$500 BUILD IT CHALLENGE
What happens when you take $500 and try to build a 1080p budget gaming machine with either AMD or Intel-based specs? We find out….
REMEMBER WHEN BUILDING A PC was an affordable pastime? Remember when graphics cards used to be in stock? Remember when a reasonable upgrade path used to exist?
MaximumPC remembers…. All joking and old advertising slogans aside, it wasn’t so long ago that these things were a given. It was that age-old argument we could turn to when confronting people who had bought laptops or consoles: We saved money, and got better performance for it in the long run. Oh, if only that were still the case. Go back to our January 2017 issue, and our budget build— complete with Core i5-6500, 8GB of DDR4, GTX 1060, 256GB SSD, and 1TB HDD—came in at an impressive $801. Today? You’re talking $997 at a minimum for an almost identical spec. That’s zero improvement on performance, and a 24 percent price increase, over the course of less than a year and a half. Sad times indeed.
So, what counts as budget today? Well, that’s what we’re here to find out. With both Intel and AMD pushing the boundaries of next-generation CPUs, whether that’s with integrated Vega graphics or more cores than we’ve ever seen before, is it possible to build a gaming machine that functions without a discrete GPU? We’ve already seen what the Ryzen 5 2400G can do, but what about its younger sibling? And AMD aside, how about Intel? Can those additional two cores bring Kaby Lake’s architecture into contention with AMD once again? Read on to discover how the competitors shape up.