What is the ACTUAL cheapest Gaming pc I would be happy to build?
So our ‘Is PC gaming pricing people out’ article got me thinking.
What would that actually look like and would it be worth actually building.
So I set out with one simple idea, build a cheap gaming PC that I would be happy recommending to someone to actually use.
What kind of price, well this is the hard part. What is ‘budget’, for us we believe that around £900 is roughly the sweet spot for this kind of system. This gives you some options for the build but doesn't shoe horn you into searching CPU and clicking sort by price and going ‘thats the cheapest.
We can spend hours talking about the design and the parts so instead of detailing the parts line by line, let's just show you.
CPU - AMD 5500
CPU Cooler - Kolink 120mm Air Cooler
RAM - ADATA XPG SPECTRIX RGB 16GB DDR4
SSD - Silicon Power 512GB NVMe M.2 PCIe Gen3x4 SSD
GPU - Asus RtX 5060
PSU - Montech 550w
CASE - MSI Mag Forge Mr100
MotherBOARD - MSI AM4 A520M-A PRO M-ATX
Why did we choose these parts? What's the cost? Are the first two questions that will jump out to everyone reading this. The cost we will get to shortly. As for the parts, we wanted to get the right balance for a user, and we have said before we recommend the RIGHT parts not always the NEWEST parts!
We began with the idea of what a budget system today cost and not using second hand parts. We looked around and settled on £900 as a sensible cost for a ready built, or built to order, system.
Once we decided on the price we worked backwards from there, stripping out anything that was not going to help the gaming performance. Things like the CPU cooler, the Kolink 120mm air cooler is a great budget cooler that performs well on lower power parts and looks great too.
Next was the motherboard. A few years ago a A series board was so basic it was almost pointless, now? Not so much. These motherboards are now very performant with the main limit being overclocking support, but for this level of system that isn't something I would consider to be part of the experience.
Why AM4? This is two fold firstly, cost AM4 is cheaper than AM5 and coupled with DDR4 this reduces costs there as well! Will this hurt performance? Yes, but not as badly as you think. Let's take my own wifes setup as an example, she currently uses an AM4 5800x3d and yes the CPU isn't as fast as others but she can play almost all triple A games at a decent level using a 4070ti GPU.
In terms of the CPU and GPU part of this was covered by cost and balance of the system. The 5500 CPU is a great entry point CPU that is going to last for years, and allow you to not bottle neck the newer GPU’s. The GPU, this is simply one that I would recommend to go with in a budget system. Is the 5060 the best on the market? No but for a build of this type it's a great card that is going to give you a balance of cost and product quality.
Now let's talk about the cost.
If we were going to sell a system like this it would sit at £899 which accomplishes the brief.
But what would this look like in real life?
For around £900 this would be an amazing little entry to PC gaming. Now while some might still think that the pricing is too high, and we would love this to be cheaper, but compared to something like a PS5 Pro? This is only a little more expensive, and isn't just about gaming either.
So with all of that said, you can see the system that we could build. What we wanted to do was to also say that this IS something we are building.
So say hello to the Rebel Orca.
The Orca is built around a premise NOT a product set. The Orca is not built to be this specific set of parts, it's meant to be ‘what can we provide that hits that budget gamer level’ so as parts move we will adapt and deliver the BEST option with this. If we find better parts that do not breach the price then we will certainly keep developing this.
But now the Orca has arrived and will be here to stay quietly giving people an amazing entry way into gaming on PC