$900, $600 and $420 Gaming PCs For Any Budget - January 2019 Builds!

**Building a Gaming PC for Less than $1000**

When it comes to building a gaming PC on a budget, there are several options to consider. In this article, we'll explore some of the most affordable components available and show you how to build a powerful gaming PC for under $1000.

One of the key components of any gaming PC is the processor. For a budget-friendly option, I recommend considering the Ryzen 3 3200G or the AMD APU Rison 2200 G. The Ryzen 3 3200G is a quad-core processor with a clock speed of 3.5 GHz and a boost speed of up to 4.0 GHz. This chip offers excellent performance for its price, and it's also compatible with most modern motherboards.

In contrast, the Rison 2200 G is an APU that combines a quad-core processor with integrated Vega graphics. While it may not offer as much raw processing power as the Ryzen 3 3200G, its integrated graphics make it an excellent option for those who want to keep costs down. The main advantage of this chip is that it offers more available PCI Express lanes, which means you'll have more room for expansion in the future.

When choosing a processor, there are several factors to consider. For example, if you're looking for a quad-core processor without multi-threading, the Ryzen 3 3200G may be an excellent option. However, if you want a chip with integrated graphics, the Rison 2200 G is definitely worth considering.

In addition to the processor, another important component of any gaming PC is the motherboard. For this build, I've chosen the ASRock B450M Steel Legend Micro ATX motherboard. This board offers excellent performance and features at an affordable price, making it an excellent option for those on a budget.

The power supply unit (PSU) is also an essential component of any gaming PC. For this build, I've opted for the EVGA 550 GS, 80+ Gold 550W PSU. This PSU offers excellent performance and efficiency at a reasonable price, making it an excellent option for those on a budget.

In terms of RAM, I recommend choosing a DDR4 kit with a speed of at least 3200 MHz. For this build, I've opted for the Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB (2x8GB) DDR4 3200 MHz kit. This kit offers excellent performance and value for its price.

When it comes to storage, there are several options available. For this build, I've chosen a 240GB SSD as my primary drive. This drive offers excellent performance and capacity at a reasonable price.

The case is another important component of any gaming PC. For this build, I've opted for the Fractal Design Meshify C ATX Mid Tower Case. This case offers excellent airflow and aesthetics at an affordable price.

**The Build**

So, how do you put all these components together to create a powerful gaming PC for under $1000? Here's the build:

* Processor: Ryzen 3 3200G or AMD APU Rison 2200 G

* Motherboard: ASRock B450M Steel Legend Micro ATX

* Power Supply Unit (PSU): EVGA 550 GS, 80+ Gold 550W PSU

* RAM: Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB (2x8GB) DDR4 3200 MHz kit

* Storage: 240GB SSD

* Case: Fractal Design Meshify C ATX Mid Tower Case

**Cost Comparison**

One of the key benefits of this build is its cost-effectiveness. By choosing more affordable components, we've been able to shave over $300 off the original price.

Here's a breakdown of the costs:

* Ryzen 3 3200G or AMD APU Rison 2200 G: $95

* ASRock B450M Steel Legend Micro ATX motherboard: $50

* EVGA 550 GS, 80+ Gold 550W PSU: $60

* Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB (2x8GB) DDR4 3200 MHz kit: $69

* 240GB SSD: $59

* Fractal Design Meshify C ATX Mid Tower Case: $30

Total cost: $443 (or $423 with the Rison 2200 G)

**Conclusion**

Building a gaming PC for under $1000 is definitely possible, and this build shows that you don't have to break the bank to get a powerful machine. By choosing more affordable components and optimizing our parts list, we've been able to create a system that offers excellent performance at an unbeatable price.

Of course, there are many other options available when it comes to building a gaming PC on a budget. But this build shows that with a little creativity and planning, you can create a machine that's capable of handling even the most demanding games at high resolutions.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat's up guys welcome back to Pauls hardware this is my monthly builds video for January 2019 I usually do this at the beginning of the month I'm a little late because there was CES and beginning of the year stuff that went on but I have two builds for you guys today a $600 gaming PC and a $900 gaming PC these are all based on my best choices right now for what I think you should get if you've got about that much money to spend and of course if you want to see an actual build put together check out my builds playlist because today I'm just going over parts lists I didn't post a strawpoll last months but going back to the one I did in November I sort of wanted to rehash this the thousand dollar PC in 2018 versus what you can get for a thousand dollars now and actually started this going for $1000 PC I ended up with a $900 PC so that's good news I suppose and of course if you're going to vote on next month's check out the straw polls linked in the description I'm just going for prices I want to know how much you guys are currently thinking about spending on a gaming PC and also bear in mind this is just for the core components of the PC itself not talking about a monitor your mouse keyboard or anything like that so let's get into the first build this is the $900 gaming PC and I'm not just going to talk about the parts that I chose for this one here I'm going to talk about my a thought process my methodology for choosing the parts that I did choose starting out with our CPU which is an AMD Rison 520 600 and that's usually what you might start off with let's take a look at what you can get for about a hundred and sixty hundred and seventy dollars right now and basically what you'll find from Intel is a lot of dual core sometimes quad core cpus but a lot of these do not have hyper threading enables so you're not only going to get two cores or four cores for that for a six core 12 third processor you can get the Rison 5 2600 for about a hundred and sixty-five dollars the nearest competitor is the Rison 5 1600 X which is just 5 bucks cheaper so I really see no good competition for this CPU in this price range if you want a decent amount of cores and threads and you don't want to be spending $300 plus which is what I'm gonna have to spend to get an 8 core non hyper-threaded CPU on the intel side or even more than that if you want hyper threading and like the 9900 k is like 500 bucks so bang for the buck I think this is the way to go and there's nothing else that's really close to it what's also nice about the 2600 as it comes with a wraith spire cooler installed which is a perfectly adequate cooller to get you up and running doesn't even look that bad performs just fine you can upgrade it in the future that's another thing I'm gonna focus on as I go through this build is upgrade paths because I want you to be able to build the system right now for this price but also maybe add to it in the future that is the beauty of building your own PC for a motherboard we have the MSI B 450 tomahawk note the very good ratings here on PC part picker as well as over here on new egg it's out of stock on new egg right now but this board is gonna get you four memory slots so you can expand your memory in the future it has good power delivery so not only can it handle some overclocking since it's a B 450 motherboard but if you're gonna upgrade your six core to maybe an eight core in the future the power delivery on this motherboard can still handle it for only about a little over $100 there are cheaper B 450 motherboards in this but they might skimp on power delivery beyond that there are some bells and whistles that this is missing but it's a solid all-around board for just over 100 bucks and it also has video outs on the back which is only important for the very last thing I'm going to talk about in this video more on that in a minute though for memory I have a solid 16 gig 2 by 8 gig kit of g.skill ripjaws 5 this is 3200 speed memory it's got a nice black finish that's gonna match with most builds and it should be rising compatible you just need to enable the XMP profile and what's Rison you don't want to go for faster memory 3000 speed or 3200 speed if you can afford it and a 16 gig kit for about a hundred twenty bucks I'm all-in for that that's way better memory prices than we were looking at last year now you're gonna want storage and for this I go for a 500 gig SATA SSD if you go on a PC part picker look at storage user filters choose SSD look at capacities in the 202 about 640 gig range that will give you both 500 gig class SSDs as well as 250 gig class SSDs sort by price per gigabyte and you'll find you can get SSDs for his cheapest 10 to 12 cents per gigabyte that means about 50 bucks for a 500 gig Class drive or even about 30 bucks for a 240 gig class Drive and again there's lots of options down here some brands you may have heard of more than others teams l5 light is not necessarily the best SSD but it's got your response time it's gonna get the job done so it's perfectly adequate to get off the ground for an operating system drive one other thing to point out here when you're talking about storage you can easily add more storage to the system so the 500 gig drive will allow you to install windows some apps maybe a couple games but you're probably to add to this in the future but that's a really simple upgrade for graphics card we now have the GeForce r-tx 20 66 gig available this just launched there's quite a few of these available for about 350 bucks I went for this model it's 10 bucks more but get a bit better of a cooler with a dual fan solution and a nice clean looking backplate this will get you GPU performance about in the same range as a gtx 1070 or 1070 TI looking back to last year so it's a saw a deal I think for that price lastly we have a case in a power supply and here's where you have a ton of options as well the case you should spend probably about forty to sixty dollars on the power supply about the same I have a cooler master master box case right here which is on sale it's only temporary so you might not be able to still get this deal for the MB 600 l if you wait a bit longer but there's other cases in this range and this is just a nice case well-built it's only got a single 120 millimeter fan so consider adding a second one there but it's got a power supply basement it has an acrylic side panel so you can still look in and see your builds and buy it within the next 11 hours or so probably by the time this video goes up or else that deal won't be there anymore I like for the power supply the EVGA BQ series 600 Watts 80 plus bronze rated for about $40 again there's other options for this but you're looking for black cabling 80 plus bronze rated or gold rated if you can spend a little bit more money on it partial modularity is nice so you can leave out the cables that you're not going to use and if you are looking at other power supply options just make sure you're going with the reputable manufacturer EVGA does a solid job Corsair C Sonic and Coolermaster all solid options there but there you have it though that is my build for just under $900 for all of those components and I wanted to compare this to the one I did back in December and I bear in mind the price has gone up for this because some of the components I used have gone up in price but this was 1127 or this is 1127 if you were to buy it now it still has a 2600 a B 450 motherboard a very comparable memory configuration it's got a bit nicer of a storage drive but that 1070 TI is now four hundred and seventy dollars which just is very impractical if you're comparing it to the RT ex 2060 and then you can see my case in power supply we're just a little bit more expensive as well so that's what led to the total price here of 11:27 and I think bringing that down to 900 bucks for just about the same performance is is a good deal so yay 2019 let's move on to my other this is a $600 gaming PC and for this I took three of the same core components because again I wanted there to be an upgrade past I want to build the system for a lower price but of course you could swap in the components for the $1,000 version and get yourself better performance in the long run now pay close attention to the CPU here this is the Rison 3 1200 which is $95 it's a quad-core processor there is the Rison 2200 G which is an APU and I'm going to swap that in at the very end here and show you another alternative here but if you're planning to buy a graphics card out of the gate like the Radeon rx 588 gig which you can get for 170 bucks right now go for this Rison 3 1200 rather than the APU beyond that the motherboard is the same the case is the same and the power supply is the same but I still have the price at five hundred eighty six dollars and 13 cents right now and I did that by going with that less expensive CPU which is a quad core this is a quad core without multi-threading so four cores and four threads and it actually runs a little bit lower out of a frequency than the 2200 G the difference here is that the 2200 G has integrated graphics so this one is going to give you more available PCI Express Lanes because eight of them are not dedicated to the graphics that means if you want to expand your system in the future to add like an MDOT to nvme Drive you'll be in a better situation with this chip than you would with the 2200 G that said you do need a graphics card with the r3 1200 because it doesn't have integrated graphics so for the $200 range right now you've got the art x5 88 gig or you have the GTX 1066 gig if you're looking at both of those there's much better deals on the RX 588 gig right now you can get them as cheap as 170 dollars maybe $190 whereas the cheapest 1066 gig is two hundred and fourteen dollars so for that reason I went with the very well priced power color red dragon which is available for a hundred and seventy bucks after a $20 mil and rebate dual fan cooler on this and back plate too so that's nice you could use the same memory get that I had in the first build and this one I saved about twenty or twenty-five dollars by going with a ddr4 3000 kit this is also rip jazz 5 it's also the red version so it might stand out or clash with the color scheme a little bit honestly it would probably be fine the case has a red accent on it so that's good just a little bit slower ddr4 3000 versus the 200 kits I have a 240 gig SSD so less SSD space but again still plenty of room for Windows and a few apps and maybe a game or two and with just those changes we've shaved about $300 off of the price and again we still have a lot of the same base core components so you could upgrade to the parts from that $900 build if you so desire I'm gonna do one more thing here by hitting edit this parts list and I removed the video card and the CPU I'm gonna switch the CPU over to the 2200 G which is still the same price at $95 this has integrated Vega graphics it's perfectly adequate for 1080 gameplay I have videos on this if you guys want to check them out where I do some gameplay testing everything and honestly it's good gaming PC performance for integrated graphics of course you're gonna get a nice bump up if you go with a discreet graphics card but that brings the total price for this system down to four hundred and sixteen dollars or thereabouts man we'll call it four hundred and twenty bucks so with this you could get away without having your graphics card maybe add that in the future maybe add any of the other components from that nine hundred dollar bill in the future or add more storage or do whatever you want you have plenty of room in this case since they full-size ATX build so just to loop back to my intro statement for anyone who is looking to put together a gaming PC for less than $1000 whether you're talking about 400 about 600 or about $900 this is what I'd recommend you put together of course again you got flexibility to choose your own case there's tons of ATX cases out there that you might like to look up better or maybe some features there's other motherboards that are adequate in this range too with the B 450 chipset that is the beauty of building your own gaming PC you can pick and choose the parts that you want the best suit your needs but hopefully this is giving you guys a good starting off point thank you so much for watching this video this is my monthly build series I'll be continuing this next month in February which is in just a couple weeks already thank you guys so much for watching and hit the thumbs up button if you enjoyed it links to all the parts lists and individual parts are down in the description below thanks again guys and we'll see you next timewhat's up guys welcome back to Pauls hardware this is my monthly builds video for January 2019 I usually do this at the beginning of the month I'm a little late because there was CES and beginning of the year stuff that went on but I have two builds for you guys today a $600 gaming PC and a $900 gaming PC these are all based on my best choices right now for what I think you should get if you've got about that much money to spend and of course if you want to see an actual build put together check out my builds playlist because today I'm just going over parts lists I didn't post a strawpoll last months but going back to the one I did in November I sort of wanted to rehash this the thousand dollar PC in 2018 versus what you can get for a thousand dollars now and actually started this going for $1000 PC I ended up with a $900 PC so that's good news I suppose and of course if you're going to vote on next month's check out the straw polls linked in the description I'm just going for prices I want to know how much you guys are currently thinking about spending on a gaming PC and also bear in mind this is just for the core components of the PC itself not talking about a monitor your mouse keyboard or anything like that so let's get into the first build this is the $900 gaming PC and I'm not just going to talk about the parts that I chose for this one here I'm going to talk about my a thought process my methodology for choosing the parts that I did choose starting out with our CPU which is an AMD Rison 520 600 and that's usually what you might start off with let's take a look at what you can get for about a hundred and sixty hundred and seventy dollars right now and basically what you'll find from Intel is a lot of dual core sometimes quad core cpus but a lot of these do not have hyper threading enables so you're not only going to get two cores or four cores for that for a six core 12 third processor you can get the Rison 5 2600 for about a hundred and sixty-five dollars the nearest competitor is the Rison 5 1600 X which is just 5 bucks cheaper so I really see no good competition for this CPU in this price range if you want a decent amount of cores and threads and you don't want to be spending $300 plus which is what I'm gonna have to spend to get an 8 core non hyper-threaded CPU on the intel side or even more than that if you want hyper threading and like the 9900 k is like 500 bucks so bang for the buck I think this is the way to go and there's nothing else that's really close to it what's also nice about the 2600 as it comes with a wraith spire cooler installed which is a perfectly adequate cooller to get you up and running doesn't even look that bad performs just fine you can upgrade it in the future that's another thing I'm gonna focus on as I go through this build is upgrade paths because I want you to be able to build the system right now for this price but also maybe add to it in the future that is the beauty of building your own PC for a motherboard we have the MSI B 450 tomahawk note the very good ratings here on PC part picker as well as over here on new egg it's out of stock on new egg right now but this board is gonna get you four memory slots so you can expand your memory in the future it has good power delivery so not only can it handle some overclocking since it's a B 450 motherboard but if you're gonna upgrade your six core to maybe an eight core in the future the power delivery on this motherboard can still handle it for only about a little over $100 there are cheaper B 450 motherboards in this but they might skimp on power delivery beyond that there are some bells and whistles that this is missing but it's a solid all-around board for just over 100 bucks and it also has video outs on the back which is only important for the very last thing I'm going to talk about in this video more on that in a minute though for memory I have a solid 16 gig 2 by 8 gig kit of g.skill ripjaws 5 this is 3200 speed memory it's got a nice black finish that's gonna match with most builds and it should be rising compatible you just need to enable the XMP profile and what's Rison you don't want to go for faster memory 3000 speed or 3200 speed if you can afford it and a 16 gig kit for about a hundred twenty bucks I'm all-in for that that's way better memory prices than we were looking at last year now you're gonna want storage and for this I go for a 500 gig SATA SSD if you go on a PC part picker look at storage user filters choose SSD look at capacities in the 202 about 640 gig range that will give you both 500 gig class SSDs as well as 250 gig class SSDs sort by price per gigabyte and you'll find you can get SSDs for his cheapest 10 to 12 cents per gigabyte that means about 50 bucks for a 500 gig Class drive or even about 30 bucks for a 240 gig class Drive and again there's lots of options down here some brands you may have heard of more than others teams l5 light is not necessarily the best SSD but it's got your response time it's gonna get the job done so it's perfectly adequate to get off the ground for an operating system drive one other thing to point out here when you're talking about storage you can easily add more storage to the system so the 500 gig drive will allow you to install windows some apps maybe a couple games but you're probably to add to this in the future but that's a really simple upgrade for graphics card we now have the GeForce r-tx 20 66 gig available this just launched there's quite a few of these available for about 350 bucks I went for this model it's 10 bucks more but get a bit better of a cooler with a dual fan solution and a nice clean looking backplate this will get you GPU performance about in the same range as a gtx 1070 or 1070 TI looking back to last year so it's a saw a deal I think for that price lastly we have a case in a power supply and here's where you have a ton of options as well the case you should spend probably about forty to sixty dollars on the power supply about the same I have a cooler master master box case right here which is on sale it's only temporary so you might not be able to still get this deal for the MB 600 l if you wait a bit longer but there's other cases in this range and this is just a nice case well-built it's only got a single 120 millimeter fan so consider adding a second one there but it's got a power supply basement it has an acrylic side panel so you can still look in and see your builds and buy it within the next 11 hours or so probably by the time this video goes up or else that deal won't be there anymore I like for the power supply the EVGA BQ series 600 Watts 80 plus bronze rated for about $40 again there's other options for this but you're looking for black cabling 80 plus bronze rated or gold rated if you can spend a little bit more money on it partial modularity is nice so you can leave out the cables that you're not going to use and if you are looking at other power supply options just make sure you're going with the reputable manufacturer EVGA does a solid job Corsair C Sonic and Coolermaster all solid options there but there you have it though that is my build for just under $900 for all of those components and I wanted to compare this to the one I did back in December and I bear in mind the price has gone up for this because some of the components I used have gone up in price but this was 1127 or this is 1127 if you were to buy it now it still has a 2600 a B 450 motherboard a very comparable memory configuration it's got a bit nicer of a storage drive but that 1070 TI is now four hundred and seventy dollars which just is very impractical if you're comparing it to the RT ex 2060 and then you can see my case in power supply we're just a little bit more expensive as well so that's what led to the total price here of 11:27 and I think bringing that down to 900 bucks for just about the same performance is is a good deal so yay 2019 let's move on to my other this is a $600 gaming PC and for this I took three of the same core components because again I wanted there to be an upgrade past I want to build the system for a lower price but of course you could swap in the components for the $1,000 version and get yourself better performance in the long run now pay close attention to the CPU here this is the Rison 3 1200 which is $95 it's a quad-core processor there is the Rison 2200 G which is an APU and I'm going to swap that in at the very end here and show you another alternative here but if you're planning to buy a graphics card out of the gate like the Radeon rx 588 gig which you can get for 170 bucks right now go for this Rison 3 1200 rather than the APU beyond that the motherboard is the same the case is the same and the power supply is the same but I still have the price at five hundred eighty six dollars and 13 cents right now and I did that by going with that less expensive CPU which is a quad core this is a quad core without multi-threading so four cores and four threads and it actually runs a little bit lower out of a frequency than the 2200 G the difference here is that the 2200 G has integrated graphics so this one is going to give you more available PCI Express Lanes because eight of them are not dedicated to the graphics that means if you want to expand your system in the future to add like an MDOT to nvme Drive you'll be in a better situation with this chip than you would with the 2200 G that said you do need a graphics card with the r3 1200 because it doesn't have integrated graphics so for the $200 range right now you've got the art x5 88 gig or you have the GTX 1066 gig if you're looking at both of those there's much better deals on the RX 588 gig right now you can get them as cheap as 170 dollars maybe $190 whereas the cheapest 1066 gig is two hundred and fourteen dollars so for that reason I went with the very well priced power color red dragon which is available for a hundred and seventy bucks after a $20 mil and rebate dual fan cooler on this and back plate too so that's nice you could use the same memory get that I had in the first build and this one I saved about twenty or twenty-five dollars by going with a ddr4 3000 kit this is also rip jazz 5 it's also the red version so it might stand out or clash with the color scheme a little bit honestly it would probably be fine the case has a red accent on it so that's good just a little bit slower ddr4 3000 versus the 200 kits I have a 240 gig SSD so less SSD space but again still plenty of room for Windows and a few apps and maybe a game or two and with just those changes we've shaved about $300 off of the price and again we still have a lot of the same base core components so you could upgrade to the parts from that $900 build if you so desire I'm gonna do one more thing here by hitting edit this parts list and I removed the video card and the CPU I'm gonna switch the CPU over to the 2200 G which is still the same price at $95 this has integrated Vega graphics it's perfectly adequate for 1080 gameplay I have videos on this if you guys want to check them out where I do some gameplay testing everything and honestly it's good gaming PC performance for integrated graphics of course you're gonna get a nice bump up if you go with a discreet graphics card but that brings the total price for this system down to four hundred and sixteen dollars or thereabouts man we'll call it four hundred and twenty bucks so with this you could get away without having your graphics card maybe add that in the future maybe add any of the other components from that nine hundred dollar bill in the future or add more storage or do whatever you want you have plenty of room in this case since they full-size ATX build so just to loop back to my intro statement for anyone who is looking to put together a gaming PC for less than $1000 whether you're talking about 400 about 600 or about $900 this is what I'd recommend you put together of course again you got flexibility to choose your own case there's tons of ATX cases out there that you might like to look up better or maybe some features there's other motherboards that are adequate in this range too with the B 450 chipset that is the beauty of building your own gaming PC you can pick and choose the parts that you want the best suit your needs but hopefully this is giving you guys a good starting off point thank you so much for watching this video this is my monthly build series I'll be continuing this next month in February which is in just a couple weeks already thank you guys so much for watching and hit the thumbs up button if you enjoyed it links to all the parts lists and individual parts are down in the description below thanks again guys and we'll see you next time\n"