**The Importance of Budgeting when Building or Upgrading a Gaming Computer**

When it comes to building or upgrading a gaming computer, many people often focus on getting the highest-end components without considering the impact on their overall budget. However, this approach can lead to overspending and diminishing returns. In reality, there are several areas where you can save money and still get an excellent gaming experience.

Firstly, it's essential to note that your CPU is crucial in determining your system's performance, but only if you're not spending the least amount of money on a CPU while trying to pair it with a high-end GPU. With Ryzen CPUs and the latest Intel processors, bottlenecking a GPU has become extremely rare. Even with these powerful CPUs, getting below a certain level of performance from your GPU can be challenging.

Another area where you can easily overspend is in the tier of your graphics card. Reference edition cards are based on the basic design from AMD and NVIDIA, while custom cards like the ASUS ROG Strix Special Edition White 2080 Ti come with additional features that may not necessarily provide significant performance gains. These special edition cards are often designed to overclock, but if you don't plan on doing so, they can be an unnecessary expense.

In contrast, focusing on other areas of your build can allow you to save money and allocate it to a high-end graphics card or other components that will truly make a difference in your gaming experience. For instance, investing in a good power supply unit (PSU) is crucial for delivering sufficient power to your graphics card without overheating. A PSU with a higher wattage rating than the recommended amount can provide overhead and available power above what your system needs.

A 750-watt PSU for a high-end graphics card like the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, for example, would be an overestimation, as it provides more power than needed. A reputable PSU brand is essential to ensure that you're getting a reliable unit that can handle the demands of your system.

Another critical area to consider when building or upgrading a gaming computer is your case. A well-designed case with good airflow and cooling can make a significant difference in maintaining optimal temperatures without breaking the bank.

**Finding the Best Value in Graphics Cards**

In terms of graphics cards, AMD's current offerings are excellent options for those on a budget. The Radeon RX 6800 XT is a top recommendation from our team, as it offers exceptional performance at an affordable price point. While new RDNA 2 mid-range cards are expected to hit the market soon, we're not recommending older architectures like the RX 5700 XT or NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 2060 Super and RTX 2070 Super.

**Tips for Building a Gaming Computer**

When building a gaming computer, it's essential to prioritize your budget wisely. Here are some tips to help you make the most of your build:

* Focus on other areas of your build rather than overspending on high-end components.

* Invest in a good power supply unit (PSU) that meets the recommended wattage rating for your graphics card.

* Consider a well-designed case with good airflow and cooling to maintain optimal temperatures.

* Save money by choosing the right tier of graphics card, such as the Radeon RX 6800 XT.

**Conclusion**

Building or upgrading a gaming computer can be an exciting experience, but it's essential to prioritize your budget wisely. By focusing on other areas of your build rather than overspending on high-end components, you can save money and allocate it to components that will truly make a difference in your gaming experience. Remember to also consider the power supply unit (PSU) and case when building or upgrading your computer.

**Additional Resources**

If you're interested in learning more about building or upgrading a gaming computer, we invite you to check out our other articles and resources on this topic. We'll be sharing more tips and recommendations for finding the best value in components and making the most of your build.

In the comments section below, share your suggestions for saving money when building or upgrading a gaming computer. Our team will review and respond to your comments, and we'll feature the best ones in future articles. Don't forget to follow us on social media at Twitter @js2cents to stay up-to-date on our latest content and behind-the-scenes insights into our content creation process.

We're excited to see what you've built! Share your photos with us on social media, and we might feature them in a future article.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enjs2 cents here we're going to talk about computer parts today and how not to overspend now sure there are like seven or eight main components when it comes to building a computer but we're going to focus on the main four that being cpu motherboard graphics card memory because those easily make up the most expensive parts in your system as well as the easiest areas to overspend and get really nothing back for that money we're going to start with cpus uh there's two main players obviously there's only two players when it comes to building a personal computer that is amd and intel uh it's one of those things where it's becoming very hard to recommend intel these days only because they've not been very innovative they've not really pushed the boundaries they've not really changed anything in fact they're on the same 14-meter process they've been on for years now years and years whereas amd on the other hand has been very innovative in pushing the amount of cores that you can get uh in in the same package running the same motherboards their ipc is significantly better than intel although their core clocks are a little bit behind it's easy to get caught up though in core count and thinking core count is king when it comes to building a computer now we're going to go on the assumption here here that people building a computer right now watching this video are looking at building a gaming computer and there's nothing wrong with that because i've said over and over computers that are built to handle the latest games can handle pretty much any sort of productivity task that you would throw at it in your home i mean sure there are corporate uses and there are very outlier types of use cases where you're going to need a you know the best floating point precision performance and all that sort of stuff but that is not what most people building watching this video are going to be doing so we're going on the assumption you're building a gaming computer now keep in mind that although games are now leveraging more cores than they ever have in the past they're still not going to leverage high core count cpus to their fullest potential in fact we've seen some high-end cpus actually perform worse than the lower end cpus just simply because of the core count and the way that they're utilized with ccx's and such on amd's platform so it's one of those things where a person might be interested in intel because of this the the sheer strength of its compatibility with pretty much all software and all games but if you're the kind of person that wants your computer to have a little bit of forward-facing compatibility and notice i use forward-facing compatibility and not the term future-proofing because there's no such thing as future proofing when it comes to computers you might be highly interested in going amd because of the fact that as games and programs use more cores you get more core per dollar on amd than you do with intel now what cpu is right for you is going to depend again on what you want to do with your cpu we find that the 5600x is a really really good sweet spot in not overspending for your cpu and also getting a high enough core count to where you can do multitasking live streaming have games still be able to utilize them get a high enough core clock to feel like you've got a really high-end system without spending crazy high-end money it's not that long ago where to get the amount of cores that you could on a 5600 x and this is actually 5800x by the way if you're noticing the seven you would have to spend a thousand dollars about five years ago to get the same amount of performance and core clock and core count as you do on the 5600x today in 2020. now this is all hypothetical assuming you can get your hands on it because of the popularity of computers right now and stay-at-home orders and people building home offices and gaming computers and such that um we're assuming you can get your hands on it but things are going to normalize you will be able to get your hands on them in the future intel though is becoming harder and harder to recommend these days just simply because of the reasons i at the start of the start of this segment they do not they have not been innovating at all and they're still kind of holding on to their core base which is like i like to overclock and you know what most people are not doing that on their their daily computers they're just not pushing the boundaries like we do for fun around here um but when it comes to both of these uh cpus you've got to plug them into something and that is motherboards and this is where it is extremely easy to throw away money unnecessarily now obviously the board that you choose is going to depend on the cpu that you chose so you need to make sure that the socket type is correct obviously now this isn't a how-to guide on how to match all that up we're going to assume you know that if you're running an x570 motherboard you have to use an x570 compatible cpu and vice versa when it comes to intel however the chipset is gonna determine which gpu you can put in there because there's not really any backwards compatibility when it comes to intel but there are different tiers of motherboard that make it very easy to overspend this is an extreme rampage board i only have this here because it's like a 700 or 800 motherboard this is a because of intel's x299 extreme platform this right here uh doesn't really offer you a whole lot more than some of the lower like let's say strix motherboard yes this is an x470 but they do make strix for intel and amd vice versa they are sort of cross-compatible when it comes to the tier structure of how the naming scheme works but this is simply uh an easy way to overspend there's very little things very few things that a 700 motherboard would push that out of the way a 700 motherboard can do that a 150 motherboard can't usually the difference here is going to be in the build quality it's going to be how many layers is the pcb how many what's the gold content in the socket how many usbs does it have how many usb cs and or thunderbolt if you're on intel we find that more often than not a let's talk about ryzen here for a second more often than not running the 50 series motherboard is much more beneficial to the cost of your system than running a 70 series motherboard so the x470 motherboard if you're gonna pair it with a 5000 series cpu really the only thing you're giving up uh is the pcie gen 4 capabilities and if you're not running a pcie gen 4 storage device gpus aside because they are still not utilizing all of pcie gen 3 16 x let alone needing pcie gen 4. you could save some money by going with the x470 motherboard making sure it has the latest bios running a 5000 series cpu and get yourself a really good deal because they do like to have blowouts because they are compatible with the latest cpus they're still making them and you can still find them on shelves now there's other things you'll find motherboards having tough armor whether they've got the plastic covers on the back plastic covers on the front how many m.2 storage uh devices are able to be plugged into it and these are areas where it's very easy to overspend because you're not changing anything in terms of the quality of the motherboard itself by how many of those devices it has you can find that if you find yourself a lower tiered motherboard whether it be a strix versus a crosshair for example what tends to make these motherboards different in their pricing is the build quality in terms of their vrms how many chokes and capacitors that it has what's the phase of the vrm and these are things that are really going to only matter to people who are trying to overclock their cpus overclocking the cpu adding more voltage adds more heat it adds more load to the vrms things that if i'm saying this and you don't have any idea what i'm talking about clearly don't pertain to you now that's not to say you can't play around with some overclocking on like a strix motherboard or a lower tiered motherboard usually these motherboards are going to have safeguards built in so that you don't over extend or over exert the power deliveries on these motherboards but that's not to say that you couldn't but if you wanted to play around with adding a couple hundred megahertz here and there or even going into ryzen master and doing a little bit of overclocking there you can pretty much do that with just about any of the motherboards that are on the market now for amd cpus because they are all unlocked unlike intel where if you don't go with a k-sku cpu or kf cpu or f also which just means no igp built in then you're not going to be able to overclock it because the cpu itself is going to be locked whereas amd still offers the value of having every cpu be unlocked the only thing limiting how far you can go with it really is the silicon lottery and the motherboard itself but i would not recommend spending 500 on a motherboard to plop a 300 cpu in there that's a complete waste of money there's no there's no return on that investment and it's nothing but diminished results you're going to get extra features you probably are not going to care about so i find that usually spending anywhere between the price of the cpu or less seems to be about the right parent 150 motherboard or so look at the reviews see what the overall like new egg response has been amazon and then kind of make your best decision there but although the motherboard is responsible for everything being plugged into it it's one of the easiest areas to overspend another area that's easy to overspend is your memory there's this old adage computer's running slow i think i need more memory that goes back to when i was a kid in fact i think back when i was a kid we were talking about like 286's commodore 64's and such ram was something that held you back but that's not the case today and you see more and more of these kits of like 32 gigabytes of dominator platinums or 32 gigs of you know vengeance pros 4 000 megahertz 4 400 megahertz or 5100 megahertz like we see with some of our crucial stuff that we have around here these are areas that are going to just suck up your budget and really give you no tangible return we've done videos in the past where we've talked about what's the sweet spot of ram speed for gaming and on both intel and amd and we found that right around 3000 megahertz is where we scale performance up so between 2133 which is what these rams these rams these ram sticks these dimms will boot at out of the box without enabling xmp or docp which is their extreme profiles for intel and amd they will give you more performance and more fps up until about 3000 rpm 3000 rpm wow car stuff up to about 3 000 megahertz and then beyond that it just it stops scaling so people might go well then why the heck do they even sell these four thousand megahertz and five thousand megahertz stims well extreme overclocking you start pushing the cpu hard enough the memory has to keep up with it and it really makes no difference to the average consumer out there the other thing is the capacity no one out there building a gaming rig needs 32 gigabytes of memory someone out there right now just got triggered by me saying that but the reality is 16 gigabytes is still the sweet spot and you're going to notice it tends to go 2 4 8 16 32 64 because obviously multiples of 8 there's always going to be multiples of 8 times 2 because dual channel which is why you're going to basically see them scale in that sort of mathematical order 16 gigabytes of ddr3000 from any reputable brand whether it be corsair g skill crucial patriot uh these what um what's the other one that's out there the team group is now a brand that's really sort of made a good name for themselves 16 gigabytes 3 000 megahertz dual channel if you're running a dual channel cpu or if you're running quad channel like threadripper or extreme intel make sure you have at least one dim per channel so you need four sticks is going to be plenty now the other side of that discussion is going to be single bank versus dual bank and i'm gonna tell you right now for the most part it doesn't matter in fact if you took a gaming pc if we built one that was with single bank ram and dual bank ram and no that's not single channel dual channel they're not the same we've not done a video on this because i don't really want to cause more confusion for people if you want to know what your what your system's running you could download cpu z go to the memory tab there's another tab or to the right of the memory tab there's one more camera it's called it'll tell you what bank your ram is running in if we did a blind taste test with a single bank and a dual bank system next to each other identical for every other part you would not be able to tell the difference only if you did benchmarking and you find the two or three fps extra that you might find on a on a single bank versus dual bank ramp this is an area that's easy to overspend extra lights and things on here are all ways to increase the cost of ram without changing the performance so our recommendation there honestly 16 gigabytes 3 000 megahertz dual channel call it a day if you listen to our advice that leaves you more money for the fun part of your system and that being the graphics card gaming pcs their performance is 90 dictated by your graphics card if it's a cpu-bound title that's got big open-world sandbox then yes your cpu can matter but your graphics card is still responsible for more than 90 percent of your gaming performance and saving money in these areas will allow you to get the biggest baddest graphics card that you can afford now this is the only time you're going to hear me recommend get the highest tiered product that you can afford in this category the only thing that's going to truly hold back the potential of your of how high you can go is your power supply so you're going to want to make sure that the power supply that you pair with your graphics card at least at least meets the rating recommended by the graphics card whether it be 750 watt for 30 live 30 series cards 550 watt for like a 2080 ti or whatever and make sure that it's from a reputable power supply brand you're not going to have any problem delivering power to it now keep in mind those ratings are usually very over estimated because they want to make sure that you have overhead and available power above what the system needs so a 550 watt rated power supply for a 550 watt recommended graphics card is actually more than you need which is a good thing the only other thing that's going to dictate uh your your graphics card here honestly is your cpu as long as you're not spending the least amount of money that you can spend on a cpu and trying to pair it with a high-end gpu you don't really have to worry about bottlenecking especially with ryzen cpus and the latest intels their core clocks are high enough their ipc's are high enough to where it is actually pretty hard to bottleneck a gpu these days we've done some videos testing that you've really really got to go bottom bottom dollar to start bottlenecking your gpus these days the other area too that you can easily overspend in graphics card is the tier of the graphics card you've got your reference edition cards which are the ones that are just based off the basic design from amd and nvidia and then you've got your custom cards like our strix special edition white 2080 ti right here which probably cost 150 more than a reference 2080 ti this is not going to necessarily get you much more performance very little performance actually the base clock side of these and the boost clocks that come with these special edition cards are usually anywhere between 20 to 50 megahertz higher than a reference the difference is these cards are based and built to overclock and if you don't plan on overclocking them that's an extra area that you can waste money we find still that in terms of the best value of graphics card for in our opinion from amd's current offering is the 6800 non-xt because we do know that we're going to have new rdna 2 mid-range cards that's why we're not recommending 5700 xt that's older architecture at this point or even something like a 2060 super or 2070 super from last gen if you can get your hands on it obviously graphics cards right now are commodity extremely hard to find out of stock across the board from all generations that are available again because of the popularity of people building computers right now because of stay-at-home self-entertainment games and such we find that again we're speaking hypothetical here if you can get your hands on them but if you've done everything right and you saved money in other areas of your build then it leaves you more money for the fun stuff that truly does have an impact of what your overall experience is going to be with your computer now of course there's other things that can impact you know your case your power supply your cooler and all that sort of stuff but we find that these areas right here are the easiest places to save money and spend money properly without having to worry about getting terrible diminishing returns if you think we've missed something or you think there's something very important that we didn't say that we should have that you think could help somebody down in the comments below then put your best suggestion on saving money on building or upgrading a new computer down in the comments and then then we'll go through and heart and pin the best ones that way we can make sure people see it guys if you're building a new computer here have fun don't be afraid of it i know a lot of people are afraid of wasting spending money if you've never built a gaming computer before saying you're going to probably get hooked in a new hobby is goes without saying and it's probably extremely understated um but enjoy it if you're building it make sure you share with us on social media at twitter or at twitter at js2cents at twitter show us your builds and as always guys we'll see you in the next one speaking of builds we're probably going to start judging yours here real soon so get your pictures ready youjs2 cents here we're going to talk about computer parts today and how not to overspend now sure there are like seven or eight main components when it comes to building a computer but we're going to focus on the main four that being cpu motherboard graphics card memory because those easily make up the most expensive parts in your system as well as the easiest areas to overspend and get really nothing back for that money we're going to start with cpus uh there's two main players obviously there's only two players when it comes to building a personal computer that is amd and intel uh it's one of those things where it's becoming very hard to recommend intel these days only because they've not been very innovative they've not really pushed the boundaries they've not really changed anything in fact they're on the same 14-meter process they've been on for years now years and years whereas amd on the other hand has been very innovative in pushing the amount of cores that you can get uh in in the same package running the same motherboards their ipc is significantly better than intel although their core clocks are a little bit behind it's easy to get caught up though in core count and thinking core count is king when it comes to building a computer now we're going to go on the assumption here here that people building a computer right now watching this video are looking at building a gaming computer and there's nothing wrong with that because i've said over and over computers that are built to handle the latest games can handle pretty much any sort of productivity task that you would throw at it in your home i mean sure there are corporate uses and there are very outlier types of use cases where you're going to need a you know the best floating point precision performance and all that sort of stuff but that is not what most people building watching this video are going to be doing so we're going on the assumption you're building a gaming computer now keep in mind that although games are now leveraging more cores than they ever have in the past they're still not going to leverage high core count cpus to their fullest potential in fact we've seen some high-end cpus actually perform worse than the lower end cpus just simply because of the core count and the way that they're utilized with ccx's and such on amd's platform so it's one of those things where a person might be interested in intel because of this the the sheer strength of its compatibility with pretty much all software and all games but if you're the kind of person that wants your computer to have a little bit of forward-facing compatibility and notice i use forward-facing compatibility and not the term future-proofing because there's no such thing as future proofing when it comes to computers you might be highly interested in going amd because of the fact that as games and programs use more cores you get more core per dollar on amd than you do with intel now what cpu is right for you is going to depend again on what you want to do with your cpu we find that the 5600x is a really really good sweet spot in not overspending for your cpu and also getting a high enough core count to where you can do multitasking live streaming have games still be able to utilize them get a high enough core clock to feel like you've got a really high-end system without spending crazy high-end money it's not that long ago where to get the amount of cores that you could on a 5600 x and this is actually 5800x by the way if you're noticing the seven you would have to spend a thousand dollars about five years ago to get the same amount of performance and core clock and core count as you do on the 5600x today in 2020. now this is all hypothetical assuming you can get your hands on it because of the popularity of computers right now and stay-at-home orders and people building home offices and gaming computers and such that um we're assuming you can get your hands on it but things are going to normalize you will be able to get your hands on them in the future intel though is becoming harder and harder to recommend these days just simply because of the reasons i at the start of the start of this segment they do not they have not been innovating at all and they're still kind of holding on to their core base which is like i like to overclock and you know what most people are not doing that on their their daily computers they're just not pushing the boundaries like we do for fun around here um but when it comes to both of these uh cpus you've got to plug them into something and that is motherboards and this is where it is extremely easy to throw away money unnecessarily now obviously the board that you choose is going to depend on the cpu that you chose so you need to make sure that the socket type is correct obviously now this isn't a how-to guide on how to match all that up we're going to assume you know that if you're running an x570 motherboard you have to use an x570 compatible cpu and vice versa when it comes to intel however the chipset is gonna determine which gpu you can put in there because there's not really any backwards compatibility when it comes to intel but there are different tiers of motherboard that make it very easy to overspend this is an extreme rampage board i only have this here because it's like a 700 or 800 motherboard this is a because of intel's x299 extreme platform this right here uh doesn't really offer you a whole lot more than some of the lower like let's say strix motherboard yes this is an x470 but they do make strix for intel and amd vice versa they are sort of cross-compatible when it comes to the tier structure of how the naming scheme works but this is simply uh an easy way to overspend there's very little things very few things that a 700 motherboard would push that out of the way a 700 motherboard can do that a 150 motherboard can't usually the difference here is going to be in the build quality it's going to be how many layers is the pcb how many what's the gold content in the socket how many usbs does it have how many usb cs and or thunderbolt if you're on intel we find that more often than not a let's talk about ryzen here for a second more often than not running the 50 series motherboard is much more beneficial to the cost of your system than running a 70 series motherboard so the x470 motherboard if you're gonna pair it with a 5000 series cpu really the only thing you're giving up uh is the pcie gen 4 capabilities and if you're not running a pcie gen 4 storage device gpus aside because they are still not utilizing all of pcie gen 3 16 x let alone needing pcie gen 4. you could save some money by going with the x470 motherboard making sure it has the latest bios running a 5000 series cpu and get yourself a really good deal because they do like to have blowouts because they are compatible with the latest cpus they're still making them and you can still find them on shelves now there's other things you'll find motherboards having tough armor whether they've got the plastic covers on the back plastic covers on the front how many m.2 storage uh devices are able to be plugged into it and these are areas where it's very easy to overspend because you're not changing anything in terms of the quality of the motherboard itself by how many of those devices it has you can find that if you find yourself a lower tiered motherboard whether it be a strix versus a crosshair for example what tends to make these motherboards different in their pricing is the build quality in terms of their vrms how many chokes and capacitors that it has what's the phase of the vrm and these are things that are really going to only matter to people who are trying to overclock their cpus overclocking the cpu adding more voltage adds more heat it adds more load to the vrms things that if i'm saying this and you don't have any idea what i'm talking about clearly don't pertain to you now that's not to say you can't play around with some overclocking on like a strix motherboard or a lower tiered motherboard usually these motherboards are going to have safeguards built in so that you don't over extend or over exert the power deliveries on these motherboards but that's not to say that you couldn't but if you wanted to play around with adding a couple hundred megahertz here and there or even going into ryzen master and doing a little bit of overclocking there you can pretty much do that with just about any of the motherboards that are on the market now for amd cpus because they are all unlocked unlike intel where if you don't go with a k-sku cpu or kf cpu or f also which just means no igp built in then you're not going to be able to overclock it because the cpu itself is going to be locked whereas amd still offers the value of having every cpu be unlocked the only thing limiting how far you can go with it really is the silicon lottery and the motherboard itself but i would not recommend spending 500 on a motherboard to plop a 300 cpu in there that's a complete waste of money there's no there's no return on that investment and it's nothing but diminished results you're going to get extra features you probably are not going to care about so i find that usually spending anywhere between the price of the cpu or less seems to be about the right parent 150 motherboard or so look at the reviews see what the overall like new egg response has been amazon and then kind of make your best decision there but although the motherboard is responsible for everything being plugged into it it's one of the easiest areas to overspend another area that's easy to overspend is your memory there's this old adage computer's running slow i think i need more memory that goes back to when i was a kid in fact i think back when i was a kid we were talking about like 286's commodore 64's and such ram was something that held you back but that's not the case today and you see more and more of these kits of like 32 gigabytes of dominator platinums or 32 gigs of you know vengeance pros 4 000 megahertz 4 400 megahertz or 5100 megahertz like we see with some of our crucial stuff that we have around here these are areas that are going to just suck up your budget and really give you no tangible return we've done videos in the past where we've talked about what's the sweet spot of ram speed for gaming and on both intel and amd and we found that right around 3000 megahertz is where we scale performance up so between 2133 which is what these rams these rams these ram sticks these dimms will boot at out of the box without enabling xmp or docp which is their extreme profiles for intel and amd they will give you more performance and more fps up until about 3000 rpm 3000 rpm wow car stuff up to about 3 000 megahertz and then beyond that it just it stops scaling so people might go well then why the heck do they even sell these four thousand megahertz and five thousand megahertz stims well extreme overclocking you start pushing the cpu hard enough the memory has to keep up with it and it really makes no difference to the average consumer out there the other thing is the capacity no one out there building a gaming rig needs 32 gigabytes of memory someone out there right now just got triggered by me saying that but the reality is 16 gigabytes is still the sweet spot and you're going to notice it tends to go 2 4 8 16 32 64 because obviously multiples of 8 there's always going to be multiples of 8 times 2 because dual channel which is why you're going to basically see them scale in that sort of mathematical order 16 gigabytes of ddr3000 from any reputable brand whether it be corsair g skill crucial patriot uh these what um what's the other one that's out there the team group is now a brand that's really sort of made a good name for themselves 16 gigabytes 3 000 megahertz dual channel if you're running a dual channel cpu or if you're running quad channel like threadripper or extreme intel make sure you have at least one dim per channel so you need four sticks is going to be plenty now the other side of that discussion is going to be single bank versus dual bank and i'm gonna tell you right now for the most part it doesn't matter in fact if you took a gaming pc if we built one that was with single bank ram and dual bank ram and no that's not single channel dual channel they're not the same we've not done a video on this because i don't really want to cause more confusion for people if you want to know what your what your system's running you could download cpu z go to the memory tab there's another tab or to the right of the memory tab there's one more camera it's called it'll tell you what bank your ram is running in if we did a blind taste test with a single bank and a dual bank system next to each other identical for every other part you would not be able to tell the difference only if you did benchmarking and you find the two or three fps extra that you might find on a on a single bank versus dual bank ramp this is an area that's easy to overspend extra lights and things on here are all ways to increase the cost of ram without changing the performance so our recommendation there honestly 16 gigabytes 3 000 megahertz dual channel call it a day if you listen to our advice that leaves you more money for the fun part of your system and that being the graphics card gaming pcs their performance is 90 dictated by your graphics card if it's a cpu-bound title that's got big open-world sandbox then yes your cpu can matter but your graphics card is still responsible for more than 90 percent of your gaming performance and saving money in these areas will allow you to get the biggest baddest graphics card that you can afford now this is the only time you're going to hear me recommend get the highest tiered product that you can afford in this category the only thing that's going to truly hold back the potential of your of how high you can go is your power supply so you're going to want to make sure that the power supply that you pair with your graphics card at least at least meets the rating recommended by the graphics card whether it be 750 watt for 30 live 30 series cards 550 watt for like a 2080 ti or whatever and make sure that it's from a reputable power supply brand you're not going to have any problem delivering power to it now keep in mind those ratings are usually very over estimated because they want to make sure that you have overhead and available power above what the system needs so a 550 watt rated power supply for a 550 watt recommended graphics card is actually more than you need which is a good thing the only other thing that's going to dictate uh your your graphics card here honestly is your cpu as long as you're not spending the least amount of money that you can spend on a cpu and trying to pair it with a high-end gpu you don't really have to worry about bottlenecking especially with ryzen cpus and the latest intels their core clocks are high enough their ipc's are high enough to where it is actually pretty hard to bottleneck a gpu these days we've done some videos testing that you've really really got to go bottom bottom dollar to start bottlenecking your gpus these days the other area too that you can easily overspend in graphics card is the tier of the graphics card you've got your reference edition cards which are the ones that are just based off the basic design from amd and nvidia and then you've got your custom cards like our strix special edition white 2080 ti right here which probably cost 150 more than a reference 2080 ti this is not going to necessarily get you much more performance very little performance actually the base clock side of these and the boost clocks that come with these special edition cards are usually anywhere between 20 to 50 megahertz higher than a reference the difference is these cards are based and built to overclock and if you don't plan on overclocking them that's an extra area that you can waste money we find still that in terms of the best value of graphics card for in our opinion from amd's current offering is the 6800 non-xt because we do know that we're going to have new rdna 2 mid-range cards that's why we're not recommending 5700 xt that's older architecture at this point or even something like a 2060 super or 2070 super from last gen if you can get your hands on it obviously graphics cards right now are commodity extremely hard to find out of stock across the board from all generations that are available again because of the popularity of people building computers right now because of stay-at-home self-entertainment games and such we find that again we're speaking hypothetical here if you can get your hands on them but if you've done everything right and you saved money in other areas of your build then it leaves you more money for the fun stuff that truly does have an impact of what your overall experience is going to be with your computer now of course there's other things that can impact you know your case your power supply your cooler and all that sort of stuff but we find that these areas right here are the easiest places to save money and spend money properly without having to worry about getting terrible diminishing returns if you think we've missed something or you think there's something very important that we didn't say that we should have that you think could help somebody down in the comments below then put your best suggestion on saving money on building or upgrading a new computer down in the comments and then then we'll go through and heart and pin the best ones that way we can make sure people see it guys if you're building a new computer here have fun don't be afraid of it i know a lot of people are afraid of wasting spending money if you've never built a gaming computer before saying you're going to probably get hooked in a new hobby is goes without saying and it's probably extremely understated um but enjoy it if you're building it make sure you share with us on social media at twitter or at twitter at js2cents at twitter show us your builds and as always guys we'll see you in the next one speaking of builds we're probably going to start judging yours here real soon so get your pictures ready you\n"