- What a roller coaster in this crazy year,
AMD finally eclipsed Intel in gaming performance
with their new 5000 series CPU's.
Nvidia unleashed true 4K 120Hz gaming on the world
with the new RTX 3000 series
and team red brought out a true competitor
with their big Navi RX 6000.
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 as sure as heck,
won't stop us now.
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(upbeat music)
Like last year products that we choose for our built,
must be available, brand new, taken at whatever
their usual prices and they've got to fit within about 5%
of our target budgets.
At $300, our "just game lite" price tier was
just as challenging to hit as last year.
But, we did pull off a passable e-sports 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 B450M-A.
it's got four RAM lots 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 FBM-X2, 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, but 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 B6460M-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 Triple-A gaming at 10 ADP, no problem.
And, as an extra bonus, the super version of the 1650
features in videos touring and banking coder.
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
returned from our $300 machine.
But instead of resorting to a spinning disc
we've gone full SSD with a 960Gig 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, $1000 tends to be the bang for the buck sweet spot.
So our intention was to use the best
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 Z390-A PRO
is gonna cost us almost the same amount and it's in stock.
We equipped our board with 16 gigs
of DDR4 3600 Ripjaw 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 a Asus Prime B550M-A, 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 got to 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 is offering
and generally performs worse.
So I'd stick with team red here,
unless ShadowPlay gameplay capture
is particularly important to you.
A Noctua NH-U12S CPU cooler gives us plenty
of thermal room for overclocking and goes perfectly
with our quiet Seasonic S12III 650W power supply.
We chose a Phanteks P300A mesh case
for its great air flow 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 $2,000, 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 and it's good.
Now we also doubled our RAM to 32 gigs
of Trident Z Neo DDR4 3600
and went with a Chromax.black Noctua NH-D15S.
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
and choosing an ASUS TUF X570-PRO WiFi.
It's got all the modern features, WiFi 6, Bluetooth 5.1
2.5 gigabyte 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
for storage in the form of the CORSAIR MP600.
All of this is housed in the new 4000 D also from CORSAIR,
with its ample airflow, space for a 360 millimeter radiator.
If we ever wanna go water cooling in the future
and a clean tempered glass look.
For graphics there's a 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 seemed to be going
for about 250 bucks on eBay.
They're gonna drop by at least $100 in value while you wait,
but that's a lot better to me than spending $900 today
on a 2080 Ti, and then having it drop
four to $500 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 $3,000 game end 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 enthusiastic tier hardware
is already a dubious value proposition
at manufacturer-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've listened to me eight months ago
when I told you to buy a 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 $1000 tier where we kinda had to skimp
on our motherboard are designed to be upgraded
in the future.
'Cause we'd expect many of you to be able to
sell your placeholders CPU's and GPU's
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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When you're looking for another video to watch,
maybe check out this over the top build I did
and sold to a lucky customer for just 20 bucks.
It was a lot of fun.