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With the current mining craze, prices of GPUs are high and availability is low. However, with patience and vigilance, you can find a fairly reasonable price. With this in mind, this guide uses one of the new AMD Raven Ridge APUs, which will allow you to play many games while waiting and searching for a GPU at an acceptable price.
Our Modest Gaming Build is built around the Ryzen 5 2400G. Using the stock cooler you should be able to achieve moderate overclocks on this unlocked processor.
We've paired the R5 2400G with a parametric list of mATX B350 motherboards that supports up to 64GB of DDR4 memory, multiple SATA6 devices, and front panel USB3.0. Please note that the new Raven Ridge APUs may require a BIOS update on your motherboard to function. If you receive a motherboard with an older BIOS revision AMD has a support page listing your options and will loan you a CPU if the retailer and manufacturer fail to provide you with an updated motherboard.
https://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/2Gen-Ryzen-AM4-System-Bootup.aspx
For this build and most machines outside of the top end enthusiast realm we opted to go with 8GB of DDR4 memory. The parametric filter finds the best price on 8GB kits of memory that are within AMD’s recommended specifications. We've limited it to DDR4-2800 and DDR4-3000 as Ryzen CPUs scale well with higher frequency memory. At the current time, using memory rated over 3000mhz is not advised without doing extra research as DIMM support can be hit or miss. AMD is working on releasing additional BIOS updates to add better compatibility for higher frequency memory.
With the rising cost of SSDs and memory we’re making a new recommendation for storage that is a compromise between real-world performance and cost. The parametric filter selects the best priced Hybrid drive with 2TB or more storage capacity. While the hybrid drives are slower on paper than SSDs, their practical performance for gamers will be similar while allowing significantly more storage space per dollar.
At this price point we suggest using the Nvidia GTX 1060 6GB edition. We specifically filter for the 6GB model as the 3GB not only has lower VRAM but also a lower core count leading to lower fps while gaming. The performance across most games will be similar to the AMD RX 570. We've created a parametric filter to show you the lowest priced, full sized GTX 1060 6GB under 350 dollars which will be powerful enough for most AAA games at 1080p.
Due to the high cost of GPUs and low availability, we are using a parametric filter for a GeForce GTX 1060 with a max price set. With patience and vigilance, you can find a video card for around this price, and we want to provide a part list that is more accurate to this concept.
All of the components are housed in the Fractal Design Focus G Mini MicroATX mid Tower. This case is an affordable option that has a large side panel window, front panel USB3.0, room for full size graphics cards, two LED case fans, and cutouts in the motherboard tray for easy cable routing.
For our power supply, we're using a parametric selection of well-reviewed fully and semi-modular units, all of which will provide more than enough power for this system.
Component | Selection | Base | Promo | Shipping | Tax | Price | Where | |||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
CPU | ![]() |
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Motherboard | ![]() |
From parametric filter
|
$166.00 | $166.00 | PB Technologies | Buy | ||||
Memory | ![]() |
From parametric filter
|
$149.95 | $149.95 | Computer Lounge | Buy | ||||
Storage | ![]() |
From parametric filter
|
$167.00 | $167.00 | 1stWave Technologies | Buy | ||||
Video Card | ![]() |
From parametric filter
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$396.00 | FREE | $396.00 | DTC Systems | Buy | |||
Case | ![]() |
$102.35 | $102.35 | PB Technologies | Buy | |||||
Power Supply | ![]() |
From parametric selection
(show)
|
$145.00 | $145.00 | 1stWave Technologies | Buy | ||||
Total: | $1126.30 |
Component | Estimated Wattage |
---|---|
AMD - Ryzen 5 1400 3.2 GHz Quad-Core Processor | 8W - 65W |
Corsair - Dominator Platinum 8 GB (2 x 4 GB) DDR4-2800 Memory | 5W - 5W |
Seagate - FireCuda 2 TB 3.5" 7200RPM Hybrid Internal Hard Drive | 4W - 20W |
Gigabyte - GeForce GTX 1060 6GB 6 GB G1 Gaming Video Card | 30W - 120W |
Total: | 47W - 210W |