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what a roller coaster in this crazy year

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AMD finally eclipsed Intel and gaming performance with their new 5000 series

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cpus NVIDIA unleashed true 4k 120 hertz

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gaming on the world with the new rtx 3000 series and team red brought out a

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true competitor with their big navy rx6000

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all of these things happened at relatively attainable manufacturer

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suggested prices but there's one problem

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you can't have any even large retailers just cannot get

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enough stock and the situation is made worse by opportunistic buttholes

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scooping up what little there is and selling it at jacked up prices on ebay

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but that never stopped us from doing a holiday buyer's guide before and that

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sure as heck won't stop us now with glasswire you can keep track of the

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weird stuff that's connecting to your pc even when you aren't using it if a

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strange device joins your Wi-Fi you'll be notified instantly get 25 off using code

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Linus at the link below

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like last year products that we choose for our builds must be available brand

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new taken at whatever their usual price is and they've gotta fit within about

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five percent of our target budgets at three hundred dollars our just game

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light priced here was just as challenging to hit as last year but we

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did pull off a passable esports gaming experience we're still rocking a dual

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core athlon 3000g from AMD with integrated Radeon vega graphics and as

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before we would recommend taking advantage of its unlocked core

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multiplier for a little bit of extra performance

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our motherboard this year is an ASUS prime b450ma it's got four RAM slots for

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expansion some basic overclocking capabilities and ASUS has committed to

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adding ryzen 5000 series CPU support giving you a ton of room to upgrade we

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went with a rosewill fbmx2 which is

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unremarkable but gets the job done and we even managed a modest upgrade to our

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power supply going from a 450 watt to

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500 watt unit from thermaltake it's plenty for today and it'll even be

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good enough for a modest graphics card upgrade to round out the build we've got

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eight gigs of ddr4 3000 memory and a one

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terabyte sshd from seagate for storage

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it's a great little build and it's absolutely capable of entry-level gaming

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although i do have to confess that if it was my money i'd probably buy an xbox

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series s at this price assuming of course that you can find one

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our 500 tier was also a bit of a struggle we would have loved to go for a

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ryzen 3 3100 but well

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you know fortunately Intel stock is a little

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better in this price tier at the moment and if we roll the dice on an asrock

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b460m hdv whatever that thing is it's

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got like no user reviews we can squeeze in a 10th gen core i3 10100f

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paired with a GeForce gtx 1650 super

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this CPU will handle aaa gaming at 1080p

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no problem and as an extra bonus the

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super version of the 1650 features NVIDIA's touring and bank encoder so you

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can capture your epic gaming moments at very high quality with only a small hit

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to your pc's performance the same inexpensive case and power supply combo

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return from our 300 machine but instead of resorting to a spinning disc we've

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gone full SSD with a 960 gig patriot

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burst now we could have dropped some of that capacity and invested that savings

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into a faster graphics card but honestly we felt it was better to just save our

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pennies for today and upgrade the GPU down the line once availability improves

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and next-gen budget products launch now a thousand us dollars tends to be the

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bang for the buck sweet spot so our intention was to use the best bang for

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the buck CPU on the market AMD's ryzen 5 3600 but there aren't any fortunately

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the core i5 9600k and an MSI z390a pro

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is gonna cost us almost the same amount and it's in stock we equipped our board

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with 16 gigs of ddr4 3600 rip saw memory

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from g-skill and you know what this actually ain't bad we didn't give up

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much in terms of performance going to last gen Intel here but

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if you are watching down the line a ryzen 5 3600 with an ASUS prime b550ma

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would have been our first choice because even though it would sacrifice some raw

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gaming performance it offers a better upgrade path for the future as for our

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graphics card man i gotta level with you here guys this

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was really tough when we put this script together just a couple of days ago we

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had an ASUS dual fan rtx 2060 in here for 330 bucks since then

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it's gone everything's gone and the best we can do

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is an rx 5600 xt now the 1660 super is

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also an option but it costs more than AMD's offering and generally performs

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worse so i'd stick with team red here unless shadow play gameplay capture is

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particularly important to you a knock to a nhu 12s CPU cooler gives us plenty of

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thermal room for overclocking and goes perfectly with our quiet seasonic s123

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650 watt power supply we chose a phantek

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p300a mesh case for its great airflow and aesthetics and as a bonus it is

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super easy to build in now we didn't get a capacity upgrade for storage but our

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one terabyte samsung 970 evo NVMe drive

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is likely to contribute to better game loading times in the future at two

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thousand dollars we are teetering on the precipice of big spender territory and

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this is probably where most people will draw the line now we would have strongly

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preferred a ryzen 5 5600x here but at

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roughly the same price the 3700x is not

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without its charm either it offers decent gaming performance and with eight

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cores 16 threads it runs circles around most of its competition at this price

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point in pretty much anything else with value like that you can show off

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your inner geek by also picking up a stealth pins CPU shirt from lttstore.com

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ah you snuck that in there that's good now we also doubled our RAM to 32 gigs

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of trident xeno ddr4 3600 and went with a chromax black knocked to a nhd15s

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the black version does cost a little bit more but it looks so good and we decided

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to treat ourselves we also splurged on our motherboard choosing an ASUS tough

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x570 pro wi-fi it's got all the modern

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features wi-fi six bluetooth 5.1 two and a half gigabit Ethernet and an internal

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usb 3.2 gen 2 header for high speed usb

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powering this computer is an 850 watt seasonic focus g giving us plenty of

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power and decent efficiency with an 80 plus gold rating and we picked up two

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terabytes of pci express gen 4 storage in the form of the Corsair mp600 all of

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this is housed in the new 4000d also from Corsair with its ample airflow

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space for a 360 millimeter radiator if we ever want to go water cooling in the

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future and a clean tempered glass look for graphics there is

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there is no graphics card that we can recommend in this price bracket but we

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left you 500 of budget to work with to pick up an rtx 3070 once the world

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returns to sanity if you don't have an older card to use

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while you wait i don't know

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gtx 1070 seem to be going for about 250

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bucks on ebay um they're gonna drop by at least a hundred dollars in value

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while you wait but that's a lot better to me than spending nine hundred dollars

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today on a 2080 ti and then having it drop four to five hundred dollars of

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that value in a few months so

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the best of the worst options and it's with that in mind that we are actually

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abandoning our three thousand dollar game and more tier this year i mean i

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would have loved to put together like a dream machine list with a 16 core 5950x

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and a 3080 for you work by day extreme

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gamer by night folks but the cold hard truth is that enthusiast tier hardware

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is already a dubious value proposition

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at manufacturer's suggested prices and if you're paying a big premium on top of

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that it's just not good money sense

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don't do it if this is what you were after you should have listened to me

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eight months ago when i told you to buy pc now before everything is out of stock

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for everyone other than the extreme tier folks you probably noticed some main

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themes in all of our builds compared to last year we dug deep to upgrade our

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power supplies and work in motherboards with updated feature sets we also chose

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cases with a little bit more airflow that's because all of our systems except

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the thousand dollar tier where we kind of had to skimp on our motherboard are

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designed to be upgraded in the future because we'd expect many of you to be

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able to sell your placeholder cpus and gpus without taking too much of a hit

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and then upgrade to the latest generation components when the time

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comes none of that is probably what you wanted to hear but it's the truth

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get the best prices and best selection on pc hardware and other technology at

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any of micro center's 25 locations across the united states you can check

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out their custom pc builder to configure the best custom pc for your price point

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and for a fee you can check the same day pro assembly box to have micro center's

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expert in-store technicians assemble the pc for you check them out today and

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follow the link in the video description for a three 32 gig flash drive and 32

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gig micro sd card offer that's valid in store only no purchase necessary you're

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looking for another video to watch maybe check out this over-the-top build i did

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and sold to a lucky customer for just 20

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bucks it was a lot of fun