Bitterly many years have passed so that building a PC for gaming was not worth it. Has the situation finally changed in the summer of 2023? We tried to build a cheap gaming machine.
Building a computer is a challenge, but the sweeter kind is when you create something that will serve you for years, is with you and can feel a bit like the work of your own two hands – and this is a wonderfully uplifting feeling. Well, average users didn’t get much of this in recent years, and even those who flirted with this idea, we tried with all our might to dissuade them from doing so. You had to hunt for the components on the market with a magnifying glass, the prices were amazingly unrealistic, and in most cases it was much more worthwhile to buy a factory-assembled desktop PC, or rather to upgrade it to a laptop. What’s more, if a game was included, then straight to a game console (which was also a missing item), because there was simply no gaming machine around HUF 200,000 that could even run AAA games in full HD. In fact, you couldn’t even get a minimally acceptable video card for HUF 200,000.
Fortunately, the situation has somewhat normalized, prices have moderated, and the supply is plentiful, so we couldn’t resist throwing ourselves into machine building. We have put together two configurations – of course, an AMD and an Intel CPU version – to find out if it is worth choosing a PC again instead of game consoles or simple deprivation. In our article, the console vs. PC vs. we don’t want to take a position in the streaming debate, our only goal is to be able to put together a PC that doesn’t bleed when running today’s games, it has the biggest appeal of desktop machines, modular expandability and most importantly –
not prohibitively expensive.
For this reason, cheap does not necessarily mean that we chose the cheapest of everything: we could have chosen a weaker CPU, less RAM, a more puritanical motherboard and a more modest video card. , but we felt that these would have been excessively painful compromises, which would have had a negative impact on the gaming experience and/or expandability.
Cheap AMD gamer PC: not the latest, but still powerful
Proceeding in ABC order, we start with the AMD configuration. Here, the AM5 platform is conquering, and there is reason to admire it, especially since the Ryzen 5 7600X CPU can now be purchased at a very friendly price, and in the top category, the X3D CPU equipped with extra cache allows you to taste the powerful PCs abilities. We still prefer to stay with AM4, namely because of the low platform costs. AM4 is officially out of date, but it is still popular today, and looking at the 5000 series, there is still enormous development potential in the platform. This is especially true in our case, since we chose a modestly priced, six-core (12 program threads) processor. You can easily replace this later with, say, a Ryzen 7 5800X3D CPU, or perhaps the most powerful Ryzen 9 5950X model on the platform, and your machine will already change speed.
In addition to the Ryzen 5 5500 processor, we chose a sufficiently fast and reliable Kingston Fury RAM module pair of 16 GB, which is complemented by an Adata PCIe 4.0 SSD with a sequential speed of 7 GB/s. The latter is also very important, since with this you can make good use of the increasingly popular DirectStorage API, which helps games load faster. The B550 Asus Prime motherboard we chose also has a much better equipped AM4 motherboard, for example here you only get 1 GbE LAN and a simple sound card, but there is USB 3.2 Gen2, the VRM and the chipset are cooled, you can manage with 4 DIMM slots and the design is second to none. We packed this in a cool and high-quality Cooler Master MasterBox Q300L micro ATX case, accompanied by a Chieftec 600 watt power supply. The motherboard offers many expansion options, you can install SATA and M.2 storage in the system, the housing has transparent side panels and a dust filter, and the power supply can handle a more serious configuration than the current one.
Cheap Intel gamer PC: nothing to complain about
Although users love it, Intel does not adopt AMD’s development strategy, i.e. approx. completely changes platform and processor socket every two years. This time, we did not choose a CPU from the latest generation, but from the one older, but the Core i3-12100F only because the Core i3-13100F received a clock signal increase of only 200 MHz, while it is HUF 10,000 more expensive than its predecessor.
We placed this CPU in an MSI B760 motherboard, namely one that accepts DDR4 memory, so we didn’t have to pay for the extra cost of DDR5. You get almost the same set of features as the motherboard chosen for the AMD machine: PCIe 4.0 for VGA and SSD, 4 DIMM slots, but a simple LAN controller and simple audio codecs.
There are no complaints about Intel’s configuration either, and in order to make both machines look as similar as possible, we did not change anything in the additional components. The 16 GB DDR4-3200 RAM module, the lightning-fast 1 TB SSD, the housing and power supply are all the same. Expandability is also similar. You can choose between Intel’s 12th and 13th generation processors for this machine, and by switching to a Core i5-13600KF over time, you can greatly increase the performance of your machine.
Video card: the Achilles tendon of gaming machines
As with many components, the video card was chosen to be the same for both configurations. This building block is clearly the most important and at the same time the most difficult choice, but it made our situation somewhat easier that the new models targeted at the selected price category are already on the market, so we don’t have to guess whether a video card will come in the coming months that rearranges the balance of power. Of course, it is possible that one or another older model will disappear from the market, or perhaps some GPU manufacturer will think about it and significantly reduce the prices – although thinking about it this way, we see less than a minimal chance of the latter.
The logical decision would be the latest GeForce RTX 4060/Radeon RX 7600, but both cards represent a staggering price/value ratio, not to mention that their memory subsystem is strongly underdesigned – it was similar to the cards of 3-5 years ago. Finally, after a lot of brainstorming, we chose the Radeon RX 6700 XT, which still provides excellent performance under 1080p and 1440p and does not falter even when games throw higher resolution textures at it, because it has 12 GB of VRAM at 192 bits. for the GPU. In terms of rasterization performance, this GPU is still much better than the two newer GPUs mentioned above, and if AMD finally deigns to introduce FSR3 upscaling technology, 4K resolution should not be an obstacle for some games. Of course, you have to give up ray tracing, but you would only get depressing speeds from all video cards in this category. Only the RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB could compete with this card, but even the 8 GB model – which is strongly discouraged for purchase – costs HUF 165-190 thousand, and the 16 GB version is even more expensive and barely faster .
Used at half price
If it is a transistor and has no moving parts, you can even get the components used. Even though the second-hand market has seen a clear rise in prices in recent years, you can still save a lot if you choose carefully. In our next article, we will assemble a gaming machine with similar performance by mixing used and new components, and we will also see what kind of PC can be assembled today for 300,000 forints, if we build from used (but preferably under warranty) components.
2023-08-13 10:07:56
#cheapest #gaming #worth #gamer
