Can I build a gaming computer under $1000 March 2018 edition

It’s March 2018 and we are revisiting our exercise in budget computing: Can we build a computer that will give acceptable gaming performance for under $1000 Canadian?

Here’s what’s new: DDR4 RAM has doubled in price, and dragged SSD pricing higher along with, it due to shortages in chip production. The demand from cryptocurrency miners has played Hob with video card prices and availability, which means to get a gaming system under $1000 some serious trade-offs have to be made in video card performance.

NVidia still have the 10xx series GeForce cards, which came out in 2016. However the 1070 and 1080 cards are almost impossible to get.  AMD’s Radeon RX 5xx series is competitive and the price point / hash rates of the RX 580 card has proven irresistible to miners, so they are similarly unavailable, and prices have skyrocketed on both brands of high end cards.

The component that has the most impact on performance in a gaming computer is the video card, so budget compromises have to be made between the relative costs of the GPU video card vs CPU processor vs SSD drives.

And here is where we have our problem, because the GTX 1060 6GB (Passmark score 8,899, average cost about $500) GTX 1060 3G (8,872, $409), RX 570 (6,726, $460) and R9 580 4GB (8,284, $522) were the price-performance choices but this price equation has been severely skewed.  The NVidia GTX 1070 (11,113, $800+) breaks the bank thoroughly and none of these cards are readily available.

The GTX 1050TI (5,858, $308)  and the RX 560 (4,497, $245) gain us some savings, but we give up a substantial amount of speed.

An off-the-wall way to get a lowest price machine is to get a Ryzen 3-1300G based machine with AMD Radeon Vega graphics onboard, and plan to upgrade to a video card later. This can be done under $800, or for $963 with the better Ryzen 5 2400G and 16 GB RAM.

The best bang for the buck on CPUs is still an entry level Intel Core i5 CPU or the new AMD Ryzen 5 1600 6-core CPU. The dark horse is the Intel Coffee Lake i3-8xxx series, which has 4 cores, no hyperthreading or overclocking, but delivers excellent base clock speed.  At the moment it still requires a bit more expensive of a motherboard.

Here are suggested configurations at about the $1000 price point (before tax, Canadian dollars, current to Mar 1 2018).  We have had to stretch the definition of “about” and the definition of “gaming performance”

In all of the configurations, we have gone with motherboards that have:

• one PCI-e video card slot x16
• USB 3.1 on board
• SATA III (6.0 Gb/s) on board
• Gigabit Ethernet (1000BT), no WiFi
• On the AMD build we have dropped down to a micro-ATX board with 2 RAM slots and a single video card PCI-e x16 slot to save some cash, as long as you are willing to live with 32 GB max memory.  Upgrading to an ATX board with four RAM slots, additional PCI-e lanes, and 64 GB of RAM capacity would add about $100 more.  SLI and Crossfire are fading in popularity, so the advantage of two video card x16 slots is diminishing.

We have gone with a 240 GB SSD drive as a primary drive on each machine, for the speed of booting and loading.  Its easy to add an extra hard drive if you need the space for file storage. Please note that we have costed-in a retail Windows 10 license (which is necessary unless you have a retail license of Windows 10, because manufacturer-bundled Windows versions can’t be transferred from one machine to another)

So here are our contenders:

AMD Ryzen 5 – 4 core system – the costs of video cards, DDR4 RAM and SSD has blown the budget on a discrete video card system.  By dropping to a cheap case and powersupply, a 2-RAM socket entry level motherboard, a single RAM DIMM and a lower end graphics card, just about powerful enough for gaming, we can get it to $1100.  Of course if you already have a keyboard and mouse and a retail version of Windows, you can save there.  The downside of this is that you will need to invest in more RAM later, and in a new power supply if you upgrade to a higher end video card.

AMD No Graphics Card Ryzen 3 G

The Ryzen / Radeon Vega system makes use of system RAM for the graphics, so its important to have enough RAM. But also, it makes the performance of the graphics more than usually dependent on the memory speed, so this is one instance where you’d consider dropping some extra memory into DDR4-3000 or even 3200 MHz RAM.

Intel 4-core system – here’s where things get interesting. Last year’s build had an i5-4460 in a B85 motherboard. For today’s system we are moving to the Coffee Lake i3-8100 at 3.6 GHz. To bring it below $1200, we will have to compromise with a lower video card, as budget-priced motherboards for the Coffee Lake CPUs haven’t shipped yet.

Other upgrades:

Gaming Mouse: (note that you don’t want a wireless mouse or keyboard for gaming)

Keyboard: Logitech Gaming Keyboard G110 12 programmable keys, backlighting, USB audio $96 or mechanical keyboard, $150 and up

Previous posts

April 2015
Feb 2014