$1,000 - Part's List
All things together total about $850-900, (we try to remain conscious of sales tax here in the good ol' US of A) and you're getting a pretty sweet set up for higher refresh 1080p, but really these are 1440p machines. If you only want 1080p, while these certainly still work, the maximum you probably need to spend at this point is our $750 machine.
Prices listed in article are accurate as of the time published. Clicking through may change pricing. Widgets do not reflect the ongoing sales we find!
CPU, RAM, and Motherboard ($215)
Ryzen's platform with a B550m motherboard and a Ryzen 5 5500 (currently less than $90) is hard to beat the performance of this set up and the convenience of getting WIFI integrated with the motherboard. Intel's 12400F is about 15% stronger, but at over a 50% cost increase. We can more then make up for that difference in games by getting a much more powerful GPU in this budget. You could use Intel's i3 12100F instead, but the Ryzen 5 5500 already goes blow for blow with the 12100F while also having two more cores for your workstation activities. Our RAM is still a 16GB (2x8) kit of DDR4 at 3200mhz, which hits that nice price to performance balance.
Motherboard is an Asus Tuff A520 wifi board, currently with a $10 coupon, making it $90. And with the money we saved on the motherboard, we are investing in some faster RAM speeds as Ryzen tends to favor higher memory speed to increase performance.
Graphics card ($450-500)
Keeping our costs lower by staying on the DDR4 platform above lets us snag some really powerful graphics cards that basically ensure we can play at higher refresh 1440 settings. For Nvidia, it's the 3070ti, currently at $500. It's a powerful cards that can also do some 4k gaming at lower settings; but 1440p is it's bread and butter. This is also a great match for our CPU above at 1080p with no significant bottleneck. So if you want 1080p higher refresh gaming, this is probably your max setup for a $1k budget.
AMD's RX 6800XT is to put in simple terms an absolute beast of a card. less powerful, but also cheaper. It's output is about 10-15% more in most games (though they trade blows on others) but it is also had for $500. I wouldn't recommend getting an XT version of this card with this CPU if you intend to game in 1080p; you'll start getting stuttering as there is a considerable bottleneck. But if you are determined to get an AMD card for 1080p at this price range, you can simply elect the non-Xt version of the 6800, which is also about 10% cheaper than the 3070ti, but also performs about 10% worse. That said it does have more VRAM, which is starting to be a considerable issue with Nvidia cards as games get more and more detailed.
Storage, PSU, and Case ($190)
Less than $45 for one terabyte of PCIE gen 4 storage is a pretty nice deal.
The case is stylish CoolerMaster ARGB at $75. It comes with two 120mm ARGB fans already installed that can be hooked directly up to the motherboard and controlled via that motherboard's software. It also features a tempered glass side panel, PSU shroud, and fits our much larger graphics cards (the 6800XT is 340mm!).
Finally, the power supply continues to be the bane of my existence as almost all of them as of late have been grossly overpriced. This 750w unit is reasonably priced with a 5 year warranty, all the necessary connections, and 80+bronze certified.
So that's it for this build. Want it, but don't want to build it yourself? We build PCs! We will charge a $50 build fee plus shipping and taxes to get it sent out to you. And even better, we offer warranty support (a full two years!), so if something goes wrong, send it back, and we will fix it. Click customs below, and let us know you want this exact build. If the parts are still available, or we have the same ones (or comparable/better substitutes), we will get back to you asap.