The part list

Now that we have taken a look at Corsairs case we have to pick out some parts to fill everything up. Let me first say that a few of the components that I tested with don’t really match what I would buy if buying today, so I’m going to make two part lists. One showing what I would buy and what I used for testing. Other than the SSD, none of the changes would affect performance. I’m just in the middle of moving so the entire office was boxed up so there were a few things I forgot to keep out of the boxes like the stock AMD cooler for the 1200, memory, and my hard drive. Then for things like the power supply, I actually requested the CX 650W but we had a mix up and ended up with a nicer, but more expensive PSU.

So the idea here was to get a quad core CPU at the lowest possible price and the Ryzen 3 1200 is the obvious choice. The new Core i3 8100 would also be a good choice but motherboard pricing is better with Ryzen currently on the lower end with Intel only releasing the higher end Z370 chipset. So to go with that I just needed a cheap board with a little bit of overclocking support so any B350 chipset board would do. I did my testing with the Gigabyte AB350 Gaming 3, but Asus has a few cheaper options, especially if you are willing to go with an mATX board. While the Spec 04 TG is an ATX case, an mATX board fits in it fine and saves us almost $25 bucks.

Then the other big decision was the GPU but with today's market still jacked up from this spring and summers Ethereum boom the GTX 1050 Ti is really the only decently priced option. Ideally, I would want to get in with a GTX 1060 or an RX 480/580 but they are still hard to come by. Lucky for us, the Spec 04 TG has the room to expand in the future so you can do this build and they jump up to something higher end later when you can afford it and prices are hopefully better.

The rest was just about keeping costs down. I wanted a 550 watt or higher power supply but the CX 650 was priced well. If you have some room in the budget the Corsair CS-650M from Newegg would also be a good pick. It currently has a $20 rebate that makes it even cheaper and it is modular, but you have to spend a little more and wait on the rebate. For storage, I would prefer to go with an SSD but in this price range, I think having enough capacity to install a few games is more important. That said later an SSD would be my first upgrade. To keep costs low I went with a refurbished drive, it should be good enough to install your games on but a little more for a new drive might be worth it if you plan on storing anything important on it. Then last but not least we have the memory. Like video cards memory prices have been crazy this year so in order to keep things under $600, I had to go with just a single stick of 8GB memory. I went with Corsairs Vengeance LPX over some of the other brands because it is known to work well with Ryzen. Adding a second stick later would be a nice upgrade as well, but for now, 8 gigs should get us gaming.