I'm putting together a gaming-only PC in the United States with a budget of around $2,000. I don't need peripherals or streaming hardware, and I'd like to buy soon, although I can wait if a component is likely to drop in price. The main goal is to make moving to AM5 worthwhile.
My current parts plan is a Ryzen 5 7600X3D, an inexpensive AIO cooler, an ASRock AM5 motherboard, 32GB of DDR5-6000 memory, a Gigabyte RX 9070 XT 16GB, an SSD purchased from a major retailer, plus a case and power supply. I was initially considering a 650W-or-higher PSU and estimating roughly $150 for the case and PSU together.
Does this look reasonable for the money, or are there parts I should change for better value, reliability, or power capacity?
3 Answers
The biggest issue is the power supply. A 650W unit is too close to the limit for an RX 9070 XT, so I’d use at least 750W from a reputable model. An 850W ATX 3.0 Gold unit would give you a much more comfortable margin and may not cost much more.
The overall parts selection makes sense for a gaming system, but I’d carefully compare motherboard, RAM, and storage prices. There’s no need to overspend on memory, and a reputable 1TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe drive should be sufficient if you’re trying to stay under $2,000. For the GPU, an 850W quality PSU is a sensible target; some high-power cards can produce brief transient spikes, so extra headroom is worthwhile.
You can free up money by replacing the AIO with a Thermalright Peerless Assassin or Phantom Spirit. A good dual-tower air cooler is more than enough for the 7600X3D, and the savings can go toward a better PSU, cheaper memory, or a larger SSD. Also remember to include sales tax, since it can push a build like this noticeably over budget.
Good point on the tax. I was mainly looking at the listed component prices and hadn’t added that back in.