The holidays are coming in hot, which means it's exactly the right time to get the gamer in your life their dream gift, especially if that gamer is you. But gamers, they're a fussy bunch, and with infinite combinations that you could pick from for a gaming PC, it is easy to

get overwhelmed. Well, good news everyone! By clicking on this video, you've already gotten the hardest part out of the way, so sit back as we unleash this blizzard of tech tips upon you. We are building three PCs at three different price points, and when we're done, you're

going to be equipped to make an informed decision and to save some serious money along the way. Just like this serious segue to our sponsor, Jawa. Jawa is the marketplace for buying and selling PC components and fully built rigs. From now until the end of the year, they'll have

special limited-time deals, so check them out at the link in the video description. [Music] First stop on today's Holiday Express is the $500 station. Now, one option is to turn to the secondhand market, like our PS5 killers: Craigslist and Marketplace are a

great way to maximize your dollar, but they also come with risks. No take-backs, appealing prices, but believe it or not, this isn't our recommendation either. At this price, we like the long-term value of our Game Tomorrow machine. You may already know that an APU, or Accelerated

Processing Unit, combines a CPU and a GPU onto one chip, generally keeping both power consumption and costs down. But what you might not know is that over the last couple of generations, their gaming prowess has gotten very impressive, and the 58600G is capable of playing even

modern titles in HD while leaving us with enough budget to build an upgrade-friendly platform that we can take with us for years to come. AMD's current AM5 socket has some really solid options for entry-level motherboards these days. A-series chipsets used to be a foray to avoid.

but now they come with support for memory overclocking and PCI Express Gen 4, the latter of which is particularly important because our APU limits any future GPU upgrades to just eight lanes. RAM is going to cost us around $60 if we're targeting the DDR5 price point.

Performance sweet spot: $40 for an entry-level case, around $40 for a 500GB Gen 4 SSD, and then one area where we're going to need to overspend a little is our power supply. We like these two units from Corsair and EVGA for

around $65. Either one will give us the headroom we need to add a performance-tier GPU later on down the line, but they both come with some compromises. While every power supply we're recommending today was able to go from zero to 110% load

multiple times without issue, these particular units performed poorly for output ripple. It's not likely to kill anything, and it probably won't cause problems for a system at this price point, but if you want a little bit of extra peace of mind, you can spend an

extra $20 or so on one of these units that tested better while still fitting in our budget. And don't miss out on some of our best deals of the year at LT store during Black Friday. Pick up a stubby screwdriver and a

Shaft extension bundle for just $119.99 while supplies last. You can shop this and all of our other great Black Friday deals at LMG. Dogg's Black Friday. Here's the parts list: upscale gaming today, upscale gaming tomorrow, once you slot in a GPU.

Maybe we should have called this the Merry Christmas, now wait for your birthday machine. Oh you guys, it's not even my birthday! Which means there must be a secret bonus machine. That's right, my friends, we've got an all-new price point for our holiday guide this year.

We've got the Game Hard machine, an $800 rig that will run modern games at 1440p right now, as long as you don't mind being locked out of some future upgrades. For our CPU, we've gone with the 5700 X3D on AMD's older AM4 platform.

That means no future CPU upgrades, but to be honest, I think it's going to be a few years before that really starts to sting anyway. And it frees up a lot of budget for our GPU. Rounding out the system, we settled on a compatible B450 motherboard, 16 gigs of reputable 3600 MHz transfer per second RAM, and a decent PCIe NVMe SSD.

Ideally, here you want to find one with a DRAM cache, but failing that, look for HMB support to ensure stutter-free operation.

We settled on this case, but it's worth noting that deals in this price bracket can tend to be pretty volatile, often changing on Tuesdays for some reason. So be ready to be a little flexible on that. Now for this build and all the ones that...

are still coming. You're going to need to budget for a CPU cooler, and we feel that the Thermalright Phantom Spirit is worth the $10 to $15 premium over popular choices like the Cooler Master 212. What isn't worth it at this budget is water cooling, because you want every possible dollar going into the right GPU.

This Asus Dual OC 7700 XT was the right GPU for us because we got a great deal on it at $350, but that might not always be around. So we'd recommend taking a look at Tom's Hardware's super handy GPU hierarchy chart to help you understand how any prospective deals that you find might match up at a glance.

We'd also recommend you check out LTTStore.com for some great gift ideas at much lower prices than any of the PCs featured today. We've got stocking stuffers like these stick locks or the tech sack for your favorite tech bro on the go.

Now it's time for our next step on the deal train: the Game Harder $11,000 balanced PC. Here, you can expect superior 1440p performance in new games and even 4K gaming for older titles that you'd love to see look their best. Perhaps most importantly, though, it does all of that while also providing a well-rounded foundation for future upgrades.

We'll kick off our parts list with a deal we found on an AMD Ryzen 5 7600X CPU that comes with a free 1TB Kingston NVMe SSD. Now, by the time you're watching this video, that deal might have expired, but the mentality behind our pick won't. You've got to be flexible, educate yourself on what you need, and

Then dig for the deals that are sometimes buried in bundles, and most importantly, ask yourself what games you are actually playing. For example, if you're a competitive gamer and you use low graphics settings to get high frame rates, you might want to look at an X3D chip once the scalpers get bored with their latest plaything. However, if you're building a machine for AAA 1440p gaming, you should stick with our recommendation, which brings us to one of the hardest choices: our motherboard. Let me break this down.

The Ryzen 7600X is AM5 again, but we're no longer budget-limited to just entry-level boards. That means we need to choose between the nine available motherboard chipsets. At least the naming scheme is somewhat useful, even if the first letter is redundant. So for now, let's ignore the letter and jump to the first digit, which tells us the generation; either six or eight is going to work for our CPU.

Then let's look at the next two digits. These tell us the tier of the chipset: a higher number means more tiers, and an 'E' indicates better connectivity with more PCIe lanes. But none of those things necessarily mean a better board. The chipset informs the feature set, not the build quality. So, bottom line: unless you know you need something else, a good B650 board like this one is a great choice for

about $100. It has good enough power delivery for a light CPU overclock and support for a PCIe Gen 5 SSD, even if it lacks a Gen 5 GPU slot. The good news is that this likely won't impact real-world GPU performance for quite a few years.

Looking at how long it took for Gen 4 to matter, now we could go for a Gen 5 board, but it would cost us twice as much, which at this price point we don't think is worth it. Our RAM and our cooler get carried forward; we've already got our

SSD, and that leaves us to sort out the case and power. I like the Fractal Design Meshify C and we can comfortably afford one of the good 750W power supplies from last time. That leaves us $450 for a GPU, so let's have a look at

our options. On the Team Green side, we can get an RTX 4060 Ti or on the Team Red side, this excellent XFX Speedster 7800 XT. Now, to be clear, neither of these is a wrong choice, but it is worth noting that while the GeForce card includes

NVIDIA's excellent suite of features, it's a less performant card to begin with, and it's going to rely on AI upscaling in order to deliver comparable in-game performance. So, I leave that up to you. Now it's time to open the throttle

a little. If you're after a superior PC gaming experience, the kind of 4K horsepower your console-locked friends can only dream of, we have finally arrived at the best value gaming station. This $2,000 PC is stacked and without throwing away some serious

extra money, I don't think you can get a much better experience. To kick things off, then, this behemoth starts with the absolute best gaming CPU the world has ever seen: the Ryzen 7 5800X3D. No, it doesn't—oh, that's right, those are out of

Stock everywhere. What I meant to say was the second best, the 7800 X3D. Nope, all the deals are bad. All right, we went with the 9700X. Now I get it, those first two would outperform our practical pick here, but at the cost of, how you say, more money.

And as we discussed in our recent 7900 X3D review, once you go above 1080p low settings, you're better off spending that extra money on a better GPU. Besides, we've still got eight fast Zen 5 cores, and AMD's mismanaged launch of this.

thing has resulted in some aggressive deals to help clear inventory, which is good because motherboards have gotten pretty expensive these days. We've got yet another AM5 chip, so let's buy the most expensive thing. Not I know we could afford it, but guys, if you look closely.

The main difference for the motherboards is more PCIe lanes, which unless we know we need them, we don't need them. And there's no performance difference between 600 series or 800 series, at least not on the chips that are available today. So we'd.

recommend going for whatever you can find at a good price. We ended up with this one, but after procuring it, we found this great deal that includes a 32GB kit of G.Skill Flare X5, which is a good reminder that we should always be.

flexible if we want to get the best value. It's too late for us, but hey, our loss is your gain. By the way, it's worth noting that during the holiday season, a lot of retailers will extend their return window on select items, so that.

You can shop with a little bit of extra confidence when you see a good deal. That's something that might be especially important this year with the looming threat of new tariffs on overseas-manufactured electronics. We're not going to say that things are definitely going to be more expensive

next year, but we also can't say for sure that they won't be. This will especially impact you if you're splurging on some style points with an AO cooler and a very glass-forward case. We've doubled the capacity of our RAM and SSD, and we've jumped up to a 1,000

W Platinum efficient power supply to keep our power-hungry GPU fed. Realistically, we probably could still get away with a quality 750 W unit, but 1,000 is such a nice round number, and at this budget, we can afford to spend extra on something that we can hopefully bring

forward to our next upgrade. We can also afford to spend $1,000 on our GPU, which gives us a choice between AMD's 7900 XTX and Nvidia's RTX 4080 Super. Now, on the one hand, we've got better rasterized

performance and more than $100 in savings, but on the other hand, we've got better ray tracing and upscaling hardware, not to mention Nvidia's long history of solid software support. I don't think either of them is a bad choice, so I'm going to leave this one up

to you. But we ended up going Team Green for this one. We also ended up leaving all the links to everything that we've talked about down below. Just remember that because of the nature and timing of sales, the prices will be different every week. But if you were to

Start with any of these builds as a springboard. We're confident that you should end up with an amazing PC, and I'm also confident you'll end up with an amazing segue to an amazing sponsor, Pulseway. If you're a business owner or a manager and you're not always worried about everything crumbling down to a catastrophic failure, well, first of all, what kind of machine are you using? Secondly, you're probably using Pulseway already, aren't you? Well, for those of you who don't know, Pulseway is an all-in-one

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The PERFECT PC at Every Price

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


The PERFECT PC at Every Price

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