Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “The Holiday PC Buyer’s Guide – 2022”.
Got a gamer in your life who’s looking for an upgrade itching to spend your holiday bonus, or maybe your computer just exploded, and you need to fix fast well, thanks to Amazon sponsoring this video we’ve got you covered with our 2022 holiday buyers guide, because not only Is building a reasonably priced gaming rig actually viable for a change? You might be surprised to see just how low prices can go if you’re willing to buy last year’s model ddr5 more, like DDR, Buy. Thank you, foreign. We’Re kicking things off with our Apu Super Saver. Build for the Casual Gamer out there who just needs something that works.
We managed to get our cheapest system built for a little over 300 dollars. It’S not pretty, and it comes with a major caveat. Our gigabyte, GAA 320m motherboard does not support our hexa Core ryzen.
5 4600g with Vega, 7 Graphics out of the box, but if you have access to an older am4 CPU like a 2400g, you can update the biosan. You are good to go, however, if you’re willing to Shell out about 20 extra, you can avoid this hassle by simply going with an a520 board. Instead, I think it’s probably worth the 20 to 30 dollars, but when our budget is this low, every penny counts and it shows how many of you out there are using four gig sticks of ddr4. Well, we are, and our two and a half inch SSD is only 240 gigs to boot, get it because it’s your boot drives and the rest of your storage.
Anyway, we’ve gone with the zelman S3, the cheapest ATX case we could find. But if you’ve got an old home computer collecting dust, you could probably Save A Buck or 50 and just use that, if you’re on this type of a budget, you might also consider picking up an Amazon Basics, mouse and keyboard they’re affordable and they just work. As for our power supply, well, it hopefully will work, it’s only 430 Watts, 80 plus not 80, plus bronze, just 80 plus, but it’s from thermaltake who should reply to your emails. If you have any problems and for under 30 dollars, we can’t really complain, even if it’s not going to give us a lot of room for upgrades leading us to our first upgrade our 500 build. If you’re a gamer, you know you’re going to want a dedicated, GPU, eventually and Apu is fine to get started.
But if you spend a bit extra now you can make sure your system has enough power and storage for the future. Maybe some faster Ram, even a nicer case, for a couple hundred bucks more. Let’S see what we can can get.
First order of business, goodbye 256 gig, SATA, SSD, hello, crucial P3 plus one terabyte nvme SSD at 84.. It’S a steal, and while our budget doesn’t allow us to improve our processor now, almost anything that we would upgrade to later is going to support Gen 4 speeds. That’S why we’re going with the ASRock b550mpg Riptide motherboard.
Not only does it support a Gen 4 drive, but what gaming rig would be complete without argb headers and some motherboard armor memory was another huge upgrade for a small price. Since ddr4 is so cheap right. Now we even managed to squeeze in more RGB with this 2×8 gig Corsair Vengeance, kit running at 3200, Mega transfers per second cl-16, and once you can afford a graphics card, you’ll need some more juice, so we’ve upgraded to another thermaltake power supply this time with 80 Plus bronze efficiency and a 750 watt rating now to be clear, this category was full of tough choices.
I mean we had to pick between between either an APU build, but with a good upgrade path or a relatively low, tiered GPU build. That was going to make some compromises and might not perform as well as you might Hope. Anyway. There is, however, a middle ground if you’re willing to take a little bit of risk and maybe spend a bit more like 600 bucks, because there are a lot of great deals in the used graphics card market right now, thanks to the recent crypto crash, we’ve got A few recent budget build videos that you can check out. If you want to stray from the safe path of new warranty Cloud purchases at our next price tier, a thousand dollars, you absolutely could go, buy a 500 GPU slap it into our previous system and call it a day. However, both Intel and AMD have released their latest and greatest, offering upgrade paths that are unavailable to our am4 socket 500.
Build friendship ended with 4600g now Core i5 12400f is my best friend. Unlike the high higher end of Intel’s 12th gen processors. This little guy doesn’t have any efficiency cores, but it boosts a little higher than our previous six core CPU and wins out in both single and multi-threaded workloads.
Now that we don’t need integrated Graphics, we’re going to save a couple of bucks and get the F version, and this Pro z690p motherboard from MSI, which should give us a phenomenal upgrade path thanks to its beefy vrms and its ability to unlock k-series chips. Now, since 13th gen still supports ddr4 we’re not shooting ourselves in the foot by sticking with the same Corsair Vengeance modules from before, and our crucial p3s Gen 4 speeds will now be taken advantage of now. Some of you are probably screaming at me right now: Linus, the 5600x is on sale on Amazon for a hundred sixty dollars.
You fool and you’re absolutely right with a cheap, b550 motherboard. We could save almost 200 right now, but that sale won’t last forever and upgrading later to a 50 800x3d could end up costing you a pretty penny. If you can find one, if you do decide to go AMD now, though, you’ll have more than enough left over to pick up a screwdriver from lttstore.com. Thanks to the other recent price reductions from AMD, you can now get an ASRock RX, 6700 XT for as low as 390 dollars, 12 gigs of vram on a 192-bit bus, a boost clock of over 2500 megahertz.
I mean it might not be it in video when it comes to Ray tracing or streaming, but this thing is a beast for either 1080P or even 1440p gaming. As for our case, it’s still good enough for now, but we would recommend going a little over budget and maybe getting something nicer like this or this with slightly improved cable management and Creature Comforts. It can just make the build a little bit more pleasant. But if a little more pleasant isn’t enough for you, if you’re thinking of maybe going 4K at our 1500 price point, over half of our budget is going towards our CPU and our our GPU. We’Re sticking with AMD again going for the 6900 XT, which is going to give us great rasterization game performance for under 700 and we’re getting a faster CPU now with efficiency course. The 12 600k. We also upgraded our boot drive to a Samsung 980 Pro and finally we’re getting a nicer case with fractal’s Focus 2 RGB mid tower for our cooler. We chose the thermal right, Peerless assassin, 120, SE argb a decent cooler for just 40 bucks. That should be plenty for a core i5. If looks are more important to you. You can actually save some money here and not upgrade to the 980 Pro spending it on a nicer looking case or cooler instead or maybe a fully modular power supply and another valid option would be to bump your memory up to 3600 Mega transfers per. Second, we felt that 3200 was good enough for us for now, though, and besides, we still need some upgrades for our two thousand dollar build this time around we’re building. In a case that we’ve used Lots throughout the last couple of years, the phantek’s p500a digital and we’re gon na need that thing for all the juicy storage that we’ve now got with a two terabyte 7200 hard drive. That goes along with our 980 Pro that we have now doubled in size to two terabytes as well, we’re still using only 16 gigs of ddr4 memory.
But it’s now running at 3 600 Mega transfers per second cl18 and we bumped our GPU up to a Radeon RX 6950xt. That 750 watt power supply should still be okay. As long as we stick to gaming and don’t try to overclock the snot out of our Core i5 13600 KF, but we’re gon na upgrade to an 80 plus gold efficiency, fully modular unit for a bit of a cleaner look and peace of mind. A good chunk of change also went to purchasing a z790 board with integrated Wi-Fi. So if you don’t mind sticking with the older chipset and you don’t need Wireless, you could actually save a bit of money there and leave the old motherboard. The hard drive is also not necessarily required, but hard drives have gotten wildly inexpensive these days and it’s nice to have a spot to save any extra files.
You have particularly to something that’s a little easier to recover data. From honestly, I was expecting to find more Nvidia cards in today’s builds, but the reality is that AMD has made some aggressive price reductions recently and with free Prime shipping through Amazon. It was kind of a no-brainer thanks again to them.
For sponsoring this video, I mean no joke just using PC part picker. They were usually the cheapest option anyway, particularly if you already have a Prime membership and they’re going to have more sales, as we move closer to Black Friday and the holiday season. So keep your eyes peeled. As for now, we’re gon na have all these products listed Linked In the description down below. If you enjoyed this video be sure to check out our recent budget builds like the 69 gaming PC and the upgrade that we made to it later.
The second hand Market is super wild right now, good time to build a PC .