#Cheap gaming pc under $500 for free
#Cheap gaming pc under $500 how to
#Cheap gaming pc under $500 1080p

To work with our 13100F, we need an Intel 700 series motherboard and the best price we've seen on one is $99 for the MSI PRO B760M-P The microATX board uses DDR4 RAM (cheaper than DDR5) and provides support for M.2 PCIe 3.0 or 4.0 SSDs. We found that the 13100F was about on par with AMD's Ryzen 5 5600, which costs about $30 more. It comes with a cooler in the box so there's no need for a third-party one. This CPU has four cores, all of them performance cores, and a solid boost clock of 4.5 GHz.

#Cheap gaming pc under $500 1080p

If you want something a little faster and can expand your budget by just a few dollars, your best bet is this RX 6500 XT card, which goes for around $149 and can take you up to 65.8 fps in 1080p medium.įor our CPU, we're going with Intel's Core i3-13100F which is just over $100 but delivers plenty of pep for the price. The card averaged 54.7 fps in our benchmarks at 1080p medium, though updated drivers may have improved things another 5–10 percent. Besides that, it's faster than AMD's competing RX 6400, comes with more VRAM, and most importantly it has full video encoding/decoding acceleration - including AV1 support for the future. We didn't love the card at launch, but it's now readily available at Newegg and has been for a few months.

That's a big improvement over relying on integrated graphics.įor the graphics card in this system, we're going with Intel's Arc A380. You won't get the fastest GPU around, but you will be able to play games at 1080p with modest settings. Silicon Power Value Gaming DDR4 RAM 16GB (8GBx2) 3200MHzįor around $500, you can build a PC that has a discrete graphics card.

#Cheap gaming pc under $500 how to

And if you've never made a computer before, see our article on how to build a PC. Nor do we include the price of peripherals such as the best gaming monitors, best gaming keyboards or best gaming mouse.

#Cheap gaming pc under $500 for free

On the high-end, though, the Ryzen 9 7900X3D is a great choice.Īlso note that we don't include the cost of an operating system, because you can get Windows for Free or Cheap. This is because, right now, the cost of Ryzen 7000 CPUs, along with their expensive motherboards and pricey DDR5 RAM, make them poor budget options on the low end.

You might notice most of our current best PC builds use Intel CPUs. Given frequent price and stock changes in the space, you should get whichever third or first-party card is available with the GPU you want for the best price at the time you read this. For example, we'd recommend an RTX 4070 Ti and link to a list of available cards rather than, for example, the Zotac RTX 4070 Ti. We are also going to recommend GPUs rather than specific makes and models of graphics cards. However, because we are trying to hit price points and frequently changing these lists (as prices change), we have not tested all of the parts in each build together and some of the less performance-centric parts such as the case, motherboard and PSU may be ones that we have not reviewed. Note that our best PC build recommendations are based on our component expertise, market research and testing we've done of the key components in each build, namely the CPU, GPU and SSD. Why you can trust Tom's Hardware Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you.