A GAMING PC YOU CAN ACTUALLY BUILD! Ryzen 5600X + RX 6600 XT Build Guide
Building a gaming PC has been nigh on impossible this year, what with the stocking issues and insane pricing – especially of graphics cards – but I’m happy to say it’s not impossible! In this video I’ll be walking you through how to build this system, and how it performs, including streaming! So, let’s get into it.
Let me start with a quick rundown of the parts – I went for the Ryzen 5600X as a great option for 1080p gaming, it’s still got a good upgrade path with up to 16 cores available should you want, and is at a great price especially with the bundle I bought from OverclockersUK which includes a Gigabyte B550 Aorus Elite V2 AX motherboard and this Kingston Fury 16GB kit of DDR4-3600 CL17. I picked up an ARCTIC Freezer 34 eSports DUO to keep the chip nice and cool, a Corsair CX650F to keep it all powered and a Phanteks P360 case to house it all. I also picked up a WD SN750 1TB Gen 3 SSD as the primary storage drive, aaaannnndddddd we get to the extortionate bit, the graphics card. I went with this RX 6600 XT Nitro+ from Sapphire, at the time of filming it is still in stock, but you’ll have to part ways with £600. Yes, £600! That brings the total to just under £1300 – way more than this sort of system should cost, I’d imagine more like £1000 normally, but that’s what you can get right now.
So, that’s the parts, let’s put them together. Starting with the CPU, you’ll need to lift the arm on the socket up, match the gold triangle on the chip with the triangle on the socket, carefully place the chip into the socket then drop the arm. Next, you can install your ram by flicking open the clips at the top and bottom of the slots, then line up the notches and install the first stick in the second slot from the left. Slide it in and press it down on both sides until both clips lock. Repeat for the right most slot too.
Installing the SSD is easy, unscrew the heatsink, remove the screw from the standoff, slide the drive into the slot, hold it down onto the standoff and reinstall the screw. Peel the plastic off the heatsink pad, put the heatsink back on and reinstall the screw at the back.
The last thing to do with the motherboard is remove the cooler mounting brackets and screws, and swap them for the four standoffs included in the cooler’s mounting kit. Screw them into the backplate that came with the motherboard – you can make it easier for yourself if you only remove one of the stock brackets at a time!
That’s it for the motherboard, so let’s get the case ready. You’ll need to pull the front of the case from the bottom to remove the front panel, revealing the two hard drive trays with the top one holding the accessories kit. You’ll also want to slide off both side panels too, then turn your attention to the power supply. You’ll need to attach all the cables you’ll be using, which for me are the 24 pin, an 8 pin CPU power connector, a PCIe power connector and a SATA power cable. Once those are all clipped in you can slide the PSU in from the open side, push it to the back and install the 4 screws, one per corner. I like to pre-route the cables, specifically the 8 pin CPU power connector up at the top towards the back side. The 24 pin goes pretty much in the middle, and the PCIe power connector gets fed through a little hole in the power supply basement. You’ll also want to connect the SATA power connection the case needs.
Flip the case around and place the motherboard in. I love Phanteks cases because the centre and upper centre standoffs have a little lip that lets you hang the board in place so once it’s in you can let go and just install all 9 screws. Very handy! Once those screws are in, you can connect all the power and data connections. The 24 pin on the right of the board, the 8 pin up at the top left, the HD audio at the bottom left, any fan headers (the case comes with two fans preinstalled at the front), the USB 3 connector and the power switch header.
Before we can install the cooler you’ll have to screw the mounting arms to the coolers base plate. Make sure to put them on the right way round! Once on, apply some thermal paste to the CPU. You don’t need much, just a grain of rice sized blob will do. Then, and I can’t stress how important this is, REMOVE THE PLASTIC COVERING THE BOTTOM OF THE HEATSINK. Then place it down and install the four thumb screws nice and tight. Don’t forget to reattach and plug in both fans too.
Lastly, installing the GPU. Push the locking tab at the back of the PCIe slot down, remove the two rear PCIe covers from the back of the case, then slide the GPU into the slot pushing firmly until it locks into place. Reinstall both screws at the back, then connect the 8 pin PCIe power connector. And that’s it, clip your panels back on and install Windows, then it’s time for games!
I ran these benchmarks at both 1080p and 1440p on settings I’d generally play at, which is a mix of medium and high, and honestly this thing stormed it! In CSGO you can expect around 450FPS average at both 1080p and 1440p on low settings. I’d call that pretty decent, wouldn’t you? And yes the 1440p result is actually slightly higher than the 1080p average, CSGO is a very CPU dependent game so that’s pretty normal. I’ve actually had the same happen even on the new Alder Lake chips!
In Cyberpunk on medium settings you can expect around 100FPS average which is pretty remarkable considering just how intensive this is to run. That’s demonstrated with the 1440p numbers, where you can expect more like 60FPS average instead. That’s still not bad though, and is plenty playable.
Microsoft Flight is a touch better, I saw around 110 FPS average at 1080p on medium settings, and 72 FPS average at 1440p. Both offered a great experience, and if you did want to bump the quality it’s clear you’ve got the headroom for it.
Watchdogs Legion netted 116 FPS average at 1080p on medium settings and 90 FPS average at 1440p. Again, more than playable. Fortnite on high settings ran at just shy of 200 FPS average on both 1080p and 1440p, which should equally make for a rather good time too!
Finally in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, at high settings it offered 152 FPS average at 1080p and a nice round 100 FPS at 1440p. The CPU Render numbers are pretty impressive too, with the built in benchmark concluding the GPU is almost exclusively the bottleneck to more performance here.
Most of the time I’d stop here, but I decided to do something a little different here, which is to also include some streaming benchmarks too! I tested both CSGO and Shadow of the Tomb Raider at 1080p, using both OBS and the x264 CPU encoder streaming to Twitch, and Radeon ReLive to record the screen using H.265 too. In CSGO, despite “only” having 6 cores available, even when using the CPU to encode the stream performance only dropped slightly, and it didn’t drop at all when using the GPU’s hardware encoder! The recording quality was pretty great too, and the stream didn’t drop any frames so good all round!
In Tomb Raider it’s much the same story, a slight performance hit while using the CPU to encode the stream, and not much lost when using ReLive. Again the stream didn’t drop frames and the recording quality was exactly what I was seeing on screen, so can’t ask for much more than that!
Oh, if you are wondering about temperatures by the way, the CPU peaked at around 60°c while gaming, and the GPU was only a touch higher at 64°c – meaning if you wanted to push either of these with a little power limits tinkering they’ve both got the heatroom.
So, there you have it. A gaming PC you can actually buy today. Sadly the GPU pricing makes it about £300 more than it really should be, but if you want a new system now and have the cash, this is a great option. It’s well balanced, offers good upgrade potential from pretty much every component, and should stay relevant for a good few years yet. Of course I’ll have affiliate links to all these parts linked in the description below – both to OverclockersUK who provided the case and helped us out when purchasing the rest of the components, and a couple global Amazon links too.
