 Has it been a year already? Apparently. So it's holiday PC Buyers Guide time again. As usual, we'll be targeting three different price points in US dollars before operating system. Under $500, $900 to $1000-ish, and about $2000. I'll be using pricing from Newegg US and Amazon.com, and I'll have a where-to-buy link in the video description. Let's go! G Fuel is having a buy one get one free deal event this Black Friday on their 40 serving tubs. Check it out now at the link in the video description. So first up is our decent quality 1080p gaming box. We won't be sweating small stuff like upgradability or future-proofness for this one. We've got $500 to spend, so if it doesn't make the FPS number go up, it's out. So there are 145 CPUs on Newegg.com from $50 to $75. Too bad that when you filter out the dual cores, you're left with a whopping one option at the price we paid last year. The Athlon X4 845. Non-overclockable and slower than the 860K we chose last year that goes for $78 now. I mean if I'm gonna spend that much, I might as well go with the... Nope. Nope. No, there's nothing. Bloody hell is it a bad time to be a budget CPU buyer. But at least I get AMD's Wraith stock cooler for my extra $8, right? Oh wait, I don't! That part number costs an extra $20 on top. So 860K with a normal cooler and paying more for it, it is. Anyway, shopping for RAM is easy. I opted for a single stick, trading a little bit of performance for the option to upgrade to 16 gigs down the road. And last year for the motherboard, I went with a super basic MSI board for $47. Cheap, right? This year Asus has a similar one for 40 bucks. Sold. Moving on to the case, after two years of dominance, the Cooler Master Elite 350 has finally been dethroned in my $500 system by Cooler Master. The Elite 342 drops compatibility with full ATX motherboards, and you get a 400 watt instead of a 500 watt power supply, but you save a few bucks, and from Hardware Secrets' review, the included 400 watt unit made by FSP can actually deliver its rated output, as long as you're not concerned with efficiency. And I will definitely be using that $6 I saved to get a ballin' out video card. The Radeon RX 480 4G has double the frame buffer, but more importantly is way faster than the GTX 960 2G that I recommended for this system last year, and it costs only 20 bucks more for the cheapest variant I could find on Newegg, with Civilization VI included to boot. Our storage is going to be a lot faster too. Scrolling past some of the very random cheap SSD options, I mean, Hyundai, really? Reveals 240 gig products from a handful of reputable brands for as little as 65 bucks. We can always add a hard drive for more storage later, so I chose a SanDisk Z410. So in summary, we spent about $20 more than last year for the same CPU and RAM loadout, but we are deep into double-digit gains when it comes to GPU performance at 1080p, and ditching the mechanical hard drive will make a huge difference to the day-to-day usability, even if it means we might need a storage space upgrade in a little while. For our next system at $1,000, future expandability, features, and usability beyond gaming are much bigger considerations, but instead of spending extra on chasing overclocking headroom, I'll be focused on the best out-of-the-box performance I can get. So we'll start with an Intel Quad Core, and this year for the same price, we get a big upgrade to a Skylake Core i5 6400 that... Wait a minute... This thing is only marginally faster than the Core i5 4460 we used last time. Aha, I get it. The i5 6500 is the sweet spot this year. Much faster, and only $15 more. Oh Intel, you devious little scoundrels. Oh well, at least for our lunch money, we also get a faster DMI, support for 64 gigs of DDR4 RAM, and some power savings. Speaking of RAM, the best deals I found while writing this were on a VEXIR or Corsair 2x8 gig kits of DDR4. I didn't stress about speed for the reasons I outlined in this video, and I picked the ASUS B150M-A M.2 to install them on. No USB 3.1 support, but it's got four DIMM slots for RAM expansion and with all the SSD innovation moving forward on the M.2 slot, I consider that a must-have for a storage upgrade down the road. The EVGA B1 500W power supply held its crown this year. It's even a few bucks cheaper, and so is our case. It was a toss-up for me between the NZXT Source 210 and the Thermaltake Versa H25, both at $40, but the Versa has free shipping with Prime, so that put it over the top. Storage got a big shake-up at this price point this year. SSDs are cheaper, so I got 750 gigs for what I paid for 500 gigs last year, but I actually ditched the 4TB hard drive, so you'll have to add one later if 750 gigs isn't enough for you. Bringing us finally to the video card, the reason that I pinched every penny in a thousand dollar build up until this point. I managed to squeeze a GTX 1070 in here, making this rig a perfect match for a cheap 1440p or even ultra-wide monitor off eBay or high-end VR gaming, and I even threw in a DVD drive just to show off. Bam! So compared to last year's model, we spent marginally less, but we gained some CPU horsepower, got a bigger SSD, but sacrificed our hard drive, and we added anywhere from 40 to 80% to our gaming performance, depending on the game and resolution. Not too bad for a year later. Note that our Amazon build out includes an OEM CPU, since even with a Hyper-T2 thrown in, it's cheaper there, and CPUs rarely fail anyway. Our last system assumes a buyer who is willing to pay more for creature comforts like sleeved cables, RGB lighting, overclocking, and quiet operation. It also assumes that a buyer who requires high performance outside of purely gaming applications, let's say video editing or 3D modeling. Well, it sure is easy to choose a CPU when you have $2,000 to spend, isn't it? Actually, no, it kind of gets harder. While I could drop a thousand dollars on an 8-core 6900K, unless I am heavy into content creation, an unlocked 6-core is going to do me just fine, and that money would be better spent elsewhere. So I'm going to go with the 6800K, a slightly faster 6-core than last year. The 6850K would be strongly recommended as an upgrade if you're adding a lot of PCI Express storage or expansion cards. Along with the same SLI support, solid build quality for overclocking and USB 3.1, the U.2 slot, LED lighting, and Type-C port on the X99A2 for an extra 15 bucks put it over the top versus the older board we chose last year. Then for RAM, thanks to falling prices, we make up that 15 bucks and get a slightly faster 32GB kit of Vengeance LPX Quad Channel DDR4 than we did last year, plenty for the time being with the option to upgrade to 64GB down the road. For case and cooling, I went for a slightly different strategy this year. I downgraded my case to an NZXT S340, which is basically as small as you can get while still fitting my upgraded cooling, a Noctua NHD 14. Compared to last year, it won't be as roomy to work in, but should yield a significant improvement in CPU clock speeds for overclocking. Power comes courtesy of an EVGA Supernova G2 850W fully modular unit, 80 plus gold, 100 watts more than last year's RMX series, and a few bucks cheaper. Nice. Onto storage, the only real difference is that instead of a bargain basement 1TB SSD and a 4TB hard drive, we're getting a Samsung 850 EVO 1TB SSD and a 4TB hard drive. I went with a 2.5-inch SSD, even though it's the same price as one that would go in an M.2 slot, because in a tower case, we don't really need the space savings, and that'll leave my M.2 slots open for an NVMe drive upgrade in the future. Right now, that M.2 drive, unless you want to pay a lot for it, is going to be running over the SATA interface anyway. Also, I checked a DVD drive in there. Woohoo. Video card time. Last year, I actually downgraded the 3D gaming performance of the $2,000 system to make room for that 6-core CPU, double the memory, and double the SSD storage compared to the 2014 edition. This year, I'll be able to keep all of those things, with the faster CPU and SSD, better cooling and better I.O., and get better gaming performance thanks to the GTX 1080. All of this while staying about $80 cheaper than the 2015 edition. Which brings us then to the end of this year's Holiday Buyer's Guide. Remember, as always, these aren't hard and fast rules, and daily pricing fluctuations, especially on categories like RAM or video cards, can affect the exact part that I would recommend a lot. But if you follow these guidelines, I'm sure you'll end up with a kick-ass system that you'll enjoy for years to come. Interesting fact, this is the first year that all three systems come out cheaper on Amazon than Newegg, if you buy Windows 10, and have Prime for free shipping. So be sure to check out our Prime membership link below and the links to where to buy using our affiliate code. Clicking through those links, regardless of what you buy, lets Amazon know that we helped you with your purchasing decision, which gives us a commission. I fix it. They got a lot of talking points. 19,000 free step-by-step repair guides, lots of tools you can buy on their site, lifetime warranty on the tools. But I'm gonna get off the script for a little bit here, because I don't need to tell you guys, iFixit's tool kits are great, and they allow you to take apart and reassemble pretty much any device. And I'm gonna go, what is it, late November? Ah yes, full-on holiday messaging. Got a geek in your life who doesn't have a toolkit yet? Bam! Perfect present. iFixit Toolkit. You'll actually be giving them the gift of saving money and tinkering with electronics. What could possibly be better? I know, a discount! So also use our discount code, so you can save a few bucks on your order, and you can feel good, they can feel good, I'll feel good, iFixit will feel good, everyone's feeling good. That's the Christmas spirit. Or holiday spirit. Sorry. 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 at Amazon in the video description, I kind of already said that, well whatever, it's down there. Also linked in the video description is our merch store, which has cool shirts like this one, and our community forum, which you should totally join. Now that you're done doing all that stuff, you're probably wondering, hmm gee, what should I watch next? Maybe check out our latest video, over on channel Superfun. See you next time! I keep vowing to do more of these buyer's guides, and I keep only doing them once a year. Buyer's guides, and I keep only doing them once a year.