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're building
three PCs at three different price points, 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.
First stop on today's Holiday Express is $500 station. Now, one option is to turn to the
secondhand market like our PS5 killers. Craig's List and Marketplace are a great way to maximize
your dollar, but they also come with risks. No takebacks on person-to-person dealings could burn
you today, and no warranty could burn you tomorrow. So I don't blame anyone for choosing something
like our Game Today machine that includes discrete graphics at a very 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 Ryzen 5 8600G 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 headroom 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 zero
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 GameHard 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 5700X3D 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 3,600 mega-transfer per second RAM,
and a decent PCIe NVMe SSD. Ideally here, you want to find one with a DRAM 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 write phantom spirit is worth
the $10-15 premium over popular choices like the CoolerMaster 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, because 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 LTTstore.com for some
great gift ideas at much lower prices than any of the PCs featured today. We've got stocking stuff
like these stick locks or the tech sack for your favorite tech bro on the go.
Now it's time for our next up on the deal train, the game harder $1,000 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 7600X CPU that comes with a free 1TB Kingston NV2 SSD. Now by the time you're
watching this video, that deal might have expired, but the mentality behind our pick won't. You gotta
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 graphic 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 plaything. 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 7600X 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, 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 PCIe 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 Phanteks XT Pro, and we can comfortably afford one of the
good 750 watt 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 4060 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-performance 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 locks friends can only dream of,
we have finally arrived at the best without wasting money station. This $2,000 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. Oh, that's right, those are out of stock everywhere.
What I meant to say was the second best, the 7800 X3D. No, all the deals are bad.
Oh right, we went with the 9700 X. 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 cores, 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 PCIe 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 AIO cooler and a very glass forward case. We've doubled the capacity of our
RAM and SSD, and we've jumped up to a 1000 watt platinum efficient power supply to keep our power
hungry GPU fed. Realistically, we probably could still get away with a quality 750 watt unit,
but 1000 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
a thousand dollars on our GPU, which gives us a choice between AMD's 7900 XTX and NVIDIA's
RTX 4080 Super. Now on the one hand, we've got better rasterized performance and more than $100
in 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. 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.