sub $1,000 gaming PC

With Ryzen 9000 right around the corner, is now the perfect time to buy? Zak Storey finds out

LET’S FACE IT, PCs are too expensive.

Over the last ten years, graphics card prices have soared ever upward.

Regardless of whether you support team green or team red, the trend has been the same. CPUs likewise have ballooned in price, and building an entry-level gaming PC for sub-$400 is a thing of the past.

That’s a sad fact, but it’s true. At launch, the humble Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 cost just $600. 10 years later, the RTX 4080 is now double that to $1,200. No matter how you split it, that cost increase tumbles down the range as well. Heck, even the 16GB 4060 Ti landed at $499. That’s half the price of our entire build here for what should be a mid-range card.

After much discussion in the Maximum PC office, it got us thinking. With college and the next semester right around the corner, if you wanted to invest in a decent gaming PC, ready to while away the tiny amount of time that you’ve got spare on gaming instead of studying, what exactly could you get for under $1,000?

We’ve given ourselves some caveats to this build challenge. You could easily produce a super budget rig and save money by using 16GB of RAM, 500GB of hard drive storage, an Intel GPU, and/or second-hand or older components. But $1,000 feels like a good sweet spot.

So then, first criterion, 32GB of DRAM minimum. Second, the GPU must be AMD or Nvidia. Third, 1TB of modern-day PCIe storage is a must. Finally, it needs to look good, and have enough future-proofing to handle upgrades later down the line. This should give us an epic PC that not only keeps up with its far pricier counterparts, but also gives it enough legs to get some serious hardware upgrades in the future, too.

999 dollars on the wall

CPU

AMD RYZEN 5 7600

WWW.AMD.COM

Don’t be fooled by its understated demeanor compared to its X sibling; the Ryzen 5 7600 is no slouch when it comes to CPU prowess. Both chips feature the same core counts, the same cache, the same CCD setup, and more impressively, similar clock speeds as well, at least at stock.

For your money, you get six cores, with multithreading for 12 threads, along with a base clock of 3.8 GHz and a turbo of 5.1 GHz. There’s all the hardware support you’d expect for a Ryzen 7000 series chip, including PCIe 5.0 and DDR5, but it’s the differences in clock speed that blew us away. The Ryzen 5 7600X is only 200 MHz faster on its boost clock, and although it has 900 MHz on the base clock, given how workloads function on Windows resource allocation, we’re not too bothered by that fact.

That said, one thing you do get with the 7600 that you don’t with the 7600X (apart from a lower 65W vs 105W TDP) is an included cooler. Yep, the 7600 comes as standard with the Wraith Stealth CPU cooler. It’s easy to install, and you don’t have to worry about bringing your own or buying a second-hand Wraith off eBay or elsewhere.• $185

MOBO

ASUS PRIME X670-P

WWW.ASUS.COM

Asus’s Prime series of motherboards have been a staple for those looking to save cash on their system without stripping back to the bare bones. The X670-P likewise encapsulates that ethos, with a crisp black PCB and beautiful aluminum heatsinks. It not only looks the part, it also comes with some serious clout to back it up.

As standard, it includes that AM5 socket (which AMD has confirmed will be supported officially up to 2027), and features a 12+2 power stage design and support for PCIe 5.0 M.2 drives, DDR5 support up to 192GB/7600 MHz, and a serious amount of I/O.

Speaking of, there are seven USB 3.2 Type As, one USB Type C, two USB 2.0 ports, an HDMI port, DisplayPort, three audio outs, a PS/2 combi port, and, more impressively, a 2.5G Ethernet port. On top of that, the motherboard can house up to three M.2 drives, two in PCIe 4.0, and one at PCIe 5.0. The downside? No official PCIe 5.0 support for the top PCIe slot for GPUs, although that’s not exactly the end of the world. • $144

RAM

32GB (2X16GB) LEXAR THOR OC DDR5 @ 6000 C32

WWW.LEXAR.COM

If you’ve been following our Blueprints section (you can find this month’s deep dive into pricing on page 96), you’ll know that memory pricing is continuing to fall like a stone for DDR5, and that’s made this pick all the more easy to make.

For RAM, we’ve gone with Lexar’s Thor OC 32GB kit @ 6000 MT/s. That’s impressive enough, but couple that with a super-low CAS latency of 32, and it brings this kit down to an impressive 10.667 ns real-world latency. Not too shabby. Right now, though, 6000 MT/s is perfect for Ryzen’s 7000 series, and Lexar’s kit comes in super clutch at this price point.

Its gold and black heatsink design can be a touch intense, but honestly, it looks far better in person than in photos, and the performance is top-notch, too. Still, there are a number of kits out there at this price point, so if you want to swap this out for something a little more stylish, then it shouldn’t be too challenging. • $100

BUDGET FRILLS

Let’s be honest, this chassis is fairly epic when it comes to the looks department, but if you want to amp up its appearance on the cheap, there are a few ways you can do that.

Added accessories in the PC world don’t have to cost an arm and a leg, that chassis supports a ton of cooling, adding three 4.7-inch fans to the PSU shroud would work a treat, Phantek’s M25-120 fans would be a great pick there, without breaking the bank, and add a little extra illumination in there.

Likewise, a good fan controller can make the world of difference. Corsair’s Commander Core is a good pick, but pricier than we’d like. Thermalright sells a super cheap four-channel fan controller for just $7.59, or you could go with Arctic’s Case Fan Hub—a 10-fold PWM fan controller with SATA power—for just $10 on Amazon. Just bear in mind that as this will plug directly into a single header, you won’t be able to control individual fans—just set them to one speed.