 You've saved your box tops, fished under the couch cushions, and pulled together all your leftover lunch money, and you are finally ready to build your first gaming rig. But what do you choose? AMD? Intel? We couldn't decide either. So today, we're going to be building not one, but two budget-friendly gaming PCs, each coming in at around a thousand US dollars, and we're gonna put them head to head to see just how they perform. That is, after we perform this message for our sponsor. The Corsair K100 RGB mechanical gaming keyboard combines aluminum design with perky RGB backlighting and their 44-zone three-sided light edge bar. Check it out today at the link below. The build starts with one of the best budget CPUs on the market right now, the AMD Ryzen 3 3100. What's so great about this is it uses the same Zen 2 architecture as their higher-priced products, but in a more bite-sized package. So instead of having six or eight or 12 or 16 cores, it's got just four cores, but they're fast ones, and like the rest of AMD's Ryzen lineup, there's full support for overclocking. Compared to our CPU, our motherboard is an area where we actually went beyond the bare minimum, though. To be clear, the B550 Phantom Gaming 4 from ASRock isn't a high-end board, but what it does have is an upgrade path. So in addition to having a couple of M.2 slots for SSDs, it's got support for PCI Express Gen 4 in both the top 16X slot and top SSD slot, if we ever wanted to upgrade the graphics card, and it's got out-of-the-box compatibility with Zen 3 Ryzen 5000 series processors, which up until this point have such high core counts and high prices that they don't necessarily make sense for a budget build, but that doesn't mean it's not worth spending the extra, you know, 20 bucks or 30 bucks to have the ability to go that route in the future. Representing Intel, we've got the Core i3-10100. Just like our AMD competitor, it's got four cores and eight threads, but unlike our AMD competitor, it is not capable of overclocking at all, which did inform some of our other parts choices. For example, our motherboard. We could have gone with the H470 Phantom Gaming 4, which does have another M.2 slot, a couple more power phases, as well as slightly better USB connectivity, but because that didn't give us any overclocking potential and stepping all the way up to a Z series chipset just wasn't in the cards at this price point, we decided to save the, what is it, like 20 bucks, 30 bucks? Something like that, yeah. The last key difference between our two systems is our memory. For the AMD system, we're using G.Skill RipJaws V, and for the Intel system, we're using G.Skill RipJaws V, but at a slightly slower speed. G.Skill rightly pointed out when we requested memory for this project that the Intel system wouldn't be able to take advantage of anything higher than 2933 megahertz. Now, because 3200 megahertz was exactly the same price at current promo pricing, we opted to go for that anyway. With that out of the way, to save you guys some time and boredom, we're going to talk about the rest of the parts with just one of the systems, the AMD one, while Colin assembles the other one on the counter over there. Let's start then with the cooler. We've gone with a classic here, ladies and gentlemen. This is the Hyper 212 EVO V2. It's got a 120 millimeter fan, it's a tower design with four heat pipes, and they make direct contact with the IHS of the CPU. Basically, this has been the go-to for like 10 years for cheap and cheerful CPU cooling if you don't have an included cooler. Of course, one common drawback with budget-oriented coolers is that the installation is, well, let's just say it's some assembly required. It's not difficult by any stretch of the imagination, but it does take a little bit more time than something like a knock to a cooler. Once it's on there though, hey, that looks pretty freaking great. And the cherry on top is to tie our fan cable in a nice little bow and plug it into the CPU fan header. In line with our theme of building a pretty nice gaming machine without wasting any money, we've gone with the EVGA 550B5 power supply. It's a decent quality unit with 80 plus bronze efficiency. It's got a nice quiet fan that can even be turned off. That's right, my friends, it's got a silent fan mode, and it's one of the most inexpensive units on the market with a fully modular interface. While there are a ton of other cases on the market, we really like the 275R Airflow for its good mix of price, features, and performance. It's got a tempered glass side panel, filtered air intake on the bottom, excellent, there you go, Airflow through the front, three included 120 millimeter fans, and really nice looking cable management that's gonna give our build a really clean look when we're done. This isn't by any means a step-by-step build guide, but I also don't wanna gloss over important stuff like this. With budget boards, you do still have to install your own IO shield, which a lot of the time means bending these things and making sure that they're not in the way once the motherboard actually goes in. Try not to cut yourself. This is like the highest probability of cutting yourself part of, dang it. Is it just cheaper to produce like external ones than to build them into the motherboard? Because it's not just the cost of the actual units, it's like the tooling cost of creating the shroud and stuff because the IO is so different on every motherboard. Like we blew so much of this thousand dollar budget on the graphics card, and the only way we can do that is by saving three bucks here and two bucks there, okay? For storage, we normally steer clear of DRAM-less SSDs for your operating system, but in this case, because we're looking for a reasonable amount of capacity, faster than a hard drive, and we don't wanna spend any more than we have to, the Patriot Burst 960 gig ticks a lot of boxes. One thing we might recommend in the future as an upgrade when you've got a bit of extra budget is switch over to using your SATA SSD just for your game drive and run your OS off of an NVMe drive that you put in later. At around 500 US dollars, our MSI Mech Radeon 5700 XT represents about half of our total budget, but given that this is a gaming machine, not a video editing PC or 3D modeling PC, I think that is more than justified, and there's a lot of bang for the buck to be had here. It's got a fast GPU, it's got eight gigs of GDDR6 memory, and it doesn't have fancies like HDMI 2.1 or PCI Express Gen 4, but if you wanna play AAA games at anywhere from, I'd say up to 1440p, this is your ticket. Unfortunately, attempting to enable XMP and get it running at DDR4-3600 was a no-go, even though it's like supported, but I still think we can do better than 2933, which is what Colin's gonna be stuck with with the Intel system there. So we're just gonna go to, oh yes, DRAM frequency, let's try 3200. Boop, boop. We could have saved our $3 here though. Now that the machines are built, it's time for the head-to-head showdown, which of course means 1v1, but also with bots on our side, so whatever, don't worry about it, CSGO. With my Ryzen 3, I had a hard time running it anything higher than stock RAM settings, and I couldn't tell you whether that's down to my particular chips integrated memory controller or my motherboard, but that could be a significant disadvantage for my system right now, in spite of the fact that I have fast RAM installed in it. As for whether that's actually a competitive advantage, I guess we'll find out soon enough. Ha ha ha ha ha, no, spray and break, yes, headshot. You know what the bottom line is though, regardless of who wins? See, that's what a nice winner I am. Is like, these are both great experiences. I'm having a great time. I'm sure you're having a great time headshotting me every time you come around the corner. Something to note though is, I'm actually hosting our server, but CSGO server is not like a super intensive workload by any stretch. Okay, we're going dual Berettas. Dual Berettas boys. Wait, what? My bot's dead already? What the? I didn't do it. No, you really didn't. Your bot killed both of us. Baa-bam! Oh! Actually, I kind of fear Colin's bot more than him. Baa-bam! Hey, there's games that Colin's good at. This just doesn't happen to be one of them. That's why I picked it. So this is cool. We're recording gameplay on our graphics card. I'm running a server and we're both still running at like 200, 250 FPS. Not too freaking shabby, hey? I've only got like an extra 20 FPS on you. Is it worth like having the other person on the server see if it's comparable? I see what you're saying. Like to make sure that that's not a huge performance difference. Honestly, to me, it doesn't really affect the conclusion much here though, because I'm looking at this going, man, for a thousand dollars, boy, can you ever get a whole hell of a lot of gaming? Like this 1440p absolutely maxed out. Yeah, it's an e-sports title, but you are getting an extremely competitive experience here. Yeah, there's nothing wrong with this gaming experience. On either side. And we can run some more benchmarks if you really want to know which one edges out the other. So why don't we do that? Which brings us perfectly to our next game where you might notice I've chosen a canned benchmark rather than a head-to-head battle. Ha ha, got him. And three, two, one, here we go. Oh wow. You might've looked good in CSGO, but we're running at the same settings. 1440p, absolutely cranked. And that Intel CPU is holding back the GPU a little bit here. Remember, these systems are identical other than the CPU and then the motherboard obviously to go with it. I mean, I guess that's what an extra a hundred bucks gets you. Yes and no, because if it wasn't for prices being driven up by the holiday madness and shortages on AMD CPUs, these would be basically the same darn price. And we didn't have to go B550. We could have saved a buck and gone with a lower end chipset knowing that we would have to update the BIOS in order to get our third gen Ryzen processor to work on it out of the box. So we could have gone B450 and been right around the same price. Okay, now we have- My minimums crushed you. My low 1% FPS are way above. This must've just been one frame. This is clearly a better result. Low 0.1% even, way better. Well, with that crushing defeat, let's open up 3DMark. You already ran that, right? I did already run it. So we can just load up the results. Perfect. And you come out ahead. Yes. In every possible way. I'm glad you asked why that happened. Yes. He didn't yet, but he was going to. I was going. The reason is that synthetic benchmarks just cannot simulate every possible gaming scenario. Every game engine and every individual game using that engine can have different idiosyncrasies that run better or worse on different hardware. And that's why we don't even talk about 3DMark in our graphics card and CPU reviews. Now, if you're doing something like overclocking, it's a valuable tool because it tells you on identical hardware, am I faster than I was before or slower than I was before, but it's not great for comparing non-identical hardware. Now, let's actually carry on that theme and fire up Cyberpunk 2077. Let's do it. To illustrate that point, AMD is actually coming slightly behind our Intel system in this particular game. Cyberpunk 2077 is about eight to 10% slower on our AMD versus Intel system. Remember again, using exactly the same graphics card and exactly the same settings. We're running on the medium preset at 1440p. I mean, this is pretty indicative. And I mean, as we're sitting here, like I'm cooler and also faster. I didn't even notice that you were running cooler right now. How's our 99th percentile? Oh, wow, you're way ahead in that. Okay, well, that's pretty much it. That's the conclusion. For a thousand bucks, you can get a fantastic gaming experience, whether you decide to go AMD or Intel. As for which one is slightly ahead of the other, it's gonna come down to which games you wanna play. For my money, I prefer the white box here. And the reason is that it's got a more clear upgrade path, but we also don't know for sure how Rocket Lake from Intel, which is also gonna be on that same LGA 1200 socket is going to stack up. Which means no matter who comes out ahead, AMD or Intel, the big win is for you, the consumer. You know what else is a big win? Me telling you about our sponsor. FreshBooks is easy to use accounting software designed specifically with you in mind, the small business owner. FreshBooks has everything you need to manage your books, invoicing, expenses, time tracking, and more. And it's designed to be easy to use with built-in automation. So you spend less time invoicing, expensing, and tracking projects, and more time doing projects and growing your business. Whether you're a trades person, creative agency, or a YouTuber, you can choose a plan that's right for you. They have award-winning Toronto-based customer support if you need it. And you can try it out for free for 30 days today with no credit card required at freshbooks.com slash Linus. If you guys enjoyed this video, maybe check out the one where I took an old Dell, like Frankenstein office PC and turned it into a gaming rig. It's pretty freaking sick. And one thing we forgot to mention when we were talking about the value prop between them is like considering PlayStation 5 scalper prices, this is looking pretty compelling. Just saying. I'm not going all PCMR on it. I'm just saying. Just saying. No? Okay.