides and I keep only doing them once a year