Best cheap gaming PC under $500 2024: Budget 1080p PC build

Now you’ve taken a look at our selection of components, you should have a pretty good idea of whether or not this build suits your needs. We’ve discussed exactly what this build offers in terms of performance, and have gone into more detail on how each of the hardware choices impacts this build. Now, let’s go over the areas that need to be considered before buying this build.

What you get for your $500

One of the most important areas to consider before any PC purchase is your budget. By that, we mean will you be able to build a PC that meets your performance requirements with the funds you have set aside. $500 is a decent chunk of money, and whilst a $500 gaming PC won’t be powering through 4K at 100FPS, it represents a simpler PC that gives you incredible value for money. We recommend increasing your budget to around $800 for a better overall experience, with around $1000 being the sweet spot.

As you can imagine, putting together the best custom PC build for under $500 was no easy task. Many compromises were made along the way to be able to extract the maximum level of performance out of this build. It is entirely possible to craft a gaming PC with a dedicated GPU at this price point. The performance difference between the $400 and the $500 builds is considerable as you move away from integrated graphics. Around the $500 mark, large M2 SSDs and 16GB of RAM are now achievable.

Performance

You can expect this $500 build to handle 1080p/60FPS gaming across a few AAA titles with higher settings. This RX 6650XT will also handle a lot of popular esports games with ease, giving you a wide variety of entry-level options. High FPS is obtainable in esports titles with lowered settings, so overall this budget $500 PC is very versatile. We have bolstered performance with the included 16GB of RAM, a solid amount for gaming, and an SSD storage device. You can expect snappy boot times for Windows and your games, along with some future-proofing from the RAM.

$500 Custom Gaming PC vs $500 Prebuilt

Building your gaming PC is always going to offer more value, however, we understand that not everyone wants to tackle the challenge of a custom gaming PC. Well, this is where a $500 prebuilt gaming PC could be worth your while but there are a few things to consider before you pull the trigger on a prebuild.

The first thing to note is that you are probably never going to get a prebuilt gaming PC that offers the same performance at the same price. If you were to spend your $500 on a prebuilt, you are likely to see a lower-end CPU with fewer cores/threads, possibly smaller capacity RAM and storage, and lesser quality PC cases and supplies. It’s also a given that you’d get a lesser GPU, the main driver behind your gaming performance.

The reason is not because prebuilt manufacturers are crooks, it’s because prebuilt manufacturers are a business, and they make money through prebuilt PCs by adding a markup (labor costs). This is understandable but it can impact the value you get, you probably know all too well that at the lower end, every penny counts.

How to upgrade your $500 gaming PC

Another major factor to consider when building a custom PC is how easily you can upgrade it down the line. We have built this $500 build with upgradability in mind, choosing the LGA 1700 socket means you can upgrade to any CPU up to the Intel Core i9-14900K theoretically – not that’ we’d recommend that on the H610 chipset, as it lacks certain features and seems like a bit of a waste to populate it with such a high-end CPU. Since you’d have to upgrade your Motherboard anyway, you might as well upgrade your motherboard and memory.

We recommend the i5-13600K as the next logical CPU update, it’s up to you if you want to keep the same motherboard and stay on DDR4, or upgrade to a better one for DDR5 and a better chipset. Of course, this will come at a significant cost. But that’s a future problem.