The good news is that we are out of the dark times. The time when even trying to build a pc with a reasonable graphics card seemed impossible. Graphics card prices have fallen in the last couple of months. You can now start today’s budget build at 700 USD.
Table of Contents
Avoid Spending Too Much on The CPU and Motherboard:
Most people spend too much money on CPU and Motherboard in a budget build. But if you’re not buying a super expensive graphics card then you are going to be GPU limited, not CPU limited in most gaming situations. It means if you spend a lot of money on a CPU then you’re just wasting that money. People might think it increases the longevity of the system and you can upgrade further GPUs in the future.
Although it is quite clear that spending more on your PC will make it last longer. However, if you are on a limited budget, we would rather suggest you buy the best PC right now. Enjoy it for a few years before worrying about whether you will lose a small amount of upgrade potential in the future.
Let’s talk about the Core i3-12100F CPU. It has a quad-core processor. This CPU is ranked as a high-quality GPU as per the 10-gaming average at 1080p. The 10-gaming average also indicates that this 12100F despite being a 4 core 8 thread CPU can beat 3700x and Ryzen 5 3600. Remember the 3700x is an 8 core 16 thread and Ryzen 5 3600 is a 6 core 12 thread CPU. It delivers a similar performance to an i5-10600k and i5-11600k.
Now consider playing Cyberpunk with 12100F. This game hammers the CPU a lot harder than most games. You will see that the 12100F performs on par with Ryzen 53600 or Ryzen 73700x. Compared to 10600K, its performance might be below par. However, it still delivers a very good performance. Even in one percent lows are way above the 60 FPS target.
Let’s talk about the motherboard. The motherboard is one of the places you can spend slightly more money in a PC budget build. You can spend about 20 bucks more on the motherboard. You can buy a 12400F instead. Of course, it will be significantly better but will raise the price.
The RAM:
For a budget build, we suggest you go with 16 gigabytes 2×8 configuration of memory. That’s at least DDR4 3200CL 16. This memory right now is only 50 bucks. 32-gigabytes is also nice and it cost you an extra 40 or 50 bucks. However, if you add an extra 50 bucks to every component, your will end up being hundreds of dollars over budget. If you’re looking for a kind of competitive e-sports performance, then choose faster ram, speeds, and timings instead of more ram.
The Storage:
Another place where you can save some bucks is the Hard drive. Do you want an SSD? NVME SSDs are not much expensive compared to SATA SSDs. There are some decent and fast 500 gigabyte models that you can get for 40 USD. These models may not be amazing but are fast enough for your boot drive and your games.
However, modern games can fill up a 500 gigabyte SSD very quickly. So if you install more than one or two games at the same time, you will have to buy more storage soon. That is why we recommend you a one terabyte drive at least. It will increase the cost by about 30 dollars.
GPU – The Most Important Component:
The graphics card is the biggest factor and plays a great role in your gaming experience. If your graphics card performs better, your PC will do so. However, if your graphics card is more powerful than your CPU then the CPU can’t feed the graphics card. That is why a graphics card is the number one thing affecting your gaming performance.
The prices of graphics cards have come much farther down lately. The RX 6600 is absolutely a better choice than the RTX 3050. Especially, when the RTX 3050 costs more. Now there is a gap of 80 dollars MSRP (Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price) between the RX 6600 and RTX 3050. The RX 6600 and RTX 3050 MSRPs are 329.99 and 250 USD.
However, the better ray tracing performance on the 3050 is completely irrelevant at this price. These cards already work extremely hard just to play the game without ray tracing. Thus, adding ray tracing will decrease their performance. Furthermore, DLSS is better than FSR 1.0 and has much a wider implementation than FSR 2.0. At 1080p, it looks better than FSR 2.0. Though, neither of them looks good at 1080p. That’s why we recommend you play at the native resolution. The RX 6600 is the one that can do it at high settings for a long time without relying on DLSS.
Another option you can look into is to get 2060, possibly used. The main disadvantage of 2060 is losing two gigabytes of VRAM. That’s why it is slightly slower than the RX 6600 but it is a much better competitor. But the overall performance is stronger.
The Case:
Let’s talk about PC cases. We suggest you choose a cheap case. The cheapest cases may range from 35 to 45 USD. Keep in mind that most of the cheapest cases don’t come with fans. If your case doesn’t come with fans, then you will have to buy fans. This will make you think to buy a more expensive case that had fans. However, there is no need to spend too much money on the PC case. There is no reason to believe that a cheap case cannot get the job done for you.
The Power Supply:
Regarding the power supply, we don’t need a lot of power for this build. However, spending more on a power supply means you can upgrade your GPU and even CPU in the future without buying a new one. Remember that installing a new power supply in an already built PC is an annoying upgrade to do.
You can find a decent quality power supply at around 80 USD. For example, an EVGAs power supply that is from a trusted brand can be purchased at 80 USD. It is 550 Watts, which is great.
The RX 6600 which we discussed throughout this article, never goes over 100 watts. This is more than enough power for the build we have been talking about. But again, if you want to upgrade in the future, do buy a more expensive power supply.
Some Thoughts on Budget PC Build:
Now by making all of these little cuts, you can make such a build at around 700 USD. This will give you a very solid 1080p gaming experience in most games. You will be able to play them at ultra settings. In some of the latest most graphically demanding titles, you will have to turn down the high settings. However, if you’re mostly playing e-sports games then it will get crashed. Because for e-sports games you need very high frame rates.
What Would You Upgrade If You Have More Than 700 USD Budget?
So we recommend you to build your PC as discussed above if you have a budget of 700 USD. However, if you want to upgrade then upgrade in the following order. The first thing you should upgrade is the storage. Because 500 gigabytes of storage is just not enough. You can do this upgrade in the future but we would suggest you have a terabyte to start with.
The second most important part to upgrade is your GPU. However, keep in mind that a GPU upgrade will cause a huge increase in your budget. You can get 6600 XT for pretty reasonable prices. Its MSRP is 380 dollars. So that is an 80 USD increase. Although 80 USD is a lot of money, it will significantly boost your PC performance.
The CPU and motherboard come next. If you want to stick with Intel, then you should go for 12400F. The other option would be choosing a Ryzen 5600 from AMD. We suggest you go for the Intel chip because this motherboard can run the 12400F amazingly well. However, if you spend 20 USD more, it will increase the upgrading capacity of your system in the future. Research shows that MSI Pro B660M-A is also proven to be one of the best budget boards.
Now, these upgrades have increased our budget up to 830 USD including the upgrade of one terabyte hard drive. Although this will be a better system, the gaming performance will be similar to what you were seeing with the 700 USD system. It is because you have not upgraded the video card yet. In case you are waiting for better CPU gains or GPU upgrades, it is better to upgrade your GPU now. Here we would recommend choosing the RX 6600 XT rather than the RX 6600. It will make your system about 19 % faster. However, with this upgrade, your budget will cross a budget of 900 dollars.
Let’s not forget the Stock Cooler. At this level of CPU and 12100F, we recommend you use a stock cooler that ranges from 20 to 50 dollars. The more you spend on it the better results you will get. For example, it could decrease the volume of your pc, and the fan noise and also help your PC temperatures stay under control.
Conclusions:
As you can see that bringing just a little increase in the cost of every component (such as storage, CPU, motherboard, and video card) caused a 200 USD increase in our budget. It means that the budget can easily and considerably go up if you did not consider every component of the PC. That is why we suggest you follow our recommendations to build a nice PC within a budget of 700 USD.