what a roller coaster in this crazy year
AMD finally eclipsed Intel and gaming performance with their new 5000 series
cpus NVIDIA unleashed true 4k 120 hertz
gaming on the world with the new rtx 3000 series and team red brought out a
true competitor with their big navy rx6000
all of these things happened at relatively attainable manufacturer
suggested prices but there's one problem
you can't have any even large retailers just cannot get
enough stock and the situation is made worse by opportunistic buttholes
scooping up what little there is and selling it at jacked up prices on ebay
but that never stopped us from doing a holiday buyer's guide before and that
sure as heck won't stop us now with glasswire you can keep track of the
weird stuff that's connecting to your pc even when you aren't using it if a
strange device joins your Wi-Fi you'll be notified instantly get 25 off using code
Linus at the link below
like last year products that we choose for our builds must be available brand
new taken at whatever their usual price is and they've gotta fit within about
five percent of our target budgets at three hundred dollars our just game
light priced here was just as challenging to hit as last year but we
did pull off a passable esports gaming experience we're still rocking a dual
core athlon 3000g from AMD with integrated Radeon vega graphics and as
before we would recommend taking advantage of its unlocked core
multiplier for a little bit of extra performance
our motherboard this year is an ASUS prime b450ma it's got four RAM slots for
expansion some basic overclocking capabilities and ASUS has committed to
adding ryzen 5000 series CPU support giving you a ton of room to upgrade we
went with a rosewill fbmx2 which is
unremarkable but gets the job done and we even managed a modest upgrade to our
power supply going from a 450 watt to
500 watt unit from thermaltake it's plenty for today and it'll even be
good enough for a modest graphics card upgrade to round out the build we've got
eight gigs of ddr4 3000 memory and a one
terabyte sshd from seagate for storage
it's a great little build and it's absolutely capable of entry-level gaming
although i do have to confess that if it was my money i'd probably buy an xbox
series s at this price assuming of course that you can find one
our 500 tier was also a bit of a struggle we would have loved to go for a
ryzen 3 3100 but well
you know fortunately Intel stock is a little
better in this price tier at the moment and if we roll the dice on an asrock
b460m hdv whatever that thing is it's
got like no user reviews we can squeeze in a 10th gen core i3 10100f
paired with a GeForce gtx 1650 super
this CPU will handle aaa gaming at 1080p
no problem and as an extra bonus the
super version of the 1650 features NVIDIA's touring and bank encoder so you
can capture your epic gaming moments at very high quality with only a small hit
to your pc's performance the same inexpensive case and power supply combo
return from our 300 machine but instead of resorting to a spinning disc we've
gone full SSD with a 960 gig patriot
burst now we could have dropped some of that capacity and invested that savings
into a faster graphics card but honestly we felt it was better to just save our
pennies for today and upgrade the GPU down the line once availability improves
and next-gen budget products launch now a thousand us dollars tends to be the
bang for the buck sweet spot so our intention was to use the best bang for
the buck CPU on the market AMD's ryzen 5 3600 but there aren't any fortunately
the core i5 9600k and an MSI z390a pro
is gonna cost us almost the same amount and it's in stock we equipped our board
with 16 gigs of ddr4 3600 rip saw memory
from g-skill and you know what this actually ain't bad we didn't give up
much in terms of performance going to last gen Intel here but
if you are watching down the line a ryzen 5 3600 with an ASUS prime b550ma
would have been our first choice because even though it would sacrifice some raw
gaming performance it offers a better upgrade path for the future as for our
graphics card man i gotta level with you here guys this
was really tough when we put this script together just a couple of days ago we
had an ASUS dual fan rtx 2060 in here for 330 bucks since then
it's gone everything's gone and the best we can do
is an rx 5600 xt now the 1660 super is
also an option but it costs more than AMD's offering and generally performs
worse so i'd stick with team red here unless shadow play gameplay capture is
particularly important to you a knock to a nhu 12s CPU cooler gives us plenty of
thermal room for overclocking and goes perfectly with our quiet seasonic s123
650 watt power supply we chose a phantek
p300a mesh case for its great airflow and aesthetics and as a bonus it is
super easy to build in now we didn't get a capacity upgrade for storage but our
one terabyte samsung 970 evo NVMe drive
is likely to contribute to better game loading times in the future at two
thousand dollars we are teetering on the precipice of big spender territory and
this is probably where most people will draw the line now we would have strongly
preferred a ryzen 5 5600x here but at
roughly the same price the 3700x is not
without its charm either it offers decent gaming performance and with eight
cores 16 threads it runs circles around most of its competition at this price
point in pretty much anything else with value like that you can show off
your inner geek by also picking up a stealth pins CPU shirt from lttstore.com
ah you snuck that in there that's good now we also doubled our RAM to 32 gigs
of trident xeno ddr4 3600 and went with a chromax black knocked to a nhd15s
the black version does cost a little bit more but it looks so good and we decided
to treat ourselves we also splurged on our motherboard choosing an ASUS tough
x570 pro wi-fi it's got all the modern
features wi-fi six bluetooth 5.1 two and a half gigabit Ethernet and an internal
usb 3.2 gen 2 header for high speed usb
powering this computer is an 850 watt seasonic focus g giving us plenty of
power and decent efficiency with an 80 plus gold rating and we picked up two
terabytes of pci express gen 4 storage in the form of the Corsair mp600 all of
this is housed in the new 4000d also from Corsair with its ample airflow
space for a 360 millimeter radiator if we ever want to go water cooling in the
future and a clean tempered glass look for graphics there is
there is no graphics card that we can recommend in this price bracket but we
left you 500 of budget to work with to pick up an rtx 3070 once the world
returns to sanity if you don't have an older card to use
while you wait i don't know
gtx 1070 seem to be going for about 250
bucks on ebay um they're gonna drop by at least a hundred dollars in value
while you wait but that's a lot better to me than spending nine hundred dollars
today on a 2080 ti and then having it drop four to five hundred dollars of
that value in a few months so
the best of the worst options and it's with that in mind that we are actually
abandoning our three thousand dollar game and more tier this year i mean i
would have loved to put together like a dream machine list with a 16 core 5950x
and a 3080 for you work by day extreme
gamer by night folks but the cold hard truth is that enthusiast tier hardware
is already a dubious value proposition
at manufacturer's suggested prices and if you're paying a big premium on top of
that it's just not good money sense
don't do it if this is what you were after you should have listened to me
eight months ago when i told you to buy pc now before everything is out of stock
for everyone other than the extreme tier folks you probably noticed some main
themes in all of our builds compared to last year we dug deep to upgrade our
power supplies and work in motherboards with updated feature sets we also chose
cases with a little bit more airflow that's because all of our systems except
the thousand dollar tier where we kind of had to skimp on our motherboard are
designed to be upgraded in the future because we'd expect many of you to be
able to sell your placeholder cpus and gpus without taking too much of a hit
and then upgrade to the latest generation components when the time
comes none of that is probably what you wanted to hear but it's the truth
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