STEPBY-STEP GUIDE

Build your own low-budget system

IT SAYS A LOT that when we first priced this system up a month ago, it was about $295—four weeks later, and the thing sits at $387. Honestly, we feel like a broken record at this point, but the market is absolutely volatile right now, as unscrupulous folk and miners snap up every piece of hardware they can find. Even the budget end is suffering, sadly. We’re finally starting to see some companies take action against this (namely Nvidia with its RTX 3060 plans), but it might just be too little, too late.

Our opinion? It’s not likely to stabilize for another year, if that. Similar to the memory-shortage crisis three years back (when a set of 32GB memory would cost you nearly $500), there’s just not enough fab time out there to cater for the entire market. Nonetheless, this got us thinking: what exactly is the cheapest system you can buy today, with new parts and decent performance, and get the most bang for your buck?

And with that simple question, the Budget Buster was born, a $300-400(ish, depending on time of reading) masterpiece of super low-spec, low-price PC-building awesomeness. Genuinely, this build is one of the most fun ones we’ve done for some time. That might sound crazy, but there’s something about getting back to the bare bones of PC building that’s refreshing. It makes you think, it challenges you as you lose access to a lot of quality-of-life improvements, and it’s good to see just what is available at the lower end of the spectrum in regards to parts and performance.

PC building’s not always about crazy, high-end systems with $4,000 worth of components, and enough RGB to light up Times Square. In fact it’s something we’ve always argued—the smaller your budget is, the more valuable your buck becomes when allocating it to separate components. So how did we do it? Read on to find out.