7/21/2020 $800 Entry Gaming and Streaming

Today we are starting a new list. I have been seeing a lot of requests around the $700-900 range for entry gaming and this is prolly the lowest we could go with dedicated graphics with a NVIDIA card. We could go lower with an AMD or even a 1650 or 1650 Super. But, I still don’t trust AMD cards yet to remain stable***. Also, the 1660 is the lowest with a dedicated Turing NVENC encoder for you up and coming streamers. As the list progressed it worked into a White and RGB list.

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 2600 3.4 GHz 6-Core Processor ($139.85 @ Amazon*) 

Motherboard: ASRock B450 Steel Legend ATX AM4 Motherboard ($133.44 @ Amazon*) 

Memory: Team T-Force Delta RGB 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-3000 CL16 Memory ($72.98 @ Amazon*) 

Storage: Patriot VPN100 256 GB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive ($49.99 @ Amazon*) 

Storage: Seagate Barracuda Compute 2 TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($58.00 @ Amazon*) 

Video Card: Asus GeForce GTX 1660 6 GB TUF OC Video Card ($219.99 @ Amazon*) 

Case: NZXT H510 ATX Mid Tower Case ($69.98 @ Amazon*) 

Power Supply: be quiet! 500 W 80+ Gold Certified Semi-modular ATX ($79.31 @ Amazon*) 

Case Fan: ARCTIC F14 Silent 46 CFM 140 mm Fan ($8.34 @ Amazon*) 

Total: $820.90**

CPU: I went with the 2600 because the 3100 is sold out on Amazon and the 1600(12nm) is overpriced right now. The 2600 is a 6 core, 12 thread little beast which will have no issue running games and even a stream.

Motherboard. This is the option that decided the White and RGB list. I knew at this price range I wanted to go full ATX board and this B450 board is well paired to the 2600.

Memory: So I went with the T-Force White RGB ram for 2 reasons. First, it’s white and RGB. Second, it is also 16GB of 3000. 3000 is pretty much the slowest I would go with Ryzen 2nd Gen.

Storage: You didn’t think I was going to cheap out here did you: Going with a 256GB NVME from Patriot with 512MB of Cache (DRAM). We paired that with my favorite budget hard drive, the Seagate Barracuda 2TB.

Video Card: I wanted to make sure the card I put here wouldn’t be a slouch, Was an NVIDIA for stability,*** and had the Turing NVENC so that the aspiring streamers could start with this PC. The 1600 checks all the boxes.

Case: Most of you know by now that I love the NZXT H510. I love putting 2 140mm fans in the front and having a nice positive pressure case that will help to keep the dust out. Yes, there has been testing that shows that the stock cooling set up with negative pressure using only the 2 stock 120mm fans as exhausts runs cool and that adding 2 140mm fans from the front doesn’t add much in the way of cooling. But, I see it as worth the extra $20 as keeping dust out of the case keeps things cool longer and with less cleaning and more gaming.

Power Supply: This Be Quiet PSU is a nice little Semi-modular PSU that is well-reviewed and should last years to come.

Case Fans: Straight up I chose these because they are White and black to match the case. Well reviewed, these fans should serve you well.

Conclusion: This is the perfect build to get someone started gaming and even streaming if they want to. 

*Post contains Amazon Associate links.

**Based on the prices and availability at the time of writing. Pricing and availability changes minute by minute.

***AMD has reportedly fixed their driver issues. We will not be including them in builds for a while to make sure the issue is truly fixed.