the holidays are coming in hot which means it's exactly the right time to get
the gamer in your life their dream gift especially if that gamer is you but
Gamers they're a fussy bunch and with infinite combinations that you could
pick from for a gaming PC it is easy to get overwhelmed well good news everyone
by clicking this video you've already gotten the hardest part out of the way
so sit back as we unleash this blizzard of tech tips upon you we are building
three PCS at three different price points point and when we're done you're
going to be equipped to make an informed decision and to save some serious money
along the way just like this serious segue to our sponsor Jawa Jawa is the
marketplace for buying and selling PC components and fully built rigs from now
until the end of the year they'll have special limited time deals so check them
out at the link in the video description
first stop on today's Holiday Express is $500 station now one option is to turn
to the secondhand market like our PS5 Killers Craigslist and Marketplace are a
great way to maximize your dollar but they also come with risks no
takebackspace
appealing price but believe it or not
this isn't our recommendation either at
this price we like the long-term value of our game tomorrow machine you may
already know that an APU or accelerated Processing Unit combines a CPU and a GPU
onto one chip generally keeping both power consumption and costs down but
what you might not know is that over the last couple of generations their gaming
prowess has gotten very impressive and the 58600 G is capable of playing even
modern titles in HD while leaving us
with enough budget to build an upgrade friendly platform that we can take with
us for years to come AMD's current am5 socket has some really solid options for
entry-level motherboards these days a series chipsets used to be a for avoid
but now they come with support for memory overclocking and PCI Express Gen
4 the latter of which is particularly important because our Apu limits any
future GPU upgrades to just eight Lanes
RAM is going to cost us around $60 if we're targeting the ddr5 price to
Performance Sweet Spot 40 bucks for an entry-level case around $40 for a 500
gig Gen 4 SSD and then one area where we're going to need to overspend a
little is our power supply we like these two units from Corsair and EVGA for
around $65 either one will give us the headro we need to add a performance tier
GPU later on down the line but they both
come with some compromises while every
Power Supply we're recommending today was able to go from Zer to 110% load
multiple times without issue these particular units performed poorly for
output Ripple it's not likely to kill anything and it probably won't cause
problems for a system at this price point but if you want a little bit of
extra peace of mind you can spend an extra $20 or so on one of these units
that tested better while still fitting in our budget and here's the parts list
upscaled gaming today upscale gaming
tomorrow once you slot in a GPU maybe we should have called this the Merry
Christmas now wait for your birthday machine oh you guys it's not even my
birthday which wait means there must be a secret bonus machine that's right my
friends we've got an all new price point
for our holiday guide this year we've got the game hard machine an $800 rig
that will run modern games at 1440p right now as long as you don't mind
being locked out of some future upgrades for our CPU then we've gone with the
5700 x3d on AMD's older am4 platform
that means no future CPU upgrades but
being honest I think it's going to be a few years before that really starts to
sting anyway and it frees us a lot of
budget for our GPU rounding out the system we settled on a BIOS compatible
b450 motherboard 16 gigs of reputable 3600 megat transfer per second RAM and a
decent PCIe NVMe SSD ideally here you
want to find one with a dam cache but failing that look for hmb support to
ensure stutter-free operation we settled on this case but it's worth noting that
deals in this price bracket can tend to be pretty volatile often changing on
Tuesdays for some reason so be ready to be a little flexible on that now for
this build and all the ones that are still coming you're going to need to
budget for a CPU Cooler and we feel that the thermal right Phantom spirit is
worth the $10 to $15 premium over popular choices like The Cooler Master
212 what isn't worth it at this budget is water cooling because you want every
possible dollar going into the right GPU
this Asus dual OC 7700 XT was the right
GPU for us cuz we got a great deal for it at
$350 but that might not always be around so we'd recommend taking a look at Tom's
Hardware's super handy GPU hierarchy chart to help you understand how any
prospective deals that you find might match up at a glance we'd also recommend
you check out LTT Store.com for some great gift ideas at much lower prices
than any of the PCS featured today we've got stocking stuffers like these stick
locks or the tech sack for your favorite tech bro on the go now it's time for our
next stop on the deal train the game
harder $11,000 balanced PC here you can expect
Superior 1440p performance in new games
and even 4K gaming for older titles that you'd love to see look their best
perhaps most importantly though it does all of that while also providing a
well-rounded foundation for future upgrades we'll kick off our parts list
with a deal we found on an AMD ryzen 5 7600 X CPU that comes with a free 1 TB
Kingston mv2 SSD now by the time you're
watching this video that deal might have expired but the mentality behind our
pick won't you got to be flexible
educate yourself on what you need and then dig for the deals that are
sometimes buried in bundles and most importantly ask yourself what games am I
actually playing for example if you're a competitive gamer and you use low
Graphics settings to get high frame rates you might want to look at an x3d
chip at least once the scalpers get bored with their latest play thing
however if you're building a machine for AAA 1440p gaming you should stick with
our recommendation which brings us to one of the hardest choices our
motherboard let me break this down the ryzen 7600 X is am5 again but we're no
longer budget limited to just entry-level boards that means we need to
choose between the nine available motherboard chipsets at least the naming
scheme is somewhat useful even if the first letter is redundant so for now
let's ignore the letter and jump to the first digit which tells us the
generation either 6 or 8 is going to
work for our CPU so then and let's look at the next two digits these tell us the
tier of the chipset higher number means more tiers and an e indicates better
connectivity with more PCI E Lanes but
none of those things necessarily mean better board the chipset informs the
feature set not the build quality so
bottom line then unless you know you need something else a good b650 board
like this one is a great choice for about $100 it has good enough power
delivery for a light CPU overclock and support for a PCIe Gen 5 SSD even if
it lacks a Gen 5 GPU slot the good news
is that likely won't impact real world GPU performance for quite a few years
looking at how long it took for Gen 4 to matter now we could go for a Gen 5 board
but it would cost us twice as much which at this price point we don't think is
worth it our RAM and our cooler get carried forward we've already got our
SSD and that leaves us to sort out case and power I like the fantex X T Pro and
we can comfortably afford one of the good 750 W power supplies from last time
that leaves us $450 for a GPU so let's have a look at
our options on the team green side we can get a RTX 460 TI or on the team red
side this excellent XFX Speedster 7800
XT now to be clear neither of these is a
wrong choice but it is worth noting that while the GeForce card includes NVIDIA's
excellent Suite of features it's a less performant card to begin
with and it's going to rely on AI upscaling in order to deliver comparable
in-game performance so I leave that up to you now it's time to open the
throttle a little if you're after a superior PC gaming experience the kind
of 4K horsepower your console locked friends can only dream of we have
finally arrived at the best without wasting money station this $22,000 PC is
stacked and without throwing away some serious extra money I don't think you
can get a much better experience to kick things off then this Behemoth starts
with the absolute best gaming CPU the world has ever seen the AMD ryzen 7 9800
x3d does it oh that's right those are out of stock everywhere what I meant to
say was the second best the 7800 x3d
nope all the deals are bad all right we went with the 9700x
now I get it those first two would outperform our practical pick here but
at the cost of how you say more money
and as we discussed in our recent 9800 x3d review Once you go above 1080p low
settings you're better off spending that extra money on a better GPU besides
we've still got eight fast Zen 5 course
and AMD's mismanaged launch of this thing has resulted in some aggressive
deals to help clear inventory which is
good because motherboards have gotten pretty expensive these days we've got
yet another am5 chip so let's buy the most expensive thing not I know we could
afford it but guys if you look closely the main difference for the eboards is
more PCI E Lanes which unless we know we need them we don't need them and there's
no performance difference between 600 series or 800 series at least not on the
chips that are available today so we'd recommend going for whatever you can
find at a good price we ended up with this one but after procuring it we found
this great deal that includes a 32 gig kit of g-skill flare X5 which is a good
reminder that we should always be flexible if we want to get the best
value it's too late for us but hey our loss is your gain by the way it's worth
noting that during the holiday season a lot of retailers will extend their
return window on select items so that you can shop with a little bit of extra
confidence when you see a good deal that's something that might be
especially important this year with the looming threat of new tariffs on
overseas manufactured Electronics we're not going to say that things are
definitely going to be more expensive next year but we also can't say for sure
that they won't be and this will especially impact you if you're
splurging on some style points with an AO cooler and a very glass forward case
we've doubled the capacity of our RAM and SSD and we've jumped up to a 1,000 W
Platinum efficient power supply to keep our power hungry GPU fed really real
istically we probably could still get away with a quality 750 W unit but 1,000
is such a nice round number and at this
budget we can afford to spend extra on something that we can hopefully bring
forward to our next upgrade we can also afford to spend ,000 on our GPU which
gives us a choice between AMD's 7900 XTX
and NVIDIA's RTX 480 super now on the
one hand we've got better rasterized performance and more than $100 in s
savings but on the other hand we've got better Ray tracing and upscaling
Hardware not to mention NVIDIA's long history of solid software support I
don't think either of them is a bad choice so I'm going to leave this one up to you but we ended up going Team Green
for this one we also ended up leaving all the links to everything that we've
talked about down below just remember that because of the nature and timing of
sales the prices will be different every week but if you were to start with any
of these builds as a springboard we're confident that you should end up with an
amazing PC and I'm also confident you'll end up with an amazing segue to an
amazing sponsor Paul sway if you're a
business owner or it manager and you're not always worried about everything
crumbling down to a catastrophic failure well first of all what kind of machine
are you secondly you're probably using pulseway already aren't you well for
those of you who don't know pulseway is an all-in-one remote monitoring and
management software that lets you see everything from operational data to
system issues all in one place monitoring is simple set it up in
minutes then deploy across your endpoints with preconfigured policies
pulseway also gives you reliable remote control of any monitored system making
it feel like you're right there I could almost smell my computer
and thanks to their mobile app you can access real-time data receive alerts and
have troubleshooting tools right in your hand for our viewers only they're
offering 40% off all their plans start your free trial today using our Link in
the description and unleash the true power of it with pulseway if you guys
are buying the parts for a new pc but you want some help putting it together
why don't you check out our ultimate guide on how to build a PC it really is
the last one you will ever need