The Best $1250 Gaming PC Possible (End of 2024)
[Music] what's up guys welcome back to build fix this is my monthly series for anyone who's looking to build a new computer today I'm going to be getting back to basics because we've actually gone through quite a few launches recently some of the Dust has settled so I have two builds for you guys today one is the best bang for the buck gaming PC that you can build I think at the moment and the second is a higher-end system that's looking forward to Wi the 9800 x3d launches in just about a week this is build fix episode number eight for our oober proudly sponsored by PC part picker excellent I will quickly explain how build fix works it starts with a community post usually posted towards the beginning of the month but if you're not subscribed to my YouTube channel consider subscribing so you can be notified of when that goes up you can use PC part picker or you can manually enter the components that you have for your planned build I then browse through the replies and pick some builds that I think could use some tweaking or some tuning and of course there's a pole attached which is just for fun uh went with an October themed won for this month and the ghost one yay ghosty 44% of of the votes but let's dive in with our first build submitted by Logano 27 and I picked this one because I think it could benefit from some tweaking but I also picked this because I think it represents a really good bang for the buck system with a am5 build a 7700x CPU so that's what I'm going to be aiming towards as I tune this logoo is using two 27in 1080p 165 HZ refresh rate monitors but they've chosen an RTX 470 super OC so they're already going a little overboard with the graphics card but I think the 4070 super is a good GPU to pair with the rest of these components at around this price range this is also a mixed use build since Logano does CAD work in Fusion so having more vram on the graphics card does help out with that the budget for the system is at or under $2,000 and here is my current uh list of the prices as input on PC part picker which is coming up at about uh just shy of 1,900 for the total so I'm going to edit this parts list and I'm going to see if there's some stuff we can swap out or swap in or things that we should just leave alone but real quick let's talk about the CPU situation right now for anyone who is buying Intel just recently launched their cor Ultra 200s series of processors at least they launched the higher-end K skes the unlocked like the 285k and it's been pretty universally confirmed from all the reviews that have come out in the last week that these are not ideal for gaming in fact the gaming performance for some of these they're not even outperforming last generation until 14th gen CPUs to say nothing of amd's best offerings like the 7800 x3d so for that reason I would only be pointing people towards Intel's newest core Ultra 200 series processors if they're specifically building a non-gaming system and since both builds today are gaming PCs they're both AMD am5 systems which have an upgrade pass to the existing 7800x 3D which is still the best CPU for gaming as well as the 9800x 3D which we're expecting to launch next week and reviews for that are still forthcoming however the 7800x 3D in the leadup to Intel's launch has gone way up in price it can only be found for about $450 at the cheapest whereas a month or so ago it was selling for 350 or even less so if you're building a system right now you can still build am5 you can go with one of their six core or 8 core not 70 800x 3D options which are more reasonably priced around 200 bucks that will let you get a system up and running that is forward compatible with the x3d CPUs either the 7,000 or the 9,000 ones that you could maybe buy later down the line when prices have mellowed out a little bit so right from the top here we have the 8 core 7700x which is about $270 right now and note that for the AMD processors that have an x on the end it's not going to ship with a CPU Cooler that means you're going to need to add one of those on which is going to cost probably around $35 to $50 but our Builder who I'm just going to call Logan has chosen the noctua NH L9 x65 which is a very good CPU Cooler but it's also a little bit more on the low profile side and it also costs about $70 and I'll say for any budget Builders out there you should opt for the AMD ryzen 5 7600 non X the 7600 X is about $28 but you will need to add a CPU Cooler for that in that case I'd recommend just spend a little bit more and get the 7700x budget Builders right now should opt for the $ 7600 less than $200 comes with a CPU Cooler so you don't need to add that as an expense and yes you can upgrade your CPU uh cooler down the line too for a better one but that's going to be an over $100 savings right there I'm going to op to swap the cooler out here though just to save a few bucks as well the one thing I couldn't tell with this build is if it was supposed to be small form factor there's a an sfx power supply and that low profile CPU Cooler but it's still a fulls size ATX motherboard I'm just going to assume we're doing a fulls size ATX build though because that's what makes the most sense for most Builders it provides the most flexibility and for that we're going to go with the go-to air cooler right now which is thermal rights Phantom spirit this is right up there with all the best-in-class air coolers it's only $36 and it even comes with addressable RGB fans there's a non-rgb version as well if you're not into the RGB bling next up let's talk about the motherboard this is a perfectly fine motherboard it's $200 it's an Asus tough board it has a good feature set and it's got all the connectivity you would need and in fact uh do keep that motherboard as was about to say I can save you 50 bucks by going with my go-to azck recommendation right now which is either the live mixer or the PG lightning which are effectively the same board just the live mixer has this garish color scheme on it which maybe you're into but but actually point being I don't recommend either of these right now cuz they're both over $200 this is supposed to be a $150 motherboard but azck has gotten people recommending it so now they're like ooh maybe we can charge an extra $80 for that no stick with that Asus tough board or if you do want to save 20 bucks aarch b650 steel Legend Wi-Fi is a good choice and you know it's got Wi-Fi so this or the tough either one is perfectly fine this is a whiteboard so it's not going to be quite as matchy matchy but uh we're building on a budget so the Aesthetics are lower on the importance list the memory kit we're definitely going to swap out we have a 32 gig kit that is what you want but it's ddr5 5200 and cl40 not the best speed or timings and for $97 there's definitely faster and better memory kits out there if you're building on am5 you want a ddr5 memory kit that is ddr5 6000 to about 6,400 that is a sweet spot for the current ryzen platform I don't actually recommend going much beyond that unless you really want to get into memory overclocking tweaking and tuning your timings and becoming a huge build Zoid fan which there's nothing wrong with to be perfectly clear but uh for most people who aren't going to do that you want ddr5 6,000 to 6400 you want a 32 gig kit that's 2x 16 gigs although if you are considering doing stuff like CAD heavy photo or video editing or anything that's going to use up a lot of system Ram here's a good place to also give yourself an upgrade for that purpose in which case I would opt for a 48 gig or 64 GB kit if we sort this by price per gigabyte we can see they're compatible kits starting around 80 bucks and then the final character istic I would look at if you don't want like RGB lighting cuz RGB lighting is the thing memory can do too but you shouldn't really buy a specific kit just for that but then look at cast latency uh you want the lowest value possible here that will also affect your first word latency so you can sort by that as well but do note that the uh really tightly timed kits with lower cast latency can increase the price pretty significantly so the least expensive kits that meet all these criteria are going to give you about 10 nond first word latency so there's some silicon power kits down here there's this team group group kit and you know what for $86 uh and and it's a white Kit so that's going to match our motherboard so we'll go for that one about a $10 or12 savings but more importantly we have much faster memory that's going to have much tighter timings and that's going to improve just about our entire Computing experience including gaming I have more to change with this build but I'm going to try to do this in the right order by first attacking the power supply down here I don't want to say attacking but we have an sfx power supply and a fullsize ATX build sfx power supplies cost more because shrinking things and making them smaller in the Tech World usually makes them more expensive and you can still use an sfx power supply on a full-size ATX build usually there there's a bracket adapter or something like that but you're kind of wasting your money on making it small so the wattage for your power supply should be based on your graphics card and your total system power PC part picker gives an estimated wattage over here based on the parts you've added to your list but it's best to look at the GPU that you have or the graphics card you want to get in the future look at the minimum recommended power supply rating for that go for that amount of wattage or possibly 50 to 100 to maybe even 200 Watts more if you're planning to like add a bunch of drives to your system or other things that are going to suck up more power 750 wats should be perfectly adequate for the vast majority of builds we're going to start these by price and then I'm going to look for brand names that I've heard of before that I'm not scared of and with apologies to aevia and Aries game and cotep these brands do not necessarily have the best track ratings so uh MSI Corsair uh EVGA of course thermal take these these are all pretty solid options the last thing you might consider down here is the 12 plus 4 pin AKA 12 VH power or 12v 2x6 connector if you're going to get an Nvidia graphics card a 40 series or the 50 Series in the future I'd say definitely go for a power supply that has one of those at least natively at least as long as you're not paying too much money for it that gives us the MSI mag a750g PCI E5 look at that $70 750 watts that's like a 100 bucks cheaper than that sfx unit I would also consider maybe the this tough power unit from thermal take or you know you can go up to 850 Watts with the MSI okay we' fixed this build some we've removed some parts that were a little bit overpriced we've increased the performance specifically I think the memory was the biggest upgrade and we've shaved some money off I think we're down 100 or 150 bucks but I think we can drop that a little bit more for people who don't need some of the extra parts that are added here like a 4 TB SSD nice to have definitely but it's also 350 $ expense for most people just starting out with a gaming build you need a 1 tbyte Drive 2 tabt is nice too so consider looking at 2 terab options as well and we want an m.2 20280 that's the form factor SSD and almost all these are going to be nvme ssds which is the latest standard here I will again sort by price per gigabyte we're looking at about 4.4 cents per gigabyte with the least expensive options here and those are all 2 TB drives so $90 to $100 for an entry level 2 TB drive that's probably going to be a PCI EXP Express gen 3 ones so these aren't going to be the fastest in terms of Maximum read and wrs or anything like that but these will work perfectly fine and if you're building a gaming PC your SSD is only going to affect your load times it won't affect your actual game performance at all among the 2 terab drives up here I've used the team group mp33 personally most frequently it's a perfectly fine drive but hey let's stick to a budget with a 1 TB Patriot P400 light and now things are looking much more reasonable in terms of our overall costs we're down to close to 1,400 I should note that I added the fantex XT Pro Ultra midtower case cuz it's a $76 case that comes with fans pre-installed and this represents the mid-range build that I would Point most people towards at this point in time if you're planning to spend between 1,000 and $1,500 on a gaming PC if you do want to bring the price down and get it closer to the $1,200 range go with the 7600 non-x and uh use the stock cooler and then beyond that you'd want to look at your graphics card because this is a 600 50 470 super and we can get that same GPU the 470 super for less than $650 in fact quite a few variants down here in the $600 range including Asus models like the Dual Evo MSI Ventus 2x the 2x OC and I will also say don't spend an extra like $40 or $50 on an OC model of a card look at the actual overclock results here the peak frequency is 2595 MHz on the Asus tough gaming OC that that is only about a 100 maybe 125 Hertz boost over any of these stock cards you can easily go in and use any GPU tuning utility to add an extra 100 HZ or so to your graphics cards Peak frequency and it will work with pretty much all of these these OC models are not worth it if you're spending a lot more money but hey if the cheapest version is an OC like this MSI Ventus 2x OC uh then go for that for sure all right and here is our fixed build with the 7700x coming in at $1,357 or so and apart from having not as much storage cuz we have 1 TB Drive instead of the original 4 TB drive this will be a faster system than the one that we started out with and if we want to know how much this build would cost with the less expensive CPU the 7600 that brings the price down to about 12250 and that is the version that I will save and Link down in the video's description for anyone who's looking to build a new gaming PC right now okay let's move on to build too I'm going to try to do less explaining this time and get straight to the parts this one's from Zack W 4941 upgrading from a 5900 X system to the 9800x 3D that launches next week so I can't exactly say here's how much this will cost or go out and buy this we should wait until those third party reviews come out to confirm but given that the 7800 x3d is still the top CPU to go for if you're building a gaming specific system right now even after the Intel 200 series launch it's reasonably safe to say that the 9800 100 x3d will at least be a little bit faster Zach already ordered and received a few parts like an azrock Nova x870 motherboard noct to a D15 G2 cooler 64 gigs of ddr5 6400 memory a 1 TB crucial SSD a 3090 Founders Edition but I'll be uh considering some other options there too and a very nice case and fan configuration with fractal North XL and noctua nf14 G2 fans as well as a bit of an Overkill power supply with a cic prime px600 so if you looked at my 12 to 400ish do mid-range PC and you're like I can do better than that or I want to do better than that here's going to be like the high-end version of that with the current parts list adding up to $2,154 uh but do note that that's not including the graphics card cuz you can't buy the 390 fers Edition anymore all right let's power through this list the 7800x 3D as mentioned at the beginning of the video is overpriced right now the MSRP was $450 but we know AMD was comfortable selling these for around $330 to $350 at least until it became so popular that they were like well let's uh you know we got that demand lever there going so let's just charge more money I think that was also a response to the Fallout with the Intel 14th gen instability problems that kind of became a big thing late in the summer but anyway when the 9800x 3D launches next week we're expecting it'll probably be $450 maybe a $500 MSRP not really sure what AMD is going to go with there but for the time being the 7800 X 3D with its current overpriced price is a decent enough standin and by the way 430 isn't even accurate the cheapest in stock available one is about $477 cuz Best Buy sold out at the hot price of $430 okay I'm actually going to come back to the cooler on this one because we seem to have a very intentional noctua fan setup and I don't want to mess with that too early that said noctua fans are expensive and you can get away with other fans that aren't quite as pricey but let's do stuff first like a graphics card of course I'm also going to remove the storage now hear me out here the the t705 is a pcie Gen 5 drive it's a very fast nvme SSD which for certain applications you might actually want that if you're doing a lot of moving around of really big video files and you really need those super fast read and write speeds then maybe that's something you want to stick with but I already showed you guys there are 1 tab nvme drives available for 50 bucks is another $100 for 1 tab Drive does that makes sense to you it makes less sense to me especially since this isn't going to impact your gaming performance but if you need that speed then 150 bucks for that class of Drive isn't horrible this is also a monstrously Overkill power supply being 1,600 WTS and 80 plus Platinum tonic actually makes an 80 plus titanium version of this power supply that's even more expensive than that but you really don't need this much wattage unless you're running like a multi-gpu workstation and it is 400 it's almost $500 so we can save a lot of cash there let's find an SSD again we're looking for an m. 220 280 and let's go for a 2 TB Drive since we're looking at a higher-end build I'm looking for something that's a step up from like the least expensive pcie gen 3 drives but without spending too much more money and I think for that we actually have these MSI spatium spatium however you pronounce this stupid drive's name but look it's a Gen 4 drive and it actually hits Gen 4 speeds read wres in the 7300 and 6400 megabytes per second range respectively and it's only about like 10 or 12 bucks more than the cheapest 2 TB drives that are out there so that seems like a good solution for me and then of course there is the video card and I think there's really only two choices right now for the video card for this caliber of system you got the 490 of course fastest gaming graphics card currently on the market but you're going to need to spend at least 1,800 bucks for that and hey at least this one's actually in stock you can can add it to cart over there on Best Buy so absolutely if you're going all out that would be where I would point you because you're not going to get a whole lot of more performance going with like an 00 or $2,000 plus version of this card the downside of course is that we're expecting Nvidia to launch the RTX 50 Series probably in January or maybe January February is time frame they're probably going to be announced at CES so that's a big question mark how much faster will the 50 Series be what what are the prices going to be for the 50 Series are they going to be widely available or you going to have to pay some crazy markup in order to get one all those things considered if you're really ready to build a gaming PC right now this is probably the direction I would point you with your fallback being the RTX 480 super which you should be able to get for about 800 bucks cheaper there are a few models of these available for $1,000 we're going to save ourselves 2 Cents by going with the gigabyte windforce V2 all right and with that I've swapped out the major parts that I would definitely want to swap out and that brings the price down to $2,633 but I want to go back and revisit a few things like the motherboard that I didn't discuss before if you're building a new am5 system and you're looking at the 9000 Series you might consider the x870 chipset motherboards I would not recommend a standard x870 motherboard right now I think they're just too cut down compared to b650 and x670 x870 motherboards are going to give you all the Dual chip chipset connectivity that you get with x670 and x670 and they're also going to be newer boards that support like USB 4 and that should make them an ideal pairing for a ryzen 9000 Series CPU I also still consider motherboards to be about 150 to $200 for the entry level and I still want to keep it to like 200 to 300 maybe 350 for the mid-range so this board being about 350 standard MSRP over on new EG at least if it comes back in stock I think it's a bit more reasonable in terms of the amount of features you get without spending $500 plus with all that said I don't like the current Amazon price for this board of $425 and yes if you don't need usb4 support then definitely consider x670 and x670 E motherboards that are already on the market which you might be able to get a better price for the last thing I might potentially change about this build is going to be the cooling uh I I have a lot of respect for noctua and I really like the nhd15 and what they did with it that said it's $150 for an air cooler and it does perform better than like the thermalite options that are down in the $35 to $50 range but does it perform $100 plus better than those I would say no in my personal opinion I don't think it's quite worth the premium thermal right's top performing air cooler right now is the Phantom Spirit Evo that goes for $50 so we can swap that in and in the same vein paying $150 for four of noct tua's newest nf14 x25 G2 fans is a hefty premium as well and if you're looking for noctua fan Replacements uh there's actually quite a few out there there's a lot that are very nice performing I was looking for fantex d30s and you can actually get a three- pack of those for $90 that's still $30 each and for our power supply since we don't need 1,600 Watts uh for gaming PC build we need 850 WTS I think is a nice sweet spot to aim for for an RTX 4090 or 4080 super if you are going for a 4090 maybe consider bumping up to 1,000 Watts depending on how many additional uh components you're adding to your system it's mostly drives beyond the CPU and GPU that might add a bit more wattage if you do a lot of those but here again if we're trying to stick to something that's good bang for the buck the MSI mag a850 whatever the 850 W version will do us just fine all right so that brings our total price for the build down to just over $2,500 maybe $25.50 probably my most controversial decisions will be about the fans uh since we are still going with a relatively expensive fan kit and we have a three-pack instead of four but with there being so many different fan options out there um that's something that's still comes down to being pretty debatable and actually if I plug in the proper price for this motherboard as well even though it's out of stock right now I forced it to use that that brings the total price down to less than $2,500 and that is for a 7800x 3D plus RTX 480 super build with the potential to uh upgrade that 7800 x3d to the 9800x 3D fingers crossed if and when it launches next week and then maybe tack on an extra $800 if you want to go with the RTX 490 over the 4080 super before I close I had a couple quick like honorable mentions in the comment section dougl DD asked for the least aesthetic build possible with like all mismatching colors and static color case fans and oh clear I don't know if I can go clear but uh green exposed PCB Ram I like this idea I didn't go for it this time around but I kind of want to keep that in mind for a potential future project and finally smooth Al asked a question that I've been getting a lot lately which is like what about people who don't game and yes I do want to make builds and recommendations for people who aren't gaming focused as well so just wanted to let you guys know I'm not ignoring you completely and for the time being if you're looking to build a non-gaming system I would point you towards this little system which is very small that I built for my sister and uh she's been using that for several months now I guess actually more than half a year and it's a great little system so I'll post a link to that in the description as well but that's all the time I have for this one thank you guys so much for watching this episode of build fix and a thank you again to PC part picker for sponsoring this series you can find links to the parts lists and the parts down in the description below and of course check out my store at Paulshardware.net for highquality merchandise t-shirts mugs pint glasses and these new mouse mats which are super awesome if you'd like to hit the thumbs up button that's greatly appreciated subscribing to my channel is always a good call too and we see you all in the next video
2024-11-05 17:04
