Best budget gaming PC under $500 2024 – Build a cheap gaming PC

Building a gaming PC for under $500 can be fairly challenging as you need to squeeze every last dollar out of your budget to reach an acceptable level of performance. First-time custom PC builders can find the entire process a little intimidating, don’t worry, however, we’ve created this easy-to-follow guide to the best gaming PC under $500. It will ensure you have all the components you need to create the perfect entry-level gaming rig to suit your needs. We made sure that with this affordable build, you’ll still be able to enjoy a wide selection of games in 1080p.

$500 can go a long way these days. Long gone are the days of console-only options and APUs, you can now get a PC for under $500 featuring a dedicated GPU. While a lot of components that make up this computer are considered entry-level and from previous generations, we still think they hold up well today, however, don’t expect the world out of this little entry-level machine.

You can also check out our budget gaming PC page for recommendations on builds that suit a variety of lower budgets. Whilst these PCs won’t be running Cyberpunk at 4k, they do offer an excellent price-to-performance ratio.

$500 Gaming PC build of the month

This is the best $500 build you can get right now, we’re pretty sure of that, we’ve analyzed the market and pulled together a list of components along with a dedicated GPU for the low price of $500. You can expect incredible 1080p performance even in the most intensive games with a few graphical tweaks, the RX 6600 can hold its own when it comes to frame rendering. The Core i3-12100F gives you all the budget performance you need for everyday tasks, and the 4.50 GHz single-core speed gives it an edge in lighter gaming workloads.

The reason we have chosen to go with Intel for this build is we feel that Intel processors have better future-proofing opportunities and slightly better budget gaming performance. AMD is in a little bit of a weird position right now for budget gamers, as opting for AM4 will leave a hefty upgrade price for future you to worry about, but AM5 is far too expensive for the price.

How we test

We build our custom gaming PCs from scratch to make sure all the parts we recommend work well together and fit into our PC case of choice. We take all the hard work out of the equation so you get the best performance possible for the price range.

Most of the PCs we build are used in our office for everyday work, so they are subject to rigorous testing daily. While we test, we also run benchmarks to see how well our builds perform, making sure temperature levels are stable and performance is as it should be.