$1,000-$1,400 Budget PC

Good Afternoon,

As the title says, I’m looking to buy a PC in the above-mentioned price range in preparation for Shadowlands. I understand building is better as it relates to “you get what you pay for.” However, I don’t want to build in pure laziness and would rather buy and play.

Please help me out find the best thing money can buy me.

PS: I already have a monitor, keyboard, and mouse.

Thanks!

Honestly?

Check your local Walmart.

They are putting some surprisingly decent rigs on the shelves for about that price range.

And they appear to have room for upgrades, which many “shelf PCs” didn’t have in the past. Retailers are learning, finally.

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Before you buy a Walmart gaming PC, Google “walmart gaming PC” and see what the tech YouTubers have to say based on hands-on testing of these machines.

If you want to buy a prebuilt, and you have a decent budget (you do), but you dont want to get ripped off, head to NZXT’s “BLD” service.

They charge MSRP for the components, and you only pay a fee for the Windows license and 50$ shipping fee.

Its about as good as it gets (you’re only paying a ~150$ premium or so over building it yourself out of the exact same parts, sales notwithstanding), the shipping is fast (might be delayed right now), and they offer full support.

Its pretty solid.

Letsbld.com

https://www.letsbld.com/bld/step4?price=1500&draft=0905512658

Roughly 1400$ shipped to your door.

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that makes zero sense to me. however, just go to newegg and look at complete builds. put your filter to your price range. find the system. then google that system to see if anyone has it cheaper.

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What makes zero sense?

Cant recommend this. You end up with junk-filled prebuilts with mediocre motherboards, 2666 or 2133 RAM paired with Ryzen CPUs, terrible firecracker PSUs, and junk storage.

One bonus to this approach is that the case you’re getting is a great deal nicer than anything that comes with machines from any prebuilt manufacturer except maybe Apple (which doesn’t make gaming PCs). NZXT cases are excellent.

Of course this won’t matter to some people, which fine and totally fair, but personally speaking if I were spending this much I’d want a decent case.

why someone would rather buy pr-built just out of laziness.

and if he is going to pre-built route, he is more than likely going to end up with either a very crap board, weak PSU, stock heatsink, slow drives or a mix/all of those.

you spend 1500 on a pc you are going to have junk compared to the 850 someone else spent. its just kind of how it works

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That where this rig came from. Been great.

Newegg has a ABS with ryzen 3600, 16gb 3000mhz ram, 512gb SSD, RTX 2070 super for $1199. That’s just as quick look as the site I check doesn’t list any gaming PC deals atm.

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i linked somebody to that one in another forum not a horrible deal for those that cant build and are worried about mucking it up

costs about 790 bucks to build if you go with a decent case, little better motherboard, better ram and an 850 watt PSU. maybe cheaper if you compare prices, i just done like a 5-10 min search before i linked it to them to make sure at current prices they werent paying double yaknow.

speaking of prices, i caught a flash sell and got another m.2, 16gb ram, and a 800watt PSU half off a motherboard for 20% off…daughters upgrade is going to come a couple of weeks early it seems

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That… looks god awful.

Firecracker Rosewill PSU, terrible ultra-low-end B450 motherboard (look at the Rear IO… Q.Q) and im highly skeptical of the RAM (looks like bargain-basement junk in the picture).

The case is… a perfectly serviceable case, at least. But yeah… for the regular price (1399$) that thing is a nightmarishly bad deal. ANd their support is -awful-.

Its actually pretty hard to compete with NZXTs BLD service if you want a decently spec’ed, well built rig.

Yes, if you cut corners (“any old case will do”, “who needs a modular PSU”, “any old motherboard will do”) then yeah, you can get a lot cheaper for similar performance (probably no worse than 10-15% slower at the absolutely worst case).

But you wont have the build quality, you wont have the parts quality, and you wont have a comprehensive one-stop warranty service.

With BLD, you’re only paying 100$ over MSRP on the parts/software. Thats it. 50$ flat build fee, 50$ flat shipping fee, and it ships same-day if you get the order in before a certain time (normally, Virus lockdown may be impacting that).

For example, here’s the same rig i linked above, “building it yourself”:

So… ~1350$ vs ~1440$.

And that extra 90$ gets you a one-stop full warranty (shipping on them), next-day or same day shipping, high build quality…

Its really not that bad.

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And how do you know it’s a rosewill psu when I don’t see it?

TLDR; do not get a pos walmart PC dude. You’ll regret it.

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I haven’t looked at the machine in question, but on cheap prebuilts it’s safe to assume that the PSU is junk - it’s by far the most common place manufacturers cut corners since it doesn’t show up on the spec sheet. Even name brand prebuilts like Alienware often do it, so on no-name prebuilts it’s practically a guarantee.

Look on Dell outlet for Refurbished and “Scratch n dent” pcs.
Specs

  • 16gb ram
  • nvidia 2060
  • 1tb hdd / 512gb ssd

They should run below $1400 and has good warranty.

Because you can see the PSU in the pictures, and its a Rosewill unit.

That’s… The PSU shroud :rofl:

From the rosewill spectra d100 case, $79 on Newegg

Skip to :28, you can see the same “rosewill” word, he’s not using a rosewill psu either before you try to say otherwise, he’s demoing the case by using an old Corsair GS power supply

And based on those 10 pictures on Newegg (which is sold out now) I don’t see anything referring to a rosewill psu you claim

Come on kagthul…

I would never recommend this company! Had two 980’s made by them, and the fans blew 3 months later, and they told me i was SOL!

Either EVGA, Asus, Nvidia, XFS, or Gigabyte! Only brands i would trust. I have had over 50-60 gpu’ in my time as a builder of gaming rigs for 25 years, so take the advice or dont.

Happy gaming.

You can not go wrong with these brands.

You can see the PSU FROM BEHIND.

Holy crap are you dense.

Just… stop. You’re just making yourself look even dumber than usual.