I Tried To Build a CHEAP Gaming PC in 2026

- Are budget gaming PCs dead? Here in 2026, trying to build a gaming PC is incredibly difficult thanks to the RAM crisis. So today, I'm going with a challenge that I hope will be actually really informative. I'm going to try to build a legitimate gaming PC for less than $500. And I'm doing it here at our wonderful sponsor, Micro Center's Tustin location. Let's see how this goes. So I'm trying to take this as an actually serious challenge. I want to build a reasonable gaming PC for less than $500, which means I want a dedicated GPU. I want something that you can actually play games at least on like low settings. So the thing is, as you can probably immediately tell, a lot of PC parts are way more than $500. I mean, these are $500 and $600 CPUs right off the bat. So what I would like to do is find something a little bit older because realistically, I'm probably gonna have a budget of less than $100 for my CPU, which is not a lot of money. So we can go down to something like a 7600X, but even that's $160, I cannot afford that. They do have bundles, I might look at bundles in a minute. Although, hello, a Ryzen 5 4500? I think the obvious answer for me is literally the cheapest possible CPU I can get my hands on. The Ryzen 5 4500 is not a new chip by any means. But this is 60 bucks and it comes with a cooler. And I need every dollar I can for RAM, for SSD, for graphics card. This is doable. I actually wanna go and find my graphics card next. So like always, the GPU is really one of the most important parts of a gaming PC. And at $500, I have very, very little room to maneuver. So normally what I would look for is something like an older budget AMD GPU. Traditionally, there's been a lot of value in that for the sub $200 price. The problem is that a lot of the older GPUs, they just don't make anymore, right? So you're gonna be spending $300 plus on a lot of the newer stuff, which I just simply do not have the budget for. Or I can go over to the Intel side. Now, Intel's also rolled over a lot of their stock recently. So if I really wanna go on the budget side, they do have an A310, which technically would count. That is not a gaming GPU. I'm gonna have a hard time playing with that. Now there is the A380. This is $170 GPU, which is, I'll be honest, more money than I've got to spend for my GPU. I don't think I can afford this, but because the RAM crisis has pushed so many components up, I might have to make some sacrifices. Like, there's a real shot that I might just have to commit to eight gigs of RAM and try to make it work. I think this is what I need. I think this is gonna be my choice. We're gonna put it in the cart of optimism. This cart right here, it's full of optimism. I will not be elaborating on what the optimism is. These are the parts I wanna get, and I just hope that by the time I make it to the register, the price is less than $500. Here, my friends, is the final boss of a gaming PC in 2026, RAM. The RAM crisis has met. The RAM has absolutely skyrocketed in price thanks to the build-out of AI data centers soaking up all the supply. Normally, I recommend going with something like DDR5 memory. However, this is, shall we say, a little bit pricier than we have the budget for. Thankfully, because we're gonna go with AM4, we will have a little bit more to work with. So, the good thing is, is that I'm building with DDR4, so it's a little bit older, a little bit cheaper, less so, but still expensive. So, if I'm gonna try to get, let's be honest, I'd probably have to stick with eight gigs of RAM. I'm looking at something like, what? 80 bucks for eight gigs of Ripjaws. I'm not happy about having to have eight gigs of RAM in a system. But unless I want to spend $600, which you might want to, I think I'm gonna have to settle for that. - [Alex] You know how you mentioned something about bundles? - Yeah, but the problem is they don't usually have bundles for budget things. Most of the time their bundles are like a 7600X or something, which would be great. That's probably like, I think last time I checked it was like 300 bucks. - [Alex] Boy, do I have news for you. Why don't you walk over this way, sir? - Are you hiding a bundle for me? - [Alex] It wasn't hiding, it was in plain sight. You just weren't looking for it. - They have a $200 Ryzen 5 5500 bundle with 16 gigs of RAM and a motherboard. I knew that, and I'm so ready to buy exactly that and not what I was gonna do, which was something worse in every possible way. Ryzen 5 5500, which is a better CPU than I had, a Gigabyte B550M, actually a pretty decent motherboard. I was gonna probably go with something lower. and then 16 gigs of Ripjaws, importantly in dual channel. That's actually legitimately just good. - [Alex] Hell yeah, the card of optimism is now the card of realism. Let's go! (both laughing) - So for $200 for a CPU, 16 gigs of RAM, motherboard, then the $170 for a GPU, that leaves us $130 for a case, did that easy. SSD, which is gonna be a little challenging 'cause SSDs are also more expensive, but not by as much. Power supply, which we can get away with something very low end, we actually might be able to do this. I said with full confidence, we can totally do this. Absolutely. So with all of our components put together, I think we just about did it, because we've got ourselves 16 gigs of RAM, the 5500, we've got ourselves the A380, admittedly a pretty budget power supply and case and whatnot, but I think, if I did my math right, we should be just under $500. And the answer is... Ooh, you know what? - No! (Austin laughing) - It's $530! - Ah, Mr. I did my math right. - Wait, what did I miss? 'Cause the bundle was 200... 375, I didn't count the case! Oh my God, I didn't count the case. - Oh! Rookie mistake. - We're gonna just change the title of the video real quick, "Can Austin build a $530 gaming PC?" - [Alex] No, it's fine. we'll keep the title the same, and the answer is just no, you failed. - Look man, we gotta appreciate that slight budgetary oversights aside, that it is still possible to build yourself a reasonably priced gaming PC. - [Alex] Yeah, so you were wrong, that you couldn't, so you actually couldn't build a PC - Um! Yeah, that's actually the real answer. If you build it in a cardboard box, which I've done many times- - Oh God. - you can do it. So, my main questions with this system are really how usable is it going to be for modern games. Because I feel very confident that we're gonna have no problem playing, you know, eSports titles, slightly older AAA games, like all of those should be fine. But when we start to throw brand new games at it, or especially games that are gonna be coming out over the next year or two, that's the thing that I worry a little bit more about. Because this is, while a reasonable PC, I think on the lower end of the system requirements for a lot of games, The Q300L is a case I have built in many times, largely because this is routinely the cheapest case that you can buy at Micro Center. And at 40 bucks, it did push me over my budget. But it is a no-frills case that is actually pretty much perfect for an ultra-cheap build. As always, lots and lots of helpful tutorial bits. If you wanna watch our full tutorial, I'm just gonna be kinda breezing through this because it is the simplest build you can pretty much possibly do. So we've got ourselves our B550M. Now the nice thing about this combo, which is like legitimately really impressive, is what you're getting for the $200. So between your CPU, it also comes with a CPU cooler, and you have 16 gigs of RAM and the motherboard. Just saying, got a friendly local Micro Center nearby, it is definitely worth checking out those bundles because you are not getting this level of hardware in 2026 without a Micro Center bundle, I will tell you that. All right, we've got ourselves our Ryzen 5 5500. We're not gonna pause for B-roll 'cause who gives a (beep) - Okay. - Everyone ready? I'm already done. You know, I will say I have not used an AMD stock cooler in a minute, which is very lovely because honestly, this is a totally decent cooler. I know that back in the day, stock coolers used to get a bad rap, but for something like this, this is plenty. Even though we only have the single case fan. You know, it's also cool to have- - A cooler? - RAM. This is gold. This is worth three quarters of a kidney. So, with our CPU, RAM, and SSD installed, let's put this thing in the case, shall we? Wow, look at that. So easy. So let me just run some cables real quick. We'll install a graphics card, and we'll see what kind of raw performance our gaming PC's gonna be working with. All right, let's see what we got. - Power supply. - No, I didn't do that. Oh. One day. - One day, I will finally learn my lesson. - [Ken] The most basic thing. - Spin, spin, spin, spin, spin, spin. Yep, that looks beautiful. And the monitor's on. I think. - Tick-tock. - It takes a moment. It's gotta recombobulate itself. Oh, I got USB. Hey, look at that. I was not concerned in any way whatsoever. If you'll excuse me, I'm gonna update the BIOS, get everything up and running, install a copy of Windows, and let's see what this thing can actually do. Behold, the 500-ish dollar gaming PC. - You keep saying 500-ish. - It's 500 adjacent and that's close enough. - Ah, all right. - So we're gonna put this to the test by playing a number of games, kinda casually. I have not done anything besides load it up. And we're gonna start with "Baldur's Gate 3." So I'm gonna try this at 1080p, so you can see our Arc A380 graphics. If I had a little bit more time to tweak and tune things, this is the first time I've actually loaded the game. I probably would turn it down just a touch more just because I think that we could be better served with a bit more of a stable frame rate. But I'll say it's actually pretty similar to playing on the Steam Deck when it comes to a slightly, shall we say, interesting framerate. I will say for Baldur's Gate, this is a pretty unqualified success. 1080p medium, right out of the box, no problem at all. Let's try something just a little bit more competitive, even though I get very competitive when it comes to Baldur's Gate. (ethereal music) (beeps) I think a very popular game on a budget system like this is "Fortnite." So I'm pretty sure this should be pretty easy 'cause Fortnite will run on a literal potato. So, we're gonna be running at 1440p upscale from something resembling 1080p and mostly medium settings. So I think that sounds pretty solid. Let's see if it actually works. All right, what are we looking at here? 60 FPS, oh, actually it looks really nice. Yeah, look at that. Like damn, look at that epic draw distance too. Wow, I don't think, this looks better than I need. I actually would rather have a little bit better FPS than the visuals. Yeah, no, this is terrific. Like this actually looks great. Oh, what the hell? Okay, that was my bad. This isn't just playable. This is actually a great experience. To really put our PC through its paces, let's try Indiana Jones. This was the very lowest spec that you can run this game at? - [Alex] Absolutely, yep. The graphics card we have is the minimum specs. So yeah, maybe turn absolutely everything down. - So this is basically running at 1080p low, which feels fine. Let's do it. Ooh, a little low res, little low res. Ooh, oh, ooh, oh, oh no. There's a lot of latency is what I'll say. Like, no, no, no, we're turning that down. Haha, that is not it. - [Alex] I was gonna say, 1080p sounds ambitious. Yeah, let's do 720, let's do, let's do 720. It is playable, but 720p, and that's being generous, I think it's upscaling a fair bit to get up to 720p. I do think this is a GPU issue. We have enough power for lighter weight games, but for something that's really demanding like this, you're gonna have to really sacrifice settings. Let's see how our system handles "Cyberpunk." This is a game that while it looks great on the high end, so if you wanna turn on like Ray Tracing and path tracing and stuff, but also you can run it fairly low settings. So I've got it set to 1080p low with XeSS on. The thing is, this is a game that, I mean, this was originally running on PS4s and Xboxes. Not well, but it scales pretty well. I don't think we'll have a problem running it. The question is, how well will we actually be able to play? I mean, that is 60 FPS. It's a little low res. XeSS is probably upscaling from something a little closer to 720p, but this is a lot better showing than Indiana Jones, which shouldn't be a big surprise. But I think what I'm learning here is that a lot of games run fairly decently on this system, as long as you're okay with somewhat low settings. But the bigger issue really is gonna be when it comes to brand new releases. Because if you're playing something that's coming out in 2026, 2027, that's really graphically demanding, you might be at a limit where it's just not gonna be very playable with only six gigs of VRAM and a kinda little baby GPU. Now, what do we have to say about this whole process? I think there's some positives here for sure. I mean, this is a fairly playable system that we were able to get for 500-ish dollars. And in 2026, man, when RAM is more expensive than liquid gold, oil, and printer ink, I think that there's something to be said for the idea that you can still get yourself a reasonable gaming PC. I think we can give this a pass, right? I think we actually did pretty good today. - [Alex] I think so. Yeah, I would recommend this system to like new first time building. - For your first time system. You get another 100, $200, you can certainly make some pretty substantial improvements. The fact that we walked into our friendly local Micro Center and got the cheapest gaming PC we could and it's still kind of usable even in 2026, is definitely worth celebrating. Thank you very much to Micro Center for sponsoring this video. If you like, you can check out the links in the description for some of the components we used. But give your friendly local Micro Center a visit. They've got some components that will actually let you build a PC. (upbeat music fading)