Budget gaming pc

[Bates751]

Hi,

My boy has asked for a pc for Xmas and has a budget of £600 he has a monitor. I know its not massive amount of cash for pc gaming but just trying to get best value i can for the money and willing to build it myself.

What would you guys/gals recommend?

 

[sailfast67]

From my experience it is hard to beat AMD in price/performance. My only other device would be don't skimp on the motherboard. Go Asus or MSI if you can manage it and definitely stay away from a traditional HDD. SSD's are worth the money for performance and reliability.

 

[Bates751]

From my experience it is hard to beat AMD in price/performance. My only other device would be don't skimp on the motherboard. Go Asus or MSI if you can manage it and definitely stay away from a traditional HDD. SSD's are worth the money for performance and reliability.

Would you happen to have any builds you could recommend?

 

[sailfast67]

I have a few suggestions:
I have built 3 desktops for myself and my kids over the last few years (several prior to that for my place of work) and we have had great performance and reliability from Ryzen 7 processors. I have also heard great things about the Ryzen 5 so a budget friendly version would be something like the Ryzen 5 1600. Which is around $150. I have read a lot of reviews and it seems to be a pretty easily OC'd processor and is very stable. My disclaimer is that I personally have not used one in a build.
For a MB I have had very good luck with Asus TUF motherboards. My son and I both have the ASUS TUF 570+ and they are very solid. ($190) I have also used MSI motherboards in the past and I had one that lasted over 7 years and multiple upgrades (it is still unfortunately in my garage, but probably would still work) ($110-150)
There are several GPU's right now less than $200 that are pretty amazing. We just upgraded my son's Sapphire Radeon RX 570 8GB card and are going to put it in my daughter's new build because it is such a great card. But if you prefer nVIDIA the GTX 1050 Ti is supposedly pretty amazing. Hopefully you will get some other people to chime in on GPU's because I am slightly bias toward the Radeon cards.
RAM and your storage drive will just basically require a bit of research. Everyone has different opinions on the manufacturer. Corsair has been around forever and make very consistently good products, but they are also more expensive. Teamgroup, G-Skill, Crucial, and Patriot are all good manufacturers. 16GB of DDR4 with as high speed in MHz as you can afford will get the job done.
For your SSD I have always used Samsung EVO's. I know that the PCIe SSD's are faster, but they are also more expensive. You can get a 500gb Samsung EVO 860 for around $50. Crucial also makes great SSD's and I have used their SSD's as well. The only SSD I have had issues with are Kingston.
Again I hope you get some other opinions, but hopefully this helps.

 

[RollingHand]

I've just put a PC together for £150 not including the monitor using a used Xeon 4 core 3.1ghz CPU & a used GTX750 Ti video card with 8gb of ram...the motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-B75M-D3H & that happens to be used too, the case I had was in my bits box...this rig runs CSGO, Team Fortress II & Euro Truck simulator all on high settings; there's no way or no point in paying £600 for a setup...I had the creative spaekers already too so it's basically Motherboard, Video card, Ram, Power Supply, SSD & cooler;