It's a GREAT Time to Build a PC - Holiday Buyer’s Guide 2018
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2019-05-06
·
1,985 words · ~9 min read
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between the nan flash shortages dram price fixing and the GPU mining boom and
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subsequent bust 2018 has been one heck of a ride but now
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as the holidays approach it's looking like a fantastic time all of a sudden to
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build a new gaming pc and it's my job to
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find the best deals at five hundred dollars a thousand dollars and two
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thousand dollars for you so naturally i didn't do it i had
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Anthony do it but it's okay he did a great job
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speaking of great our sponsor ifixit give the gift of fixing this holiday
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season with ifixit's pro-tech toolkit visit ifixit.com forward slash Linus at
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the link below and get yours today
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before we begin a note about our part selections we decided not to use sale
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pricing except where components are more or less perpetually on sale where we
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used the price that it was available at most often this way you guys can expect
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these prices or less so if you see
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better deals on these parts or on other parts go for it this video is just meant
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to be a guideline so let's start with our budget just game
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pc with only 500 bucks to spend every
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dollar needs to contribute to gaming performance in some way and when we look
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at last year's wow 2017 was rough
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we just barely managed a ryzen processor
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and we had a meh case with an even more meh power supply
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this year we're able to use the much faster not to mention cheaper ryzen 3
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2200g and this time we also get a b350 chipset
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motherboard which means we can actually overclock it a little bit
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now sadly we are still stuck with eight gigs of RAM but since we've got four
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slots on our board we can get a dual channel kit to improve the performance
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of our bandwidth hungry ryzen CPU without sacrificing future upgradability
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but wait there's more this time around we swung a separate
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case and 80 plus bronze power supply with its own three-year warranty and for
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storage well this was kind of a no-brainer so our sshd unfortunately ended up almost
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10 more expensive for the capacity this year
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but it's fast enough that you're not gonna feel the crunch too quickly while you're
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gaming so we had to make a compromise there and it was a worthwhile one
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because you will be gaming we're picking up a Radeon rx 570 this year the four
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gig model of course but that gtx 1050 ti
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from yesteryear is finally gone and we've got performance more akin to a gtx
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1060 three gig this is one of those it's
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always on sale cases because newegg claims it's on sale but looking at the
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pricing history it's been on sale for the entire month of november and it sold
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for not much more going all the way back to october so the heavens have opened up
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and smiled upon the budget gamers this year because by our math you can grab
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this setup for just over 501 on newegg
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or just under 500 if you spread your purchases to other vendors
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moving on we've got our game now mid-range pc
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and last year we were in pretty rough shape on this one too if i'm being
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honest yeah we managed to Ryzen five but it was a quad core this year we're
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up to six cores thanks to the most versatile CPU in our recent CPU buyer's
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guide the ryzen 5 2600 which
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it's even it's even five dollars cheaper by the way thanks AMD
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and what's more we're able to get proper ddr4 3200 memory to feed the beast for
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less than what we paid for 2400 megahertz last year i am so glad that
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whole RAM thing is over this time for our boot drive we're sticking with
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solid-state storage and this is crazy we
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are getting double the capacity this time around for five dollars less making
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this easily the biggest SSD that this segment has ever been able to afford an
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extra bonus is that at one terabyte you're not going to have to burn as many
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erase cycles swapping games around to fit in a more confined SSD and it's even
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m.2 moving on our case doesn't have a window
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to show off the clean interior but the Corsair carbide 270r offers both build
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quality and creature comfort improvements over the thermaltake versa
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complete with easier to clean removable dust filters and then going into it is
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the bigger 650 watt variant of the evga
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b3 power supply that we used last year giving us a bit of room to upgrade later
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on remember guys this is evga's like actually good even though it's 80 plus
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bronze psu line and it should serve you well for years to come
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finally we also picked up a gtx 1070 ti
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for a cool 20 less than we paid for the 1070 that got us through the last two
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years by the way it's not likely that these things will stick around for too much
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longer the existing 10 series stock is slowly but surely disappearing from the
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top down so either move fast or hopefully the rtx gtx whatever it is
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2060 ends up being a decent replacement only time will tell what we do know
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right now though is that in total this build weighed in at a hair over a grand
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but that's less than five percent of the budget and many of these parts regularly
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go on sale and it's freaking awesome so happy shopping
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finally we haven't forgotten about you mega ballers out there you so for you
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guys we've got the game on high-end gaming rig which at two thousand dollars
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should last you quite a while now looking at every other year's game on
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build you might think that us going from an hedt or high-end desktop socket down
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to a core i7 on the consumer socket is a
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downgrade and in terms of pci express
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lanes you'd be right but in terms of processing power we're actually gaining
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two cores that are each faster than any
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previous CPU that we've used in these builds which more than makes up for
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their lower thread count due to the loss of hyper threading
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we also lose quad channel memory but we keep our 32 gigs of ddr4 3200 RAM this
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time in the form of a dual channel kit that leaves two slots open for future
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expansion our storage improvement this time around
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is in picking up the SSD that we used in our game now build the wd blue one
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terabyte m.2 SATA which gives us one terabyte of fast storage to go along
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with our four terabytes of 5400 RPM spinning iron so the os and commonly
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used apps and games go on the SSD and the longer term storage and lesser used
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games go on the hard drive with plenty of room on both or you can even check
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out a software caching solution like primocash split up your SSD and kind of
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divide and conquer that way now we're keeping our sea sonic 80 plus
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gold power supply and our knock to a cooler from last year because they're
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great deals and the cooler in particular is good enough to handle quite a bit
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more than our core i7 9700k can put out and then for our case we've splurged on
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the tempered glass Corsair crystal 460x with all of its RGB goodness
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now in light of the case choice some folks might prefer a liquid cooler for
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aesthetics but just be prepared to spend a little extra for the privilege to get
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comparable cooling capacity to what we've already got
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which leads us then to our most controversial pick this time
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around last year we practically begged AMD and
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NVIDIA to give us a solid upgrade of some sort so maybe next year we'll get a
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2 000 system that's worth upgrading to from our 2016 model
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like can we AMD and NVIDIA if we're really good
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and we've got it the rtx 2070 yes i know
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rtx is nowhere near worth it at this time but that doesn't mean that the rtx
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2070 isn't a good graphics card it's
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just an overpriced graphics card and by the
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time we wrote up this buyer's guide brand new stock of gtx 1080s and 1080
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ti's was essentially depleted
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so unless you want to buy those used which by the way is a valid option one
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that we'd recommend these guides only include products that
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you can buy brand new in a store so this is the best performance for gaming that
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we could get into this price bracket and it ain't bad for productivity either
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on that subject this video is about gaming pcs and of course that was the
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goal but as it turns out all of our builds across the board ended up pretty
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well balanced for either gaming or productivity tasks and we ended up
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inadvertently following some of our own advice from our recent CPU buyer's guide
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so as it always is with custom pcs the sky
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is the limit in terms of configurability but we think that our rigs make a great
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starting point for almost anyone who isn't looking for a hyper specialized
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build so now we'll wrap up then with full disclosure time we don't get any
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kickbacks for manufacturers for our holiday buyer's guide parts but what we
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do get is a commission if you buy them using the links below so if you're in
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the market go ahead and check them out it truly is a great time to buy a pc
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especially a value one 2018 was like a real roller coaster of pricing and
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availability but here we are finally at the end of it with a tangible
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improvement across the board over previous years so may your holidays be
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filled with tech and gaming cheer is this even visible in the frame let's
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bring some springs holiday cheer yeah
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and may your holidays also be filled with screwdriver kits ifixit's manta kit
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has 112 steel bits comes complete with standard bits like phillips and flathead
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but also torques tripoint and game bits as well and includes not one but two
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aluminum screwdriver handles a hefty quarter inch drive for full size
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applications and a smaller four millimeter for precision work both
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drivers feature magnetic bit sockets knurled grips and silky smooth spinning
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tops and all ifixit tools are backed by a lifetime warranty so if something
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breaks they'll fix it for free that is how warranties work
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visit ifixit.com forward slash Linus and pick up the new mantakit today
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because if you don't then when tomorrow rolls around and you
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need it you won't have it
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so thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit that
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like button or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in the video description also link down
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there is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community
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forum which you should totally just checking to make sure i was wearing a t-shirt but i am it's good
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it's all good