got a gamer in your life who's looking for an upgrade itching to spend your
holiday bonus or maybe your computer just exploded and you need to fix fast
well thanks to Amazon sponsoring this video we've got you covered with our
2022 holiday buyers guide because not
only is building a reasonably priced gaming rig actually viable for a change
you might be surprised to see just how low prices can go if you're willing to
buy last year's model ddr5 more like DDR
Buy
thank you foreign
we're kicking things off with our Apu Super Saver build for the Casual Gamer
out there who just needs something that works we managed to get our cheapest
system built for a little over 300 dollars it's not pretty and it comes
with a major caveat our Gigabyte GAA
320m motherboard does not support our hexa Core ryzen 5 4600g with Vega 7
Graphics out of the box but if you have
access to an older am4 CPU like a 2400g
you can update the biosan you are good to go however if you're willing to Shell
out about 20 extra you can avoid this hassle by simply going with an a520
board instead I think it's probably worth the 20 to 30 dollars but when our
budget is this low every penny counts and it shows how many of you out there
are using four gig sticks of ddr4 well
we are and our two and a half inch SSD is only 240 gigs to boot get it because
it's your boot drives and the rest of
your storage anyway we've gone with the zelman S3 the cheapest ATX case we could
find but if you've got an old home computer collecting dust you could
probably Save A Buck or 50 and just use that if you're on this type of a budget
you might also consider picking up an Amazon Basics mouse and keyboard they're
affordable and they just work as for our
power supply well it hopefully will work it's only 430 Watts 80 plus not 80 plus
bronze just 80 plus but it's from thermaltake who should reply to your
emails if you have any problems and for under 30 dollars we can't really
complain even if it's not going to give us a lot of room for upgrades leading us
to our first upgrade our 500 build if
you're a gamer you know you're going to want a dedicated GPU eventually and Apu
is fine to get started but if you spend a bit extra now you can make sure your
system has enough power and storage for the future maybe some faster RAM even a
nicer case for a couple hundred bucks more let's see what we can can get first
order of business goodbye 256 gig SATA
SSD hello crucial P3 plus one terabyte
NVMe SSD at 84. it's a steal and while
our budget doesn't allow us to improve our processor now almost anything that
we would upgrade to later is going to support Gen 4 speeds that's why we're
going with the ASRock b550mpg Riptide
motherboard not only does it support a Gen 4 drive but what gaming rig would be
complete without argb headers and some motherboard armor memory was another
huge upgrade for a small price since ddr4 is so cheap right now we even
managed to squeeze in more RGB with this 2x8 gig Corsair Vengeance kit running at
3200 Mega transfers per second cl-16 and once you can afford a graphics card
you'll need some more juice so we've upgraded to another thermaltake power
supply this time with 80 plus bronze efficiency and a 750 watt rating now to
be clear this category was full of tough choices I mean we had to pick between
between either an APU build but with a
good upgrade path or a relatively low tiered GPU build that was going to make
some compromises and might not perform as well as you might Hope anyway there
is however a middle ground if you're willing to take a little bit of risk and
maybe spend a bit more like 600 bucks because there are a lot of great deals
in the used graphics card market right now thanks to the recent crypto crash
we've got a few recent budget build videos that you can check out if you
want to stray from the safe path of new warranty Cloud purchases at our next
price tier a thousand dollars you absolutely could go buy a 500 GPU slap
it into our previous system and call it a day however both Intel and AMD have
released their latest and greatest offering upgrade paths that are
unavailable to our am4 socket 500 build
friendship ended with 4600g now Core i5
12400f is my best friend unlike the high
higher end of Intel's 12th gen processors this little guy doesn't have
any efficiency cores but it boosts a
little higher than our previous six core CPU and wins out in both single and
multi-threaded workloads now that we don't need integrated Graphics we're
going to save a couple of bucks and get the F version and this Pro z690p
motherboard from MSI which should give us a phenomenal upgrade path thanks to
its beefy vrms and its ability to unlock k-series chips now since 13th gen still
supports ddr4 we're not shooting ourselves in the foot by sticking with
the same Corsair Vengeance modules from before and our crucial p3s Gen 4 speeds
will now be taken advantage of now some of you are probably screaming at me
right now Linus the 5600x is on sale on
Amazon for a hundred sixty dollars you fool and you're absolutely right with a
cheap b550 motherboard we could save almost 200 right now but that sale won't
last forever and upgrading later to a 50
800x3d could end up costing you a pretty penny if you can find one if you do
decide to go AMD now though you'll have more than enough left over to pick up a
screwdriver from lttstore.com thanks to the other recent price reductions from
AMD you can now get an ASRock RX 6700 XT
for as low as 390 dollars 12 gigs of
vram on a 192-bit bus a boost clock of over 2500 megahertz I mean it might not
be it NVIDIA when it comes to Ray tracing or streaming but this thing is a
beast for either 1080P or even 1440p
gaming as for our case it's still good enough for now but we would recommend
going a little over budget and maybe getting something nicer like this or
this with slightly improved cable management and Creature Comforts it can
just make the build a little bit more pleasant but if a little more pleasant
isn't enough for you if you're thinking of maybe going 4K at our 1500 price
point over half of our budget is going towards our CPU and our our GPU we're
sticking with AMD again going for the 6900 XT which is going to give us great
rasterization game performance for under 700 and we're getting a faster CPU now
with efficiency course the 12 600k we
also upgraded our boot drive to a Samsung 980 Pro and finally we're
getting a nicer case with fractal's Focus 2 RGB mid tower for our cooler we
chose the thermal right Peerless assassin 120 SE argb a decent cooler for
just 40 bucks that should be plenty for a core i5 if looks are more important to
you you can actually save some money here and not upgrade to the 980 Pro
spending it on a nicer looking case or cooler instead or maybe a fully modular
power supply and another valid option would be to bump your memory up to 3600
Mega transfers per second we felt that 3200 was good enough for us for now
though and besides we still need some upgrades for our two thousand dollar
build this time around we're building in a case that we've used Lots throughout
the last couple of years the phantek's p500a digital and we're gonna need that
thing for all the juicy storage that we've now got with a two terabyte 7200
hard drive that goes along with our 980 Pro that we have now doubled in size to
two terabytes as well we're still using only 16 gigs of ddr4 memory but it's now
running at 3600 Mega transfers per second cl18 and we bumped our GPU up to
a Radeon RX 6950xt that 750 watt power
supply should still be okay as long as we stick to gaming and don't try to
overclock the snot out of our Core i5 13600 KF but we're gonna upgrade to an
80 plus gold efficiency fully modular unit for a bit of a cleaner look and
peace of mind a good chunk of change also went to purchasing a z790 board
with integrated Wi-Fi so if you don't mind sticking with the older chipset and
you don't need Wireless you could actually save a bit of money there and
leave the old motherboard the hard drive is also not necessarily required but
hard drives have gotten wildly inexpensive these days and it's nice to
have a spot to save any extra files you have particularly to something that's a
little easier to recover data from honestly I was expecting to find more
NVIDIA cards in today's builds but the reality is that AMD has made some
aggressive price reductions recently and
with free Prime shipping through Amazon it was kind of a no-brainer thanks again
to them for sponsoring this video I mean no joke just using PC part picker they
were usually the cheapest option anyway particularly if you already have a Prime
membership and they're going to have more sales as we move closer to Black
Friday and the holiday season so keep your eyes peeled as for now we're gonna
have all these products listed Linked In the description down below if you
enjoyed this video be sure to check out our recent budget builds like the 69
gaming PC and the upgrade that we made
to it later the second hand Market is
super wild right now good time to build a PC