LETTERS WE TACKLE TOUGH READER QUESTIONS ON...

> Budget gaming

> Stealthy office builds

> Modern benchmarking

Gaming for $1,000

I really enjoyed your $800

Gaming PC cover feature in the June 2024 issue. While I wasn’t surprised to see that a PC without a GPU wasn’t great for playing games, it did get me thinking about what I might be able to build myself on the budget end of things.

I’m about to start my first year of college, and I think I can just about convince my parents to give me the money to build a PC if I can keep it under $1,000!

What can I reasonably expect in terms of gaming performance for that money, and what are the key components I should be looking at?

–B. Duggan

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, GUY COCKER, RESPONDS: Thanks for the feedback on last issue’s cover build— while we are 'Maximum PC', we do try to keep things balanced with a few value builds per year. When AMD’s 8600G CPU arrived promising basic gaming performance without the need for a GPU, we were intrigued, to say the least. However, as you remark, its real-world gaming frame rates were passable at best in the major titles we use for benchmarking. It really shouldn’t be thought of as a GPU replacement—rather something you can use to play casual or eSports titles now and again, if for some reason you can’t have a dedicated graphics card in your system.