 Just how much do you have to spend to build a good gaming PC? $300, $600, $2,000. It's hard to know whether it's worth it to spring for that higher tier component without firsthand experience of how the extra cost is going to affect your gameplay. So what is it like to game at every price point? Why don't you find out? Sorry, what? I did that. I built PCs at like every price point. There's like six of them. Like it over there? There's lots of computers in here. Well, okay. Then let's go check it out, shall we? After this message from our sponsor, GlassWire. With GlassWire, you can instantly see your current and past network activity, detect malware, and block badly behaving apps on your PC or Android device. Use offer code Linus to get 25% off GlassWire at the link in the video description. Linus, I'd like to introduce you to a few friends of mine. Six to be exact. You ready? Yeah. All right then. Starting us off at $309.05, it's El Cheapo. You don't have to break the bank to break into gaming. Stepping it up to $622.06, it's the Athlead. Give the underdog a chance and they just might hit the buzzer beater. Coming in at $1,028.29, it's the Midranger. If this cowboy had a horse, its name would be Price to Performance or Seabiscuit. Strolling along at $1,513.43, it's the Gentleman. You deserve a rig that will treat you right. And this one, it's happy to oblige. Flying in at $2,505.06, it's the Glowup. Started from the bottom, now we here. That's the royal we because we fancy. And redlining it's $6,806.08, it's Overkill. Budgets? What are those? Okay, now a few caveats before we jump right in. Obviously, these six builds don't represent every price point that could possibly exist. But what I think they do is give you a pretty good idea of the type of performance and overall experience that you can expect if you set your budget around these prices. So each build includes a tower and a mouse, keyboard and monitor because those are pretty important to the overall gaming experience. So when I was speccing out these builds, I posted in our forum for help and a ton of people gave me awesome feedback on components. So thank you so much forum members. I love you. I should also note that we did not overclock or do any tweaking on these builds. I wanted as much of an out of the box experience as possible. Also, final caveat, third gen Ryzen. The RX 5700 series and the GeForce RTX Super Series came out a couple of weeks after we prepared this video, which is awesome because those were exciting launches that mean better performance for gamers, but also kind of lame because it means our builds are already somewhat out of date, such as life though on the bleeding edge of technology. The good news is that the general performance category of these budgeted builds hasn't changed that much. So we'll still be able to track broad changes in the experience as we move from one to the other. So without further ado Linus, I present El Cheapo. It's actually over there. We gotta go over to it. I love the paper mouse pad. This is actually exactly what I used to use when I was a budget gamer. Well, I wanted to stick with the theme. So this is basically the cheapest parts I could get on Amazon while still kind of making a PC that could run some games. Got it. So this is running on an AMD Athlon 200 GE. It's an APU, two cores, four threads, Vega graphics. Right, no GPU. This is basically recommended as like an APU you could use to play, you know, like decent MOBAs and stuff like League and Dota 2 and stuff. Yeah, it's running all right. I mean, not great, but it is running at 90 FPS. It's just, I mean, League's graphics don't look amazing at the best of times. And this is particularly not amazing. Yeah. Is that like a special, oh, I can't go behind that line, but this is the tutorial and they're just gonna come in and like wreck me. You're gonna die, dude. Okay, what else you got? So it's got a 120 gig SSD because that is actually cheaper than buying like the most cheap hard drive. Wow, it finally happened. Because yeah, flash storage is so freaking cheap. The case itself is a Rosewill R2521M with a power supply inside. So that allowed us to save money. What, what, why are you giving me that face? Not in a way we generally recommend saving money, mind you. No, but it's the cheapest. It's Alcheapo. Come on, guys. So the monitor is the Acer SB220Q and it's actually pretty impressive for the price. It's not bad at all. This is IPS. Yeah, $90 monitor. Yeah, looks great. 75 Hertz refresh rate. Wow. 1080p with FreeSync. Four millisecond response time. Yeah, that's fantastic. So it's pretty amazing for the money. I think the monitor stands out as a fantastic choice for a budget rig. And compared to times in the past when the cheapest possible motherboard really had no upgrade options, at least this has some upgrade options. It's true. You could throw in more RAM, throw in a better CPU, graphics card. I definitely want a better power supply if you do that. But at least there's like, at least there's an upgrade path for it. Right. Keyboard and mouse, not exceptional. Amazon basics. Now I'd probably still recommend used hardware over a brand new $200 tower. But maybe that won't be the case in our next price point. Speaking of which, let's go. Wow. Even just like opening windows and launching applications on this one, just the snappiness. This is a much faster machine. Things actually loading properly in decent time. Yeah. Well, it's the athlete. And so maybe that's why you love it so much. Okay. For the athlete, basically everything has changed. Okay. We've upped the CPU power. We have an actual GPU now. So that's great. Oh, I can feel the difference. 250 FPS compared to 60. And I'm at full 1080P. The game looks great. I'm glad you feel it Linus. We've doubled the RAM. We've doubled the storage. We have an actual discrete power supply now. Yeah. So this is like an actual, we're approaching a gaming experience like for real now. This feels pretty darn good. It even looks better. It's got dust filters on the fans. The mouse is considerably better. Like it's just more comfortable. And even though this is still a cheap keyboard and the build quality is nothing special, a Logitech cheap keyboard is still better than someone else's cheap keyboard from, well, my experience here. Very true. This monitor though, we don't change the monitor. Same monitor. It holds up really well. Yeah. It looks great. And I was again, I was surprised that a monitor can be this cheap and we can use it on the next highest build and it's just as good. Yeah. Yeah. So this setup should get you 1080p, depending on the game of course, Rocket League runs pretty well regardless, but for like modern games, 1080p medium settings. Yeah, it's very respectable. Have you scored yet? No. So, it doesn't matter what the hardware is. For some people, they just can't get it done. Wah. Wah. So David on our staff has advised me that these are pretty close to like kind of the recommended settings for Rainbow Six Siege. So we're gonna see if we can handle it at 1080p. Let's do it. So this is actually running great. We're looking at 130, 160 frames per second. Now there's not a lot of action going on right now. There's a bad guy. Is that a bad guy? Did I kill him? Cool, neat, now he's dead. Now one thing that we would change about this machine, if we were to do it again, is that we'd go with a Ryzen third gen equivalent processor instead of the one that we've got. 3200G. But as you can see, it's not like the machine isn't running just fine. I mean, this is a pretty darn good experience. Is this a bad guy? Oh no, it's a mannequin. Dang it. You were killed by a mannequin. Now this one looks a lot fancier. It's the mid ranger. Yep, it's a bit fancier. We upgraded the CPU and the GPU and the storage. We got 480 gigabytes now. Dang, M.2? M.2, NVMe. Dang, dang, and we've got a six core processor. That's right. And LED lighting. Got a lot of ventilation in the front. One thing I'm sort of on the fence about is the monitor. Yeah. Like it's bigger. It's bigger, it's 24 inches instead of 22. So you're getting a bit of benefit there in terms of like immersiveness. Yeah. It's only 60 Hertz instead of 75 Hertz. So that's kind of a bummer. Feels a little more sturdy though. Yeah. Then there's two HDMI imports. Right, so you've got your console on this side, you've got your PC on that side, you can quickly switch between them. So it's got more features. Right, you're exchanging a little bit of refresh rate for versatility. Got it. But you know, the other ones could work on this build as well. Sure. The last disadvantage of this monitor is that it uses a TN panel, which means worse viewing angles and worse color fidelity, but improved pixel response times. The thing though is that this exercise is more about sort of the performance and the experience. And you could of course choose a different monitor should you see fit. Right. So once again, there's a Ryzen third gen upgrade that could make a ton of sense for us. It's another 50 bucks to go third gen. And we could yield as much as a 25% improvement in performance, but even where we're sitting right now, like this is really darn good. This is Battlefield 5 running at the high preset, 1080p, and we're getting, you know, 65, 75 frames per second. This is very, very playable. We are beyond the refresh rate of our monitor here at least. Right. And this, the name of the game for this build is price to performance. So if you are looking to upgrade, you have to kind of think about whether that extra performance that you would get is worth the money you'd pay, because this right now is sitting pretty in price to performance land. I think for most people it's fair to say, this is about all you really need to get a very satisfactory gaming experience. You're gonna get in trouble for saying that. I'm just kidding. Oh, wow. That was brutal. That's savage. So I'm at Ultra now, right? You're at Ultra because that is how the gentleman treats his date. How does it feel to be the gentleman's date today? This is a noticeably better gaming experience. Animations are smoother. We're running at about 80 FPS and we're at Ultra. So the game looks pretty darn fancy and that high refresh rate monitor makes a big difference. This is a full HD 144 Hertz monitor now. And we have that because we've upgraded the GPU to a RTX 2070. 500 bucks, it's about a third of the total budget. We stuck with the same CPU. So the same things apply as in the last one. Well, as long as it's not a bottleneck, that's not necessarily a problem. No, we stuck with the same storage and the same RAM. We've got actual gaming peripherals now. Well, I mean, we had gaming peripherals before, but these are a little fancier because we're getting into treat yourself territory now. Now, one thing we haven't done yet is turn on ray tracing. I have never actually experienced ray tracing firsthand. Is that shameful? It's surprising. All right, well, this is it. This is ray tracing. Our frame rate is definitely lower. There's more reflections on the gun, I think. Ooh, only about 60 frames per second though. And we had to drop the rest of the in-game details. That's true. And that's got nothing to do with the monitor because again, 144 Hertz. But the cool thing with this setup, the gentleman, is that you can have that versatility. You can get a million frames per second with this horsepower, or you can pump the settings up a bit. And if you want a bit more of a cinematic experience, the gentleman treats you right. And the gentleman has some other creature comforts as well. This is where water cooling makes its first appearance. And we've got a modular power supply, which just makes your build look a little bit cleaner, and it's a little bit easier to pay well manage. So the glow up. So we got a i7-9700K for the CPU. Yep. RTX 2080 for the GPU. Right, getting up near the top tier. We're getting up there. It's not super. No, but it's pretty good. It's the penultimate build. Same storage, same RAM. We added a hard drive for extra storage for the games. Fully modular 750 watt power supply. Dual radiator water cooling. More creature comforts on the motherboard. And this is hilarious. I actually didn't notice it until you mentioned it. Wireless. Wireless peripherals. Light speed from Logitech. I mean, they feel exactly the same as wired. So I just like didn't even think about it. But we're definitely in the territory now where you're like, these are the creature comforts that you can afford when your budget is this high. Yeah. I mean, a lot of what we're doing doesn't really fundamentally change the gaming experience, but the image looks a lot sharper. Yeah, it's kind of funny. You know, like in doing this video, I kind of found that like we're changing everything else, but it really all revolves around the monitor mostly. And then you just have to upgrade everything else to keep up. That's true. Whether you're going higher refresh rate, well now you need to pump more frames, or whether you're going for a larger size, well now you need more resolution in order to keep it looking sharp. Right. And then you got to upgrade so you can pump out them frames. Exactly. It's not much use getting a fancy monitor and then buying an Athlon 200 GE. You know what I mean? So now there are some things because we're at this budget, we have some room to maneuver. So we're making choices as opposed to being limited by the money we're spending. Life choices. So this is a 1440p, 165 Hertz monitor. We chose that instead of a 4K monitor, even though you could play 4K at playable frame rates with this build, but I think that it's more, it makes for a better experience overall if you can get a 1440p high refresh rate monitor instead of playing at 4K at like okay frame rates. And we were able to afford G-Sync because that means that even though we're not running at a super high frame rate right now, we're only at about 60 frames per second, 64 there. The animations still feel relatively smooth. I need to go hide for a little bit. Especially when you shoot your teammate. Yeah, I didn't mean to do that. He'll forgive me. His widow will forgive me. Oh, now the other thing of course, the i7-9700K, Ryzen third gen came out. There's a lot of really good options there. Yeah. For this budget. And because we're focusing in on gaming only, that's what we got in there. But obviously it would be a... If you're doing anything else, going Ryzen third gen for the extra cores would make a ton of sense. No brainer. Finally, a build that is entirely unnecessary. Overkill. This is amazing though. Is it? This is absolutely fantastic. I haven't actually played it. So this is Shadow of the Tomb Raider at 4K, 145 frames per second, complete ultra, absolutely everything except motion blur cause that's stupid. And oh, ow. Dang it. Don't do that please. There we go. Like everything maxed. Yeah, we've got ray tracing on. We've got high dynamic range on. Just everything about it is freaking... Oh, wow. Please don't do that to me. Oh, you are getting... Oh, I'm dead. Oh, that's too bad. Doesn't make you a better gamer. It just makes you have more fun. So yeah, as I said, complete balls to the wall. i9-9900K dual RTX 2080 Ti's. Got a terabyte NVMe M.2 SSD and another two terabyte SSD in there just for fun. This machine is nuts. Like there's no doubt in my mind it's unnecessary. Nobody needs anything like this. No, you definitely don't. In fact, it's kind of offensive to me that I even built it. I can't figure out how to get up there. I wanna go walk around in the jungle. It looks so pretty. How do I get up there? Yeah, oh yeah, you gotta get up there. There we go. That is some Tomb Raider looking shiz right there. Wow, I actually... This is a real reactor that I'm having right now. I mean, look how sharp it looks. 4K ray tracing. It's actually not anti-aliasing on too. This is nuts. Okay, I can understand how you would spend this much. You know, we said that like it's completely unnecessary. It's $7,000. I know. It's seven grand. But like we said it was completely unnecessary, but like now that I've experienced it, I don't know, you know, maybe I should sell my car. It's... I mean, we're basically sparing no expense here. We've got a triple fan radiator, water-cooled, eight core hyper-threaded processor, 32 gigs of RAM. This is about as good a gaming experience as money can buy and it shows. And it definitely is overkill. You don't need 32 gigs of RAM for gaming. I just killed a bug with an arrow. Good for you. I gave him a fantastic shot because of the specs. Oops, I fell. Oh, I just jumped off. Oh, I'm dead. Whoopsies. She's dead. So the verdict here is pretty straightforward. Yes, spending more money does get you sharper image quality, more eye candy, better peripherals, you know, no mouse cord drag and all that kind of stuff. But you can also get a decent gaming experience at basically any price point, as long as you set your expectations and choose your games appropriately. So like Battlefield V, ultra settings, $600 budget. Not likely. But if you set your sights a little lower, CSGO, Overwatch, narrative games, or even last generation or two generational AAAs, yeah, why not? I mean, that's one of the beautiful things about the PC is that the game library is quite literally tens of thousands of games deep, spanning multiple generations. Chances are there's some game they can play on the hardware that you have, and that's pretty awesome. Now, if you guys want to know firsthand what it's like to game at these different price points, one really cool thing is that we're actually taking all of these rigs, the whole things, to LTX, and there are still some tickets left. So- At the time of filming. Try them out there and you can game on everything from a $300 complete gaming setup all the way to a $7,000 complete setup and figure out what's right for your budget and your preference. I have a feeling some people are gonna walk away a little bit poorer from LTX having experienced this one in particular. Oh, I don't. Okay. 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