What can a $1000 / £900 Gaming PC Do?
|What can around $1000 or £900 get you when it comes to a gaming PC? Quite a lot. What can it do? Also, a lot. Lets look at the parts, maybe some alternatives you might prefer, and of course the performance.
Starting with the CPU, I went with a Ryzen 3600X here. That means 6 cores and 12 threads of impressive performance, both in gaming and productivity. Also impressively low power usage, which explains my next choice which is to not use an aftermarket CPU cooler. Now, if you went with the cheaper 3600, you do still have a great CPU there, but it does come with the much smaller Wraith Stealth cooler and so not quite as ideal. Of course, with Intel 10th gen launching later this week, you might prefer to go that route, but I’m happy with Ryzen here. Oh, and if you want an even more budget option, the new 3300X is a brilliant choice. You lose 2 cores but basically keep the same performance in games.
When it comes to motherboards, this might be a little hotly contested. I went with an ASROCK B450 board, their Steel Legend, as it’s a great value, well suited board for what I want to do here. While B450 is fine for the moment, if you want to have the upmost future compatability with, say, 4th gen Ryzen when that comes out, you’ll want to wait a few more weeks and pick up a B550 board instead. They should sell for pretty similar prices but will support PCIe Gen 4 to your GPU and one SSD which is great.
As for RAM, I’ve got this Patriot Memory Viper RGB. It’s a stylish looking kit, that’s rated for 3600MHz at CL17, and for not too an extortionate price either. This fits well with the 3600X as we will be able to get the most performance out of it – and all for not much more than a more standard non-RGB set.
The graphics card is next – that’s gonna be the XFX RX 5600XT THICC 2. A stylish card with great performance as we will see later. I went with a 5600XT here since you get RTX 2060 performance for GTX 1660ti money. If you have a little less money to spend you can drop to the 5500XT, or go for any of the 1650, 1660, ti, super options too, and if you’ve got a bit more to spend, then the 5700XT seems amazing since you get nearly 2070 Super performance for 2060 Super money. Really good.
Storage wise, I’ve got the WD SN500 Blue SSD I’m using as my main boot drive and technically only drive. It’s a great option, although WD have released a newer version, the SN550 I’d actually recommend here along with a 2TB hard drive for games too, either WD Blue or Seagate Barracuda there.
Case and PSU are gonna be a lot more up to you. I really like Phanteks, so I have the P350X for this build, along with a Cooler Master MWE 650W PSU. 650W is overkill here, you can get away with 500 to 550 instead if you want to save a little more.
Right, that’s the parts, lets get to the fun bit, the performance!
AVG | 1% Low | |
COD 1080P | 119.44 | 98.52217 |
COD 1440P | 83.31 | 68.68132 |
AVG | 1% Low | |
BFV 1080p | 94.99 | 86.43042 |
BFV 1440p | 71.17 | 43.78284 |
AVG | Min | |
PUBG 1080p | 104.7 | 75 |
PUBG 1440p | 71.872 | 58 |
AVG | Min | |
FORTNITE 1080p | 116.16 | 76 |
FORTNITE 1440p | 75.66 | 61 |
Temp °c | |
CPU | 71 |
GPU | 75 |
System Power | 212W |
So, even at ultra settings, this system can still clear well over 100FPS at 1080p and consistently over 70FPS at 1440p, making for a great gaming experience. What’s more, while gaming even with the stock cooler the 3600X only peaked at 71°c, and the GPU sitting at just 75°c thanks to the system only drawing around 210W from the wall. If you do go with this spec, the 3600X’s 6 cores means not only do you get great gaming performance, you also get spare threads to use for streaming, or even as a video editing or 3d modelling machine.