 Between the NAND flash shortages, DRAM price fixing, and the GPU mining, boom and subsequent pfft bust, 2018 has been one heck of a ride. But now as the holidays approach, it's looking like a fantastic time all of a sudden to build a new gaming PC. And it's my job to find the best deals at $500, $1,000, and $2,000 for you. So naturally, I didn't do it. I had Anthony do it. But it's okay. He did a great job. Speaking of great, our sponsor, iFixit. Give the gift of fixing this holiday season with iFixit's ProTech Toolkit. Visit ifixit.com forward slash Linus at the link below and get yours today. Before we begin, a note about our part selections. We decided not to use sale pricing, except where components are more or less perpetually on sale, where we use the price that it was available at most often. This way, you guys can expect these prices or less. So if you see better deals on these parts or on other parts, you can expect better deals on these parts or on other parts. Go for it. This video is just meant to be a guideline. So let's start with our budget, just game PC. With only 500 bucks to spend, every dollar needs to contribute to gaming performance in some way. And when we look at last year's... Wow, 2017 was rough. We just barely managed a Ryzen processor and we had a meh, case with an even more meh power supply. Blah. This year, we're able to use the much faster, not to mention cheaper, Ryzen 3 2200G. And this time, we also get a B350 chipset motherboard, which means we can actually overclock it a little bit. Now, sadly, we are still stuck with 8 gigs of RAM, but since we've got four slots on our board, we can get a dual channel kit to improve the performance of our board. We can get a dual channel kit to improve the performance of our bandwidth-hungry Ryzen CPU without sacrificing future upgradability. But wait, there's more. This time around, we swung a separate case and 80 plus bronze power supply with its own three-year warranty and for storage, well, this was kind of a no-brainer. So our SSHD, unfortunately, ended up almost 10% more expensive for the capacity this year, but it's fast enough that you're not gonna feel the crunch too quickly while you're gaming, so we had to make a compromise there. And it was a worthwhile one because you will be gaming. We're picking up a Radeon RX 570 this year, the 4-gig model, of course, but that GTX 1050 Ti from yesteryear is finally gone, and we've got performance more akin to a GTX 1060 3G. This is one of those it's always on sale cases, because Newegg claims it's on sale, but looking at the pricing history, it's been on sale for the entire month of November, and it sold for not much more going all the way back to October. So the heavens have opened up and smiled upon the budget gamers this year, because by our math, you can grab this setup for just over $501 on Newegg or just under $500 if you spread your purchases to other vendors. Moving on, we've got our GameNow mid-range PC, and last year, we were in pretty rough shape on this one too, if I'm being honest. Yeah, we managed a Ryzen 5, but it was a quad-core. This year, we're up to six cores thanks to the most versatile CPU in our recent CPU buyer's guide, the Ryzen 5 2600, which it's even $5 cheaper, by the way. Thanks, AMD. And what's more, we're able to get proper DDR4-3200 memory to feed the beast for less than what we paid for 2400 MHz last year. I am so glad that whole RAM thing is over this time. For our boot drive, we're sticking with solid-state storage, and this is crazy. We are getting double the capacity this time around for $5 less, making this easily the biggest SSD that this segment has ever been able to afford. An extra bonus is that at one terabyte, you're not going to have to burn as many erase cycles swapping games around to fit in a more confined SSD, and it's even M.2. Moving on, our case doesn't have a window to show off the clean interior, but the Corsair Carbide 270R offers both build quality and creature comfort improvements over the Thermaltake Versa, complete with easier-to-clean removable dust filters, and then going into it is the bigger 650-watt variant of the EVGA B3 power supply that we used last year, giving us a bit of room to upgrade later on. Remember, guys, this is EVGA's, like, actually good, even though it's 80-plus bronze PSU line, and it should serve you well for years to come. Finally, we also picked up a GTX 1070 Ti for a cool $20 less than we paid for the 1070 that got us through the last two years. By the way, it's not likely that these things will stick around for too much longer. The existing 10 series stock is slowly but surely disappearing from the top down, so either move fast or hopefully the RTX, GTX, whatever it is, 2060, ends up being a decent replacement. Only time will tell. What we do know right now, though, is that in total, this build weighed in at a hair over a grand, but that's less than 5% of the budget, and many of these parts regularly go on sale, and it's freaking awesome, so happy shopping. Finally, we haven't forgotten about you mega-ballers out there, you. So for you guys, we've got the Game On high-end gaming rig, which at $2,000 should last you quite a while. Now, looking at every other year's Game On build, you might think that us going from an HEDT, or high-end desktop socket, down to a Core i7 on the consumer socket, is a downgrade. And in terms of PCI Express lanes, you'd be right, but in terms of processing power, we're actually gaining two cores that are each faster than any previous CPU that we've used in these builds, which more than makes up for their lower thread count due to the loss of hyper-threading. We also lose quad-channel memory, but we keep our 32 gigs of DDR4 3200 RAM, this time in the form of a dual-channel kit that leaves two slots open for future expansion. Our storage improvement this time around is in picking up the SSD that we used in our Game Now build, the WD Blue 1TB M.2 SATA, which gives us 1TB of fast storage to go along with our 4TB of 5400 RPM spinning iron. So the OS and commonly used apps in games go on the SSD, and the longer-term storage and lesser-used games go on the hard drive with plenty of room on both. Or you can even check out a software caching solution like PrimoCache, split up your SSD and kind of divide and conquer that way. Now, we're keeping our Seasonic 80 Plus Gold power supply and our Noctua cooler from last year, because they're great deals, and the cooler in particular is good enough to handle quite a bit more than our Core i7-9700K can put out. And then for our case, we've splurged on the tempered glass Corsair Crystal 460X with all of its RGB goodness. Now in light of the case choice, some folks might prefer a liquid cooler for aesthetics, but just be prepared to spend a little extra for the privilege to get comparable cooling capacity to what we've already got. Which leads us then to our most controversial pick this time around. Last year, we practically begged AMD and Nvidia to give us a solid upgrade of some sort. So maybe next year we'll get a $2,000 system that's worth upgrading to from our 2016 model. Like, can we? AMD and Nvidia? If we're really good? And we've got it, the RTX 2070. Yes, I know, RTX is nowhere near worth it at this time, but that doesn't mean that the RTX 2070 isn't a good graphics card. It's just an overpriced graphics card. And by the time we wrote up this buyer's guide, brand new stock of GTX 1080s and 1080 Ti's was essentially depleted. So unless you want to buy those used, which by the way is a valid option, one that we'd recommend, these guides only include products that you can buy brand new in a store. So this is the best performance for gaming that we could get into this price bracket, and it ain't bad for productivity either. On that subject, this video is about gaming PCs, and of course that was the goal, but as it turns out, all of our builds across the board ended up pretty well balanced for either gaming or productivity tasks, and we ended up inadvertently following some of our own advice from our recent CPU Buyer's Guide. So, as it always is with custom PCs, the sky's the limit in terms of configurability, but we think that our rigs make a great starting point for almost anyone who isn't looking for a hyper-specialized build. So now we'll wrap up then with full disclosure time. We don't get any kickbacks from manufacturers for our holiday Buyer's Guide parts, but what we do get is a commission if you buy them using the links below. So if you're in the market, go ahead and check them out. It truly is a great time to buy a PC, especially a value one. 2018 was like a real rollercoaster of pricing and availability, but here we are finally at the end of it with a tangible improvement across the board over previous years. So may your holidays be filled with tech and gaming cheer. Is this even visible in the frame? Let's bring some holiday cheer. And may your holidays also be filled with screwdriver kits. iFix's Manta kit has 112 steel bits, comes complete with standard bits like Phillips and Flathead, but also Torx, Tri-Point and GameBits as well, and includes not one but two. Aluminum screwdriver handles, a hefty quarter inch drive for full size applications, and a smaller 4mm for precision work. Both drivers feature magnetic bit sockets, knurled grips, and silky smooth spinning tops, and all iFixit tools are backed by a lifetime warranty, so if something breaks, they'll fix it for free. That is how warranties work. Visit iFixit.com forward slash Linus and pick up the new Manta kit today. Because if you don't, then when tomorrow rolls around and you need it, you won't have it. So thanks for watching guys, if this video sucked, you know what to do, but if it was awesome, get subscribed. Hit that like button, or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in the video description. Also linked down there is our merch store, which has cool shirts like this one, and our community forum, which you should totally join us. Check to make sure I was wearing an old t-shirt, but I am, it's good. It's all good.