 Got a gamer in your life who's looking for an upgrade? Itching to spend your holiday bonus? Or maybe your computer just exploded and you need a fix fast. Well, thanks to Amazon sponsoring this video, we've got you covered with our 2022 Holiday Buyers Guide. Because not only is building a reasonably priced gaming rig actually viable for a change, you might be surprised to see just how low prices can go if you're willing to buy last year's model. DDR5? It's more like DDR, bye. We're kicking things off with our APU Super Saver build for the casual gamer out there who just needs something that works. We managed to get our cheapest system built for a little over $300. It's not pretty and it comes with a major caveat. Our Gigabyte GA A320M motherboard does not support our Hexacore Ryzen 5 4600G with Vega 7 graphics out of the box. But if you have access to an older AM4 CPU, like a 2400G, you can update the BIOS and you are good to go. However, if you're willing to shell out about $20 extra, you can avoid this hassle by simply going with an A520 board instead. I think it's probably worth the 20 to $30, but when our budget is this low, every penny counts. And it shows. How many of you out there are using four gig sticks of DDR4? Well, we are. And our two and a half inch SSD is only 240 gigs to boot. Get it? Cause it's your boot drive and the rest of your storage. Anyway, we've gone with the Zalman S3, the cheapest ATX case we could find. But if you've got an old home computer collecting dust, you could probably save a buck or 50 and just use that. If you're on this tight of a budget, you might also consider picking up an Amazon Basics mouse and keyboard. They're affordable and they just work. As for our power supply, well, it hopefully will work. It's only 430 watts, 80 plus, not 80 plus bronze, just 80 plus, but it's from Thermaltake, who should reply to your emails if you have any problems. And for under $30, we can't really complain, even if it's not gonna give us a lot of room for upgrades. Leading us to our first upgrade, our $500 build. If you're a gamer, you know you're going to want a dedicated GPU eventually. An APU is fine to get started, but if you spend a bit extra now, you can make sure your system has enough power and storage for the future. Maybe some faster RAM, even a nicer case. For a couple hundred bucks more, let's see what we can get. First order of business, goodbye 256-gig SATA SSD. Hello, Crucial P3 Plus, one terabyte NVMe SSD. At $84, it's a steal. And while our budget doesn't allow us to improve our processor now, almost anything that we would upgrade to later is going to support Gen 4 speeds. That's why we're going with the ASRock B550MPG riptide motherboard. Not only does it support a Gen 4 drive, but what gaming rig would be complete without ARGB headers and some motherboard armor? Memory was another huge upgrade for a small price, since DDR4 is so cheap right now. We even managed to squeeze in more RGB with this two by eight gig Corsair Vengeance kit running at 3,200 megatransfers per second CL16. And once you can afford a graphics card, you'll need some more juice. So we've upgraded to another Thermaltake power supply, this time with 80 plus bronze efficiency and a 750 watt rating. Now to be clear, this category was full of tough choices. I mean, we had to pick between either an APU build, but with a good upgrade path or a relatively low tier GPU build that was going to make some compromises and might not perform as well as you might hope anyway. There is however, a middle ground. If you're willing to take a little bit of risk and maybe spend a bit more like 600 bucks, because there are a lot of great deals in the used graphics card market right now, thanks to the recent crypto crash. We've got a few recent budget build videos that you can check out if you want to stray from the safe path of new warranty clad purchases. At our next price tier, $1,000, you absolutely could go buy a $500 GPU, slap it into our previous system and call it a day. However, both Intel and AMD have released their latest and greatest offering upgrade paths that are unavailable to our AM4 socket $500 build. Friendship ended with 4,600G, now core i5-12400F is my best friend. Unlike the higher end of Intel's 12th gen processors, this little guy doesn't have any efficiency cores, but it boosts a little higher than our previous six core CPU and wins out in both single and multi-threaded workloads. Now that we don't need integrated graphics, we're gonna save a couple of bucks and get the F version and this Pro Z690P motherboard from MSI, which should give us a phenomenal upgrade path thanks to its beefy VRMs and its ability to unlock K-series chips. Now, since 13th gen still supports DDR4, we're not shooting ourselves in the foot by sticking with the same Corsair Vengeance modules from before and our crucial P3's gen four speeds will now be taken advantage of. Now, some of you are probably screaming at me right now, Linus, the 5600X is on sale on Amazon for $160, you fool. And you're absolutely right, with a cheap B550 motherboard, we could save almost $200 right now, but that sale won't last forever and upgrading later to a 5800X3D could end up costing you a pretty penny if you can find one. If you do decide to go AMD now though, you'll have more than enough leftover to pick up a screwdriver from lttstore.com. Thanks to the other recent price reductions from AMD, you can now get an ASRock RX 6700 XT for as low as $390, 12 gigs of VRAM on a 192-bit bus, a boost clock of over 2,500 megahertz. I mean, it might not beat Nvidia when it comes to ray tracing or streaming, but this thing is a beast for either 1080p or even 1440p gaming. As for our case, it's still good enough for now, but we would recommend going a little over budget and maybe getting something nicer like this or this with slightly improved cable management and creature comforts. It can just make the build a little bit more pleasant. But if a little more pleasant isn't enough for you, if you're thinking of maybe going 4K at our $1,500 price point, over half of our budget is going towards our CPU and our GPU. We're sticking with AMD again, going for the 6900 XT, which is gonna give us great rasterization game performance for under $700, and we're getting a faster CPU. Now with efficiency cores, the 12600K, we also upgraded our boot drive to a Samsung 980 Pro, and finally, we're getting a nicer case with Fractal's Focus 2 RGB mid-tower. For our cooler, we chose the Thermalright Peerless Assassin 120 SE ARGB, a decent cooler for just 40 bucks that should be plenty for a Core i5. If looks are more important to you, you can actually save some money here and not upgrade to the 980 Pro, spending it on a nicer looking case or cooler instead, or maybe a fully modular power supply. And another valid option would be to bump your memory up to 3,600 megatransfers per second. We felt that 3,200 was good enough for us for now though. And besides, we still need some upgrades for our $2,000 build. This time around, we're building in a case that we've used lots throughout the last couple of years, the Phanteks P500A Digital. And we're gonna need that thing for all the juicy storage that we've now got with a two terabyte 7,200 hard drive that goes along with our 980 Pro that we have now doubled in size to two terabytes as well. We're still using only 16 gigs of DDR4 memory, but it's now running at 3,600 megatransfers per second CL18, and we bumped our GPU up to a Radeon RX6950XT. That 750 watt power supply should still be okay, as long as we stick to gaming and don't try to overclock the snot out of our Core i5 13600KF. But we're gonna upgrade to an 80 plus gold efficiency, fully modular unit for a bit of a cleaner look and peace of mind. A good chunk of change also went to purchasing a Z790 board with integrated wifi. So if you don't mind sticking with the older chipset and you don't need wireless, you could actually save a bit of money there and leave the old motherboard. The hard drive is also not necessarily required, but hard drives have gotten wildly inexpensive these days. And it's nice to have a spot to save any extra files you have, particularly to something that's a little easier to recover data from. Honestly, I was expecting to find more Nvidia cards in today's builds, but the reality is that AMD has made some aggressive price reductions recently. And with free prime shipping through Amazon, it was kind of a no brainer. Thanks again to them for sponsoring this video. I mean, no joke, just using PC part picker, they were usually the cheapest option anyway, particularly if you already have a prime membership and they're going to have more sales as we move closer to Black Friday and the holiday season. So keep your eyes peeled. As for now, we're gonna have all these products listed linked in the description down below. If you enjoyed this video, be sure to check out our recent budget builds, like the $69 gaming PC and the upgrade that we made to it later. The secondhand market is super wild right now. Good time to build a PC.