- CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 7600 |
$229$199 at Amazon (save $30) - Motherboard: ASRock B650M Pro RS |
$149.99$124.99 at Newegg (save $25) - GPU: XFX Speedster Radeon RX 7600 |
$269.99$239.99 at Amazon (save $30) - Memory: Teamgroup T-Force Vulcan DDR5-5200 | 16GB |
$62.99$59.99 at Amazon (save $3) - SSD: Nextorage Japan | 1TB |
$149.99$54.99 at Newegg (save $95) - Power supply: Corsair CX650M |
$79.99$64.99 at Newegg (save $15) - Cooler: AMD Wraith Stealth (included with CPU) | Free
- Case: Zalman S2 |
$54.99$49.99 at Amazon (save $5) - Total: $793.94
We've covered off a mid-range PC build for around $1,200 this Cyber Monday, and an all-AMD, all-performance PC for $2,700. But how about a budget build for anyone look to keep costs low and get PC gaming this winter?
The big question with a budget PC build is whether it's possible to beat the best Cyber Monday gaming PC deals on price. Usually I'd say if you have the time and don't mind learning a thing or two, you can build your own PC from scratch and score better parts, have a bit of fun, and save a few pennies. But that's not always the case when you get to gaming PC deals around this time of year, which shave off a couple hundred bucks and get rid of any prebuilt premium you might otherwise expect.
Right now, the cheapest pre-built gaming PC deal this Cyber Monday (with a discrete graphics card) is the MSI Aegis R. This scores you an RTX 4060, Core i5 12400F, 16GB of DDR5, and a 1TB SSD. Genuinely a pretty good showing for such a cheap PC, but I think we can do better.
It's also worth trying to build your own PC. Not only because it's fun, but because you also get to grips with a PC you might want to upgrade down the line, and you usually can score more premium parts overall. You rarely find one of the best SSDs for gaming in a prebuilt, for example.
| Category | Part | Sale price | Old price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Motherboard | ASRock B650M Pro RS | $124.99 | $149.99 |
| Processor | AMD Ryzen 5 7600 | $199 | $229 |
| Graphics card | XFX Speedster Radeon RX 7600 | $239.99 | $269.99 |
| Cooler | Wraith Stealth | Free | Free |
| Memory | Teamgroup T-Force Vulcan DDR5-5200 | $59.99 | $62.99 |
| Power supply | Corsair CX650M | $64.99 | $79.99 |
| SSD | Nextorage Japan 1TB | $54.99 | $149.99 |
| Case | Zalman S2 | $49.99 | $54.99 |
| Total | Row 8 - Cell 1 | $793.94 | $966.94 |
My budget PC build thought process
Two chips are fighting for my attention for a budget build today: the Core i5 13400F and Ryzen 5 7600. Naturally, I'm inclined to go with the option we picked as the best budget CPU for gaming, which is the newer Core i5. It's stuffed with more E-cores than its predecessor, and those would could come in handy for the lifetime of this chip, and of course it's great for gaming.
Woah, not so fast, me. That's an easy decision when Intel's chip is cheaper than AMD's, which it often is, though right now they are asking for roughly the same amount of cash this Cyber Monday. Both chips demand around $200.
This decision comes down to platform costs and performance figures. On the one hand, Intel offers multiple chipsets in the motherboard market that are compatible with this 13th Gen processor, and some of those still use DDR4 memory, which often sees them sell for cheaper than you might expect. Whereas AMD's AM5 platform is newer and requires faster DDR5 memory, which usually makes it a bit more expensive than Intel's.
DDR5 memory has reduced in price pretty drastically over this past year, but that's also a more general pricing trend for RAM. DDR4 is probably the cheapest it'll ever be right now, as someday soon it will start making way for the newer, speedier standard. What that actually means today is you can score 16GB of DDR5 for around $60, and 16GB of DDR4 for around $40.
On the motherboard side of things, our cheapest recommendation in the Cyber Monday motherboard sales is an ASRock B650M AM5-compatible motherboard for $110. It's a bit barebones, but it will work well alongside that Ryzen 5 7600. That will mean settling with the more expensive DDR5 RAM, but that might be worthwhile yet.
The cheapest Intel motherboard I've found is the Gigabyte B760M DS3H for $100. This is another pretty threadbare board, but it's DDR4 compatible, and so overall we can save around $30 on this and the RAM if we stick with the Intel CPU.
My issue here is that neither of these budget motherboards impress me much—neither even offers Wi-Fi built-in and you'd have to spend extra to get yourself an adapter. I feel like these are motherboards I wouldn't be surprised to see on a pre-built PC, which can skimp on the mobo to save cash for better components.
Instead, I'm going to say screw it and go with the Ryzen 5 7600 for $200 and the ASRock B650M Pro RS WiFi for $125. What a curve ball. We'll find a way to make the cash up later. Ultimately I don't feel like there's enough between this and the Intel chip to really make me hyper-fixate on buying either one—the AMD chip can be a little stronger in some games than Intel's, though not always, and Intel's chip is a little stronger in multithreaded benchmarks, though probably not be such an extent that you'll really feel that outside of Cinebench.
This is great mobo and chip combo and it's cheap enough without cutting genuinely useful features, so I'm sticking with that. If you really want you can buy a nominally same mobo for the Intel chip for $125 and switch everything over, though that's the last you'll hear me talk about it. Promise.
The GPU is where I thought I'd struggle, as these components are sought after and expensive. Thankfully, we can rely on one current generation GPU to help us cut through the noise: AMD's RX 7600.
No, not the CPU. The graphics card with almost the same name.
Despite AMD's famously poor naming schema, which I will continue to be a curmudgeon about, the RX 7600 for $240 is a really solid deal. This graphics card isn't massively exciting, and it doesn't make for a major upgrade over an RDNA 2 GPU of yesteryear, but it is the best of a budget lot right now. Nvidia's RTX 4060 costs at least $50 more and Intel's GPUs are starting to fall further behind as they're a little older now.
The RX 7600 will deliver 1080p gaming worth a damn, and that's exactly what we can expect for this sort of PC price range.
Right, I've gone on long enough already, let's speed-run these final few components.
The SSD is a genuinely great pick I'm quite happy about being able to include. You can score cheaper 1TB drives but they won't be anywhere near as quick, and if we're opting for an up-to-date motherboard and CPU platform, why not try to extract top performance out of every piece?
Onto the PSU, and you shouldn't skimp on this key component. I know it's easy to look at this anonymous black box with a few cables spewing out and think any ol' black box with cables spewing out will do. But that's absolutely not the case. Now that doesn't mean you should pick up an overkill power supply rated to 1000W 80+ Platinum for a 1080p machine, but buy from a trusted supplier. Corsair is one of the best, and this PSU will leave us wattage to spare for future upgrades.
You don't need a cooler, as we can stick with the one included with the Ryzen CPU: the Wraith Stealth. That's only a thin cooler without much heatsink, so I'd probably recommend buying a new one down the line. Even a $25 air cooler will work a treat. This Wraith will do anyways, and the Zalman case we're pairing with it comes with three fans to make sure it's fed fresh air.
The case is a point of personal preference, and all the budget cases I've used lately are tougher to find in the US than I'd like. But this Zalman looks plenty kitted out with fans, a glass side panel and a pretty style for such a small sum of cash.
All in, that's $793.94 total—cheaper than our cheapest pre-build PC deal, shipping notwithstanding. I'm okay with that. If you don't tally your weekend or evening hours and bill yourself for them at the end of the fiscal year, I'd say my build is a preferential way to get into PC gaming this Cyber Monday. It's the gaming PC I'd want to build, anyways, and currently $173 cheaper thanks to some key deals.
