Building a $500 PC to Compete with PS5 Pro

Building a $500 PC can outperform the PS5 Pro, but compromises are necessary for optimal performance.

### Building a $500 PC to Outperform the PS5 Pro
* 💻 It took over **3 years** to create a **$500 PC** that could outperform the PlayStation 5, and now the goal is to **defeat the PS5 Pro within a week**, despite a **$200 price increase** that complicates the budget.
* ⚙ The team is committed to **enhancing graphics and features** while ensuring performance **equals or surpasses that of the PS5 Pro**, using secondhand parts to **cut costs**.
* 🖥 The Intel Core i5 12400F was selected for its **cost-effectiveness and superior performance** compared to the PS5's hardware, despite having **fewer cores**.
* 💾 The build includes a **2TB SSD**, specifically the **WD Black SN 850x**, chosen for its **compatibility with the PS5's requirements** and priced **under $75**.
* 🎮 The graphics card, an XFX Quick 7800 XT, was chosen for its **high raw performance**, aiming to **match or exceed the PS5 Pro's capabilities**, despite potential compromises in features.
* 💰 The total cost of the build came to approximately **$655**, leaving room in the budget for a Windows key and accessories, with the possibility of lowering costs further to **$535** by sourcing cheaper components.
* 📊 In performance tests, while the PS5 Pro showed advantages in **optimization and visual fidelity**, the PC was competitive, highlighting the **nuanced differences in gaming experiences**.
* 🔍 Ultimately, the comparison reveals that while the PS5 Pro has its strengths, the value of the custom PC lies in its **flexibility and potential for savings on games over time**.

It took us over 3 years to build a $500 PC that could beat the PlayStation 5. And even then, there were some compromises. And now we're conspiring to murder the PS5 Pro in less than a week. It shouldn't be that hard. I mean, that $200 price bump that everyone is angry about frees up a lot of money for our budget, except for one small problem, David. While $200 is certainly a lot of money, it doesn't buy that much these days. And while we could have taken the easy path and just thrown a better GPU into our original killer, this is LTT. We don't play on easy mode. When we're done, we're going to have upgraded graphics, more features, a case that doesn't look straight out of the Fallout universe, and the same or better performance than the PS5 Pro. But be warned, this ain't going to be a smooth ride, unlike this smooth segue to our sponsor. Shut up. Oh, that's my boss. Yeah, okay. Ridge, if you're dreading the

gift-giving season. Let Ridge help you out with finding that perfect present now for even less. That's right, their holiday sale is live, and you can save up to 47% just by clicking our link in the video description. I'm not going to lie, it was pretty cool when I heard the PS5 killer mentioned by By the Mark Cery, lead system architect on the PS4 and PS5, even if he was being kind of salty about it. I mean, to be clear, I think he recognized that our declaration of victory was obviously tongue-in-cheek and that we do fully appreciate the gaming value that's on display from the PS5 hardware, but he clearly still felt the need to call us out on shortcuts that we used, like the fact that we used a secondhand motherboard in our system while comparing it to a brand new disc-based PS5. But here's what you got wrong, Mary, my guy. It was all used parts, not just a used motherboard. So wait, no, that's worse. Um, and Mr. Cery wasn't the only one to

take issue with that comparison. Many commenters accused us of giving an unfair advantage to team PC, but as you would expect from any coverage of this topic, the angry comments came from the other side too, with many of you accusing us of favoring team console. Lonus, you said you didn't place enough value on the extra flexibility of the PC, on the free online play, or the cheaper, larger game library. But guys, look, not every video can be about every topic, and today our goal is straightforward: we are going to beat the PS5 Pro in visual fidelity and frame rate at the same price. We are still going to allow secondhand parts because, yes, Mark, we do need shortcuts to beat your wonderful machine. But we are going to uncut as many other corners as possible, which means getting the absolute most out of every penny we spend, starting with our CPU, the Intel Core i5 12400F. And I can already hear you saying, Lonus, Intel for gaming? And yeah, to be clear, the AMD 5600X would

have been our ideal pick, and if they were priced identically, we would have gone team red just like Sony did for the PS5 Pro. But when we can save about $30 and still get a better CPU than what's in any version of Sony's white monolith, it's kind of a no-brainer. Once again, we aren't going with the exact specs of the machine we're competing against. We've actually got two fewer processing cores, but our cores are more powerful than Sony's, meaning that in gaming, we should come out ahead. And the included cooler, that's a nice little bonus for additional savings. The leap over to team blue comes with other benefits as well. Now that the LGA 1700 platform has been out for a few years, there are some cheap motherboards out there, like this ASRock b6m hdv that we found for under $40. Now, you don't need to go for this one in particular. In fact, if it wasn't for the outstanding deal we got, we would have preferred something with a couple

of Gen 4 NVMe slots and built-in Wi-Fi, but going used means you need to be flexible and snag whatever works and is cheap. But hey, at least being B660, it does support higher-speed XMP memory kits like this one, this our 16-gig kit of G.Skill Ripjaw 5. Now, it's worth noting that because of our CPU choice, we could have gone with DDR5 and a DDR5 motherboard, but this kit was just 20 bucks, and every penny counts, especially now that we need to match the PS5 PR's 2 terabytes of storage. And we did, or at least we were supposed to. This is 1 tab. It was marked in inventory as 2 tab. We're still counting the price of a 2-terab 1 against our total. I see, okay. Now, you probably noticed this is a pretty decent-looking SSD. Last time around, we didn't have a high-end SSD, and we justified our choice by pointing out that it doesn't really have an impact on real-world

gaming performance, but this time we're challenging ourselves to do better. We found something that meets Sony's minimum recommended requirements for a secondary drive, and we went with the WD Black SN 850x, which we found for a little under $75 and which happens to be Tom's Hardware's pick for best PS5 SSD. Though it should be noted that there are other options out there at very reasonable prices. You smell that? That's the smell of a right angle. Get it? 'Cause we didn't cut the corner anymore. Uh, anyway, for our case, we chose this perfectly decent midsize NZXT H510 that we found for $30 on Facebook Marketplace. Okay, eagle eyes, it's not the exact same one, but come on, what's the point of us buying that black one that someone else could use when we have this white one sitting in our warehouse? And besides, the point is not the exact case. There are a ton of options out there around this price point, including some much more fun ones if you don't mind rolling the dice. We

also found some older model cases that have support for an optical drive if that's your thing, but we won't need one this time around because, uh, the PS5 Pro doesn't have one either. Thanks for the free right angle comrades of K karagi. When it comes to raw power, there are any number of power supplies that could do the job, but we didn't want a shoddy heartbeat for our Sony Slayer here. So, after looking through a number of reputable units at the right price, we settled on this Corsair cx750 for $35. 750 watts, yeah, that sounds kind of Overkill considering that the PS5 Pro draws less than half of that, but we're going to need it to power a GPU that can beat the pro. Which I guess brings us perfectly to the star of any good gaming PC and also the star of the PS5 Pro if you consider that the GPU changes are the only ones that really impact performance. Sony made a big deal out of the big three larger GPU with 45% better

raw performance, more advanced racing hardware, and a new AI-driven upscaling that they call PSSR. Ever since the announcement, I've been very eager to get my hands on this bad boy to see what kind of PCI card that's going to translate to in the real world. We can make some guesses. The closest comparison could be a downclocked 7800 XT, but the not-yet-seen ray tracing hardware and custom better-than-FSR but not quite DLSS upscaling makes us wonder if we're going to need to wait for AMD's 8000 series for a true equivalent. One way to avoid giving up features would be to go for an Nvidia RTX 470, because as Digital Foundry pointed out, its feature set more closely matches the new console. But when it came to decision time, we felt that this XFX Quick 7800 XT with its higher raw performance would make up for the lack of shiny features and help us secure another win for Team PC. What are we looking at for our total?

$655 wait really. That leaves enough for a sketchy Windows key, that 8bit do controller we checked out recently, and even some stick locks from LTT store.com to cover those precious analog nubb during transport. But uh, I couldn't help noticing there's still no Wi-fi 7. H okay well that's a bit of a corner isn't it. But but hold on, if we built this machine using the absolute lowest prices we found, scrapyard War style, maybe we could get it at a lower price. $535 not bad. That's a potential $165 of budget to play with for a Wi-Fi card and I don't know, other stuff. But would you use the money for lers? That's a tough question cuz you're not going to go up another class of GPU and you could upgrade your CPU but that's probably not going to affect gaming performance that much. I think the best use of it, that's a pretty well-rounded system, probably just go for some games. Speaking of, let's do a side by side. How close are we here? I

definitely am seeing some weird moire in my rug. Me as well. Oh, you are too? Yeah, right now I've set our PC to the PS5 raid trace performance mode, which is the ideal way to play on PS5 base. But we probably want to mess with the settings a little bit to get a little more visual fidelity and see what we can squeeze out. Um, question for you, where's... oh yeah, no, we're still getting some pop-in from the confetti. It looks about the same on both of them, honestly. When we did the short circuit on the PS5 Pro, I didn't find that the PS5 and the Pro looked that different in this game, and I'm having a hard time picking anything. Oh, the grass. Your grass is noticeably higher fidelity than mine. Yeah, okay, if I want to catch up, I'm going to have to change that. Nothing here looks like it's going to help with that. All I can really do is, I think it's just resolution and FSR. So FSR will be in display. Oh, w w w w wo wo interesting.

does it look closer to yours right now? Yeah, it 'cuz we looked. I SW. I swear when we were looking at before. It was hold on. Okay, I'm going back. Oh, now it's poo poo again. That's so interesting. It's so blurry. What do I have to change to make it operate like it does in the menu? Look at this. Am I supposed to be able to see what I'm changing? No, definitely not. We're definitely getting 1% lows below 60. Ray tracing is on, which is definitely not the 7800 XT's, you know, forte. But that's the trade-off. I think in this game, we're going to have to say there's an advantage for the PS5 Pro. It is an exceptionally well-optimized game, even on the base PS5. So, the PS5 Pro just gets that extra little bit. However, with that said, if you had me blind taste test these, I would not object to either of them. This is a great experience if you want to play Rift Apart. I watched something that I've been curious to see for myself.

and I would be able to tell the difference with PS5 for one big issue, which is some of its upscaling looks like it's moving. If you look at those lines in the deck, you can see them kind of like moving, and they're not supposed to be like that. They're supposed to be stationary. Oh, okay, so hold on a second. See, yours are just stationary, so there's motion artifacting or something. I saw it in a Digital Foundry video, and I've been curious to see that. So, we've got some advantages and disadvantages both ways. Yes, I'm just looking at the confetti in there inside. Yeah, I think mine is just going a crap. FSR has no idea what to do with it. It's pretty bonkers. Yeah, there's a lot of motion artifacts in it, and it's clear that the PS5 Pro's upscaling is doing a much better job here. Like, it's really hard, but if you can catch one with your eye and try to follow it around, you can follow a piece of confetti around yours.

mine good luck. Yeah, that's just a garbled mess. Yeah, it's pretty bad overall. The motion is still there. It's moving clockwise or whatever, but those are individual objects, and that's just... it's shredded almost looking. My foliage doesn't look way worse than yours here though. Oh, my trees do though. That was background. Yeah, the background trees look so flat. We... I think this is an L. I think the PS5 prob might take the win on this one. I have everything set to high, but I think we're going to want to mess with the settings again. I think your menu looks better though, like substantially. Oh, oh, would you like to enable the pro rendering mode? Here we go. Yes, we reset these displays right before we started, and when we were using them for PS5 versus PS5 Pro on short circuit, they looked the same. M... I thought Windows 11 each chir was supposed to be good. [Laughter] You just said you liked mine better. That's true. Hey, did I load first? I think you might have loaded faster than the

PS5 Pro got him. Oh no, just kidding. Between the two, wow, that's remarkably close. I feel like your hair is better, but maybe I'm just at an angle. It's true. I think your textures are worse. That's pretty if they are. It's not by much, dude. I think the photos are a little bit clearer here. I don't know if that's a PS5 thing, 'cause it looks like it's doing some weird work on their shirts. Yeah, dude, I would rather have the softer photo than the shimmery line on it. It was distracting. Are you getting a good solid 60 FPS? Oh yeah, this is very 60 FPS-y. Me too. Looks like your 1% lows are a little bit lower, but I wouldn't be able to tell. Not with any kind of variable refresh rate. The fact that we can be this close to the screen and not tell the difference, I think tells the story. Yeah, they both look great. They both look fantastic. I think we could call this a close enough. Yeah, I think we

could probably tweak settings and get it a little bit better, but you're already at your performance threshold. So yeah, I think this is as good as it's going to get. Uh wow, this is not good. Oh wow, yeah, you're 40ish. I'm not even... no, I don't even think I believe what frame do is saying, dude. Touch this. Oh yeah, that's like sub-30 way. That's way... this is bad. The pacing here is terrible. Turn off your ray tracing. You know what, I'm going to turn V-Sync off and see if that helps. Yeah, that helps a lot. Okay, okay, now it feels like what it says it is. The thing about V-Sync is if you dip below the target frame rate, in many cases, it will actually have to dip even lower in order to ensure smooth delivery of frames. And if you are oscillating between them, it can feel extremely stuttery, worse than if you just didn't have it at all. And in this case, this was clearly the right play. I'm getting a little bit of tearing.

but this is way smoother. It doesn't look as smooth as yours, though. Once again, your HDR pops so much more than mine. And for those of you looking at the frame view up here and doubting that HDR is working, my menu pops like HDR is definitely on on both of these displays. It says HDR mode right here, Asus gaming HDR. Trust me, we reset them right before we started. We did learn when we did the last PS5 killer that Intel's implementation of HDR just plain didn't work because there's a lot of proprietary nonsense that both AMD and Nvidia have baked into their drivers to get the bloody thing working. So we could be seeing some of that here. It could also be that Windows HDR just plain isn't that great. I'm curious, kind of come stand on that semicircle, want to look at the background, 'cause I'm getting a lot of that motion upscaling crap in the background again. Yours looks a lot more stable. No, mine's clean, but I think you need to turn down some settings to get

to 60, yeah, okay. I don't like PSR. I think it looks bad. Like, look at this tree. Am I crazy? Is that like, that's no, you're not crazy. That's a lot worse than mine. Have a look. I expected this to be better than FSR, and I think, you know, well, it is better than FSR, but it's not better than just if you aren't using as much FSR. That's fair. I have a more powerful GPU than you. Yes, however, it's pretty clear that I'm not getting an even 60 FPS, and honestly, all things considered, I'd probably take that gaming experience. Really? Hey, I mean, here, try it. That's try swapsies. Oh, yeah, all right, and I'm not looking at this going, Wow, what a huge difference in visual fidelity when I'm actually playing the game. If I'm not sitting in pixel peeping, now these are both more than adequate. I would be fine with either of these. I think I would be prepared without changing one setting at a time and rebooting the whole game. I think I'd

be prepared to call this one pretty much a tie. Yeah, it's not quite there. I don't think we're quite there, but it's pretty close. It's pretty close. Let's close this out by answering some questions. Is the PS5 Pro as bad of value as people are making it out to be? Well, I think that depends on who you are. If you have a 1080p display, absolutely do not buy this machine. If you have a 4K display, though, and a base PS5, you could get anywhere from $250 to even more for your current machine, meaning the upgrade is going to cost you $350 to $450. That is a pretty tough sell. The PS5 Pro definitely looks better, but from TV distance, I feel like only the discerning of gamers are going to easily pick the pro out of a lineup. With that said, if you're coming into the PlayStation 5 ecosystem fresh, it's undoubtedly the better machine. It's the definitive PlayStation 5 experience, and for $250 more, it's no worse of a deal as

we just showed that spending another 250 bucks on a gaming PC for better fidelity because I don't really think that our extra couple hundred bucks blew away what Sony was able to do with the extra budget. I wouldn't judge you then for going for the PS5 Pro, but just be aware that you'll have to factor in an external disc drive if you want to get the best deals on games. As we showed recently, it's definitely worth the investment if you buy more than a small handful of games each generation. The other big question is PS5 Pro versus our PS5 Pro killer PC. Well, if you're the buy everything new sort, this machine is going to run you around $900 before tax. We're going to have links to all the parts in the video description. Now, over time, you might make up that difference in cheaper games and extra utility, but not everybody has a couple hundred extra dollars up front, which means that the choice is not exactly clear. As for our secondhand machine, well, I think there's

a ton of value here. I love this machine. I love this configuration, and I would strongly recommend scrapyard Waring yourself a kick-ass gaming rig like this. But before Mark Cy calls me out in another interview, I fully acknowledge that yeah, we killed the PS5 Pro, but we also threw sand in its eyes before the fight even started. So uh pocket sponsor yeah manscaped. While November may be the time we've all got turkey on our minds, don't forget there's only one bird that really needs grooming. Enter manscapes performance package 5.0 Ultra. It includes the lawnmower 5.0 Ultra for some below-the-belt trimming with its two interchangeable blades, the weed whacker 2.0 for your ears and nose, and even their crop soother and crop preserver lotions for your after-cut care. To make it even better, manscape includes their boxers 2.0 and shed 2.0 travel bag for free. Make sure your lawn is properly mowed this season. Check out the

performance package 5.0 Ultra at manscape.com. lt20 and use code lt20 for 20% off and free shipping. If you guys liked watching us kill the pro and haven't seen us murder the original PS5, why don't you check out that video? It's a surprisingly different machine.

The PS5 Pro Killer Gaming PC

Linus Tech Tips is a passionate team of "professionally curious" experts in consumer technology and video production who aim to educate and entertain.


Linus Tech Tips

Competing with the PS5 Pro: A $500 PC Build

The team took over 3 years to build a $500 PC that could outperform the PS5, with some compromises.

They plan to challenge the PS5 Pro with upgraded graphics, more features, and better performance, using secondhand parts to save money.

The CPU choice, Intel Core i5 12400F, offers powerful cores at a lower price, while cheap motherboards from the LGA 1700 platform provide additional savings.

Building a Budget Gaming PC to Match the PS5 Pro

The build incorporates a used B660 motherboard with support for higher-speed XMP memory kits and a 16GB G.

A WD Black SN 850x SSD is chosen for under $75, meeting Sony's minimum recommended requirements for a secondary drive.

The build is completed with a Corsair cx750 power supply and an XFX Quick 7800 XT GPU, aiming to match or exceed the PS5 Pro's performance.

Comparing Budget PC and PS5 Pro Performance

Building a budget PC for gaming can be done for as low as $535, leaving room for a Wi-Fi card and other upgrades.

The PC and PS5 Pro show similar performance in a game, with the PS5 Pro having slightly higher visual fidelity and better upscaling.

Both systems have their advantages and disadvantages, making it hard to choose between them for an optimal gaming experience.

The graphics and textures of the PS5 and PS5 Pro are similar, with both offering a solid 60 FPS.

The PS5 Pro's rendering mode and settings adjustments help improve performance, but both consoles struggle with frame rates at times.

The close visual comparison between the two consoles suggests they both deliver great performance, making it difficult to determine a clear winner.

Comparing HDR and Gaming Performance on Displays

The HDR implementation on the two displays shows a noticeable difference, with one menu popping more than the other.

The motion upscaling and visual fidelity during gameplay are also compared, with both setups offering an adequate gaming experience.

The value of upgrading to a PS5 Pro is debated, with the decision depending on the current display and gaming needs.

Spending an extra $250 on a gaming PC for better fidelity may not significantly outdo Sony's budget.

The PS5 Pro is a viable option, but an external disc drive is necessary for the best game deals.

A secondhand gaming machine offers great value, and the choice between the PS5 Pro and a gaming PC is not clear-cut due to the upfront cost difference.