- Hello, my friends,
and welcome to a $500 gaming PC tutorial.
Now, this is something that I used to do a lot,
and if you're a long time subscriber to the channel,
thank you.
But also, if you're not,
this is a way where I can kind of show you
some of the best deals on gaming PCs,
but more importantly, how my thought process goes
in actually picking these components,
putting them together, and showing you what kind of PC
you can get yourself for 500 bucks.
So for this video,
I'm going to be using Amazon
to do all of my ordering,
mostly because not only can I put those links
in the description for you, but on top of that,
hopefully you have access to Amazon,
unlike Micro Center, which I love,
but obviously not everyone has a Micro Center.
Now, since the last time I did a budget build,
a lot of things have changed, mostly for the better.
There are a lot of new components like always,
but importantly the chip shortage, the GPU shortage,
a lot of that has not gone
but a lot of things have returned back to normal,
which means that for 500 bucks,
I'm hopeful I can actually build a pretty decent PC.
I'm actually gonna do this in a different way
than I normally would.
I'm gonna look for graphics cards, because at $500,
I should be able to afford a low-end graphics card.
Now, a graphics card is typically
where you wanna spend the most money.
Not always depending on what you're doing,
but for a gaming PC, putting the the max value
on the graphics card is usually your right move.
I'm probably gonna be limited to $200
at the absolute most for my GPU.
I'll see what AMD options are.
So this is a 6600.
The problem is if I spend 250 bucks on this,
the rest of my system is gonna be just, like, garbage town,
which is not necessarily always a bad idea.
Like, I could go ultra budget on it,
but the problem is, with 250 bucks,
I'm gonna have to get like an incredibly cheap case,
incredibly cheap board.
Like, that's probably not gonna be the move.
Okay, how about a 6400?
144 bucks. Okay.
This is not a good graphics card, I will say,
but I'm actually gonna leave this open
just as a potential.
So this initial phase
is all about just finding interesting prices,
anything that jumps out to me,
like immediately here's something that's much better.
There's an MSI 6500 XT.
My gut is this is the graphics card I'm gonna go with.
It's actually not always incredibly easy
to figure out what's best, right?
Now, if you're following this tutorial,
you're just gonna click
on all the links in the description, easy.
But when I'm actually trying to go through
and do my research, I like to actually make sure
that I'm trying to get the best stuff.
'Cause sometimes you might find a gem that's hidden
or you'll find some absolute garbage,
which is a lot of what I'm seeing right now.
I think I've got enough options here.
I really wanna knock out the $120 580.
I don't trust AISURIX,
and I don't want to recommend you to do the same.
And then the XFX, the 6400, it's only $10 less.
It's low profile, I just don't trust it
so we're just gonna knock that out, too.
So I've only got two graphics cards here, so 165 and 210.
$165 is probably about the right amount of money
to spend on my GPU.
This should be able to play at 1080P, and importantly,
this won't burn my whole budget
so I can actually afford to get a somewhat decent CPU.
And if I spend like 200 bucks on this graphics card,
I'm gonna have to be very conservative
with the rest of my build.
If you're ever in doubt, one of the things you can do,
and while you need to take this
with a bit of a grain of salt,
is just do a search on the two graphics cards side-by-side.
So looking at this, which is UserBenchmark,
I don't know how much I'm gonna trust it,
but looking at the 1650 versus the 6650-XT,
the 6650-XT here
seems like it is significantly more powerful.
And mind you, I typically try to use more reputable sources
like AnandTech and Tom's Hardware and whatnot,
but I feel confident the 6500-XT is the move.
I'm gonna add that (cash register chimes)
to my cart.
So, with that chosen,
my next big decision is going to be
on Intel versus AMD on the CPU side.
This decision is kind of tricky, honestly.
So one of the things I'm leaning toward
would be the Core i3.
Now, this is 13th gen.
It's gonna have great gaming performance,
but where it's gonna fall a little bit flat
is it's only a quad core processor.
And I do think that this is gonna be
a little bit limited in the long-term.
I'm going a little bit cheaper on my CPU
than I think I could,
also partially because I just don't know
what I'm gonna spend for the rest of the build.
Right now, though, I'm leaning toward this Ryzen 5 5500.
But, importantly, this is only $98,
and I know that if we go with this,
we can pick up a cheap AM4 motherboard
for hopefully 60, 70 bucks that'll completely do the job,
and at that point we're gonna be sitting
on an actually decent budget
to make sure we've got a well-rounded system.
So, with our CPU and our GPU in the cart,
we've spent 262.99 of our $500 budget,
which is actually a pretty reasonable number.
I actually could have maybe spent a little bit more here,
but based on the options that I've got,
I feel pretty good about that.
Once you've chosen your CPU,
the natural next step is to choose the motherboard.
Now, because we've got the 5500 in our cart,
we need to pick an AM4 motherboard
that's specifically going to support that.
So, I'm just gonna pull up that AM4 motherboard.
I'm gonna look for most likely an A320
'cause those are the cheapest,
but a B450 may also be the move.
So there's an ASRock board for 70 bucks,
but it does specifically call out
support Ryzen 5000 and 5000 G-Series.
Man, do I actually do this though?
70 bucks is a really good deal.
It's a super basic board, but this is a $500 system.
Like, I gotta save the money when I can.
(cash register chimes) We're now at $333,
still a good amount of budget.
I'm not too worried.
The next thing I'll do is go for RAM.
So I should be able to easily afford 16 gigs.
So I can go Corsair for $48,
Silicon Power for $35. That's very cheap.
It might be tempting to just grab
a couple of random sticks of RAM,
but I do want to at least make sure I'm buying a kit.
So 16 gigs even on a $500 system
is pretty much the minimum, right?
Like you shouldn't be buying any computer
with eight gigs of RAM in 2023.
(clears throat)
MacBook Air. (trumpet note)
I normally wouldn't recommend this,
but I actually, I think I'm gonna go
with the Silicon Power RAM.
Maybe not the greatest decision in my life.
I think it's worth making.
I think this is should be fine.
The parts I have left are my power supply,
my SSD, and my case.
And with $130 to play with,
I'm gonna have to go kind of cheap on my SSD.
In fact, I'm actually go with my SSD now.
The Acclamator for $22.
I'm not gonna do that.
I would maybe spend a little bit more
to get a brand on your SSD,
especially because it's not really gonna be
that much more expensive.
When it comes to purchasing an SSD,
35 bucks for 500 gig is a no-brainer.
If I wanna go down to 250 gig, I'm only saving $6.
It doesn't make sense, so 500 gig, no-brainer,
add that to cart, (cash register chimes)
and that puts us right over $400.
Don't cheap out on your power supply.
Is what I normally say, do as I say, not as I do.
I'm gonna get a cheaper power supply,
but I'm mostly gonna go with this one
because I have bought probably a half dozen of these
at this point over the years.
And while they're not the most high quality supplies,
importantly they work and they don't explode.
What more can you ask for, especially for 35 bucks?
You know what, now that I'm actually saying it,
we got $60 left,
a perfect amount for actually a decent case.
We can actually get a good case for 60 bucks.
When it comes to picking a case,
there are two main choices here.
So there's a name brand case or a cheapo case.
Usually the difference,
in fact, it's exactly the difference
that I've got to choose from here is quality versus RGB.
It's pretty much as simple as that.
And I think I'm gonna recommend
going with the actual name brand case,
not only because it does have the three fans,
but also I trust that the build quality's gonna be better
and I trust that it's gonna be
a little bit easier to build in,
whereas some of the cheaper cases sometimes
will have like literal, like, sharp edges and whatnot.
It's totally up to you.
There's no bad choice between these two,
but for me, I'm gonna go with the Zalman.
I add that to my cart (cash register chimes)
and my total is $500.32.
- [Ken] Wow, you went over.
Your budget!
- All right, let me go through my cart.
So, I've got an AMD Ryzen 5 5500.
I've got an MSI Radeon RX 6500 XT,
the bulk of my budget right there,
the ASRock A520M-HDV motherboard.
I don't feel super strong about it
but I do think that is probably our best option.
16 gigs of Silicon Power DDR4,
a 500 gig WD Blue SSD,
500-watt Thermaltake power supply and a Zalman S3 case.
All right, my friends,
I'm going to order these components now
and I will see you in a moment for the build
and test of the Boson 5.0.
(upbeat music)
All right, my friends, let us build a $500 gaming PC.
Today, I'm gonna do a speed run of this thing,
more so to see exactly how well it works
and what kind of value you're getting for a $500 budget.
Now, if you've seen any of my PC tutorials,
you know that my favorite thing to do
is always to open up the systems,
but especially with this case,
since I've never built inside of it,
just to take a look and see
if there's anything that jumps out.
It looks very standard,
which standard's not a bad thing, right?
This looks standard as in like what high-end cases
are asking for nowadays.
All right, we'll see what is inside.
Well, I will say we did choose the acrylic side panel
instead of the tempered glass.
Yeah, it's gonna look fine.
We saved a few bucks there,
but other than that,
the interior of this case actually looks quite nice.
So you do have a little basement
where you can hide your power supply
and kind of keep some cables nice and neat.
We have two USB 2.0 and one USB 3.
I can't really complain at this price.
Maybe a little be nice to have an extra USB 3
or a USB-C, but it's fine, it's fine.
So taking a close look at the motherboard,
you'll see that we've got a wide selection of I/O,
including PS2- - Whoa!
Is that- - VGA-
- Woo! - and HDMI
and DVI.
- [Ken] Wow, this was made for dinosaurs.
- This is a quite low-end motherboard,
but when you're building yourself a $500 gaming PC,
you gotta cut corners, and I think this is one
that I'm pretty okay with cutting.
The fact that I can confidently go out on Amazon,
spend 30 minutes looking for parts
and come back with a $500 system
that I can be very like happy with, it's nice.
Oh, you know what the problem's gonna be
when everyone's running chatbots on their GPUs
and then that ruins pricing again.
Premium wraith thermal solution.
I dunno how premium it is,
but it's better than an Intel stock cooler.
Goodbye, little CPU.
I hope you enjoyed your two seconds of air
before you got brutally crushed.
(screwdriver clicks)
Boy, I love these noises so much.
Oh no, did they get? Oh man.
- Yeah, it's meant so- - It's blister packed.
- [Ken] kids couldn't open it.
- 'Kay, this wasn't called for.
What kind of [unintelligible] sends a blister pack?
You ever heard the phrase
"party in the front,
"naked in the back?"
(Ken laughs)
- [Ken] Oh my god.
- I will say while the WD Blue is a high quality,
very reasonable SSD, it is quite blue,
which does stand out a little bit in our case, I will say.
- [Ken] Again, for a $500 game PC-
- Yeah, it looked- - can you really complain?
- No, I can't complain.
Look, when you're building a budget gaming PC,
the way you spend your money is incredibly important.
A few dollars here and a few dollars there
adds up really quickly.
I think it's one of those things where when you're building
and you get excited about your components,
you can wildly overspend very quickly,
but when you really keep yourself to a firm budget
it just means that, I don't wanna say
you're gonna have to corner cut,
but you have to take some aggressive apexes
on your way to the finish line.
Alrighty, my friends, let's see if the Boson 5.0
wants to cooperate and work first try.
(upbeat music)
Let's see if Boson 5.0 wants to work on the second try
now that I've gotten that outta my system.
Did I forget to plug in it?
- [Ken] Rookie mistake.
- Here's the thing, I literally looked back here,
and from this angle it looked like it was on.
All right, take two.
Wow, that's actually like proper quiet.
Literally with no side panels on,
I can barely even hear that.
Yes, yes, yes.
Let's go.
Alright, so importantly, we are up and running.
For this, I'm going to fast forward a little bit
through the actual setup process.
The main things to do here is anytime I build a system,
I always like to make sure
that the BIOS is fully up to date,
so I'll go on the ASRock website,
download the most recent BIOS for this board, flash that,
and then I'll install Windows and I'll be right back
to see what the performance of our Boson 5.0 is like.
I also should probably put the side panels back on.
- [Ken] And also don't hit it.
The metal is so thin. (metal clicks)
- Behold, my friends, the Boson 5.0.
With a $500 budget, I'm really happy,
especially with the performance of this system.
And I've already taken the time to tweak it,
so now that we have Windows and all our drivers installed,
I've changed the memory speed to the full XMP
as well as we've got Resizable BAR
and able to give us just that little bit
of extra performance that you get
by using an AMD CPU and an AMD GPU.
A very fair question
is why I chose to use the Radeon 6500-XT.
This is a budget GPU, which is pretty good for gaming
but is very lacking in pretty much every other category.
Now, for a $500 budget, to me this is the right move,
because if you look at something like the NVIDIA equivalent,
which would be a 1660 Super, mind you,
this is a more powerful GPU,
but it is over $100 more expensive.
If you've got an extra $100,
that's a better option, full stop.
It's gonna be much better for streaming especially.
But the downside here is that if you want to build a system
in this kind of category, you have to make some choices.
You have to make some sacrifices
in some areas versus others.
And for this, I'm prioritizing gaming performance,
not streaming, not everything else.
Because look, if I wanna go with the NVIDIA GPU,
I could do that, and then I'm gonna be building
in a cardboard box with eight gigs of RAM
with a tiny little SSD.
Like, I have to make so many other compromises
with the system.
- I couldn't afford a present this year,
so I got you this box.
- If you're gonna build yourself a seven or $800 gaming PC,
by all means go ahead,
but once you start going down that slippery slope
of getting outside your budget,
you can find yourself spending an insane amount of money.
Of course, there's definitely an argument
that you could just buy yourself an Xbox Series S
and get similar-ish performance, but the downside there
is that you've got yourself the limitations of a console.
This system is fully capable
of playing pretty much every PC game out there.
You might not be crushing it at 4K Ultra settings
but you're gonna be able to play almost anything,
and I think that that's gonna actually stay true
for quite a while because this is based
on the same RDNA 2 architecture of the most recent series
of consoles between PS5 Series X and Series S.
The fact that you've got ray tracing support
and the fact that this is actually broadly equivalent
to the Xbox Series S when it comes to graphics horsepower.
Sure, the GPU is a little bit smaller
so it's got fewer CUs to work with,
but it is running at a much higher clock speed,
meaning that as long as games are coming out
for the Series S, odds are you'll probably be able
to play them with the Boson 5.0.
So to give you a little bit of an idea
of the performance of the system,
I'm gonna run a quick 3DMark Time Spy benchmark.
Look at this. Look how nice this looks.
And our score is 5,299. Pretty solid.
So basically what we've got here is a system
which punches above its weight when it comes to gaming
and maybe leaves some streaming
and some extra goodies on the table.
Look, we're not gonna be streaming,
we're not gonna be doing extra stuff.
We're gamers.
We game and we have enough RAM for Discord and Chrome.
Okay, well, no one has enough RAM for Chrome,
but, you know, take what you can get.
10,351, so a very respectable score
for the Ryzen 5 5500 CPU.
It's funny, because at this $500 budget,
we've actually got two weird choices.
Both our CPU and GPU are very unusual,
but while they both have some limitations,
I think those limitations
actually work really well together.
So this Ryzen 5 5500 was originally a laptop CPU
that they just brought out for desktop use,
so it has fewer PCI lanes for the graphics card,
but guess what?
Our GPU has fewer PCI lanes as well,
so it just goes together like PB and J.
Actually, that's pretty accurate.
It's easy to make fun of "Fortnite"
as a game that's just for kids,
but the tech behind it is incredibly powerful.
So recently there was a patch for the next gen consoles,
although it's not quite fully implemented on the Series S,
that enables things like ray tracing.
You've got things like Nanite,
There's a lot of stuff here
that will allow you to get a huge leap in visual quality.
And so I'm gonna just try to turn it on.
This is probably not going to work really well,
but I'm just curious to see pushing the limits
of the performance of the system,
because what I've turned on here
simply would not be working on a lower end NVIDIA GPU.
Realistically, if this is what you're doing,
you should be turning some of this stuff off,
'cause again, this is a $500 gaming PC,
but if I can get anywhere near a usable frame rate,
this will actually be a pretty significant step up
over what you would get on a Series S
and I will definitely take that.
So, how about 8FPS?
I'm going maybe turn my settings down just a little bit.
I got a little ambitious.
We're gonna go to medium settings.
Look at that.
Oh, that's much more like it.
Now we're up to 60FPS, so this was just 1080P medium.
That is so much better.
I'm gonna just say straight up,
"Fortnite's" super duper playable at 1080P.
Ah, ooh.
- [Ken] Austin! It works.
- I mean, oh, poop.
"Forza", "Forza", "Forza"
I'm getting 90FPS.
Oh, what?
Playing "Forza Horizon 5".
This is a game which is very well optimized for Xbox,
of course, which also means it's really well optimized
for this hardware, because again, what I've built here
is not that weird.
(Ken laughs)
(Austin clears throat)
While I might be running a little bit low on video memory,
it's fine, 'cause guess what?
It's running at 100FPS. (clears throat)
As I was saying, this game is very well optimized,
not only for the Xboxes,
but importantly for the RDNA graphics and the Ryzen CPU,
which means that, I won't think you should expect
100FPS in all games, but running in 1080P medium settings,
this is 100% playable.
I mean 80, 90FPS, even wanna get into more busy areas,
that's dope.
It has been a long time since I've been able
to in good faith recommend a $500 gaming PC build.
But with this Boson 5.0, it checks all the boxes.
If you want a 1080P gaming PC,
if you wanna get yourself into PC gaming in general,
this is an excellent first step.
Thank you very much for watching.
Make sure to subscribe.
Check out the PC tutorial if you wanna know
how to actually put the system together,
and all the links I used
will be in the description of this video.
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