Here is a budget build targeting 500€. Thanks to the Ryzen 5 5500 and the RX 6600, it is good for 1080p and esports scenarios where high refresh rates are needed.
All prices are based on Portugal stores, which may differ slightly from and other shops outside the country.
Parts
MOTHERBOARD - Gigabyte A520M-K V2 54.90€
CPU - AMD Ryzen 5 5500 84.90€
CPU COOLER - Stock CPU Cooler Included
The cooler included with the CPU is good for this build, there is no need to buy a different one unless we are overclocking, but the motherboard does not support it.
GPU - Intel ARC B570 (if available and with good price) < 230€
At the time of writing this in Portugal, this card is not available but when this card launches here, it could be a good alternative to the RX 6600 if the pricing is right, for now, I would still recommend going to the alternative card because the card also performs a bit worse with PCIe 3.0 and CPUs with 3+ years, the Motherboard and CPU combo that was chosen here have Resizable BAR compatibility so that won’t be a problem.
GPU - AMD RX 6600 (if available and with good price) < 230€
Great card for the buck, great for 1080p, and enough for light 1440p games with textures on low because of the 8GB of VRAM but for me where it excels the most is on esports titles where it can be ideal for high refresh rate experiences, at the time of writing I was able to find on Portugal some models of this card below 230€, I would not pay much more than this.
MEMORY - G.SKILL Ripjaws V 16GB (2x8GB) DDR4-3600MHz CL18 37.90€
This is a good kit for the price, but don’t limit yourself to just this option. It’s important to explore whether you can find a better kit, especially one with higher speeds (4000MHz or more), as AMD CPUs benefit from faster memory. This can help you avoid potential bottlenecks in certain scenarios. However, be careful not to overspend on RAM if you’re working within a budget.
STORAGE - PNY CS2230 500GB Gen4 M.2 NVMe 34.90€
Fast NVME storage but limited in size due to budget, I recommend you get an extra SATA SSD with at least 1TB of capacity for your games and cold storage. It can be a DRAM-less model to keep costs down since your operating system will be installed on a much faster drive. As always, be sure to look for sales to get the best deal.
CASE - Aerocool CS-104 Micro-ATX (the cheapest possible) 22.90€
Alternatives and recommendations
On this budget you are completely dependent on the price that you buy your GPU since it’s the most expensive part by a big margin, the only component that I would change from here in case you can find the GPU below 200€ is the memory, where I would expand to 32GB because some games are starting to use 16GB for minimum specs and 32GB for recommended, and in case you want to multitask and want to have multiple web browser tabs opened and have music for example 16GB will not do the trick.
Another option is going for a B450 Motherboard that allows overclocking instead of an A520, the only reason why I did not do this is because some motherboards may need a bios update to ensure compatibility with the Ryzen 5000 series (some already have) and are still slightly more expensive than the A520s for this budget.
I would also recommend that you get some cheap and quiet fans that help the ventilation of the case at least the rear one, I decided to not include it on the parts because it’s optional but will certainly help with thermals.
Benchmarks
In the video below you will find some game benchmarks on a machine running with similar specs.
Credits to: ShadownSeven
Very good build!
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