- 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 Buyer's 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 bye.
(bright upbeat music)
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.
It's not pretty and it comes with a major caveat.
Our Gigabyte GA-A320M motherboard
does not support our hexacore 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 BIOS and 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,
but when our budget is this low, every penny counts.
And it shows.
How many of you out there are using 4gig sticks of DDR4?
Well, we are.
And our 2 1/2 inch SSD is only 240 gigs to boot.
Get it?
'Cause it's your boot drive 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 tight 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, we can't really complain
even if it's not gonna 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.
An 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 get.
First order of business.
Goodbye, 256 gigs SATA SSD.
Hello, Crucial P3 Plus 1TB 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 Gen4 speeds.
That's why we're going
with the ASRock B550M PG Riptide motherboard.
Not only does it support a Gen4 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 3,200 mega transfers per second CL16.
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 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 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 gonna 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 P3's Gen4 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 $160.
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 5800X3D
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 leftover
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.
12 gigs of VRAM on a 192 bit bus,
a boost clock of over 2,500 megahertz.
I mean, it might not be the 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 $1,500 price point, over half of our budget
is going towards our CPU and our GPU.
We're sticking with AMD again, going for the 6900 XT
which is gonna give us great rasterization game performance
for under $700 and we're getting a faster CPU.
Now with efficiency cores, the 12600K.
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 Thermalright 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 $2,000 build.
This time around, we're building in a case
that we've used lots throughout the last couple of years.
The Phanteks P500A Digital, and we're gonna need that thing
for all the juicy storage that we've now got
with a 2TB 7200 hard drive that goes along with our 980 Pro
that we have now doubled in size to 2TB as well.
We're still using only 16 gigs of DDR4 memory
but it's now running
at 3,600 mega transfers per second CL18,
and we bumped our GPU up to a Radeon RX 6950 XT.
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 wifi.
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 PCPartPicker,
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 secondhand market is super wild right now.
Good time to build a PC.