If your like me your always on a tight budget and want to get the most value for your money. This gaming computer build guide will be about building the best small gaming computer system on a $500 budget. Goals for this build guide are to be under $500, small form factor and capable of
gaming current games at medium to high settings.
When building a system you will hear many people talk about future proofing. In my opinion there is no such thing. No gaming system build is going to stay capable of playing the most recent games 5-10 years down the road at high quality settings. When I build my systems I find components that give the best performance for the money. Why get the top of the line Intel Core I7-6700K or GeForce GTX TITAN X now for not that big of performance gain over some of the other choices. Unless you are that person that just has to have the latest greatest stuff being the gaming FPS / bench mark king and have the money to do it.
CASE
I picked the Thermaltake Core V1 Mini ITX Cube Gaming it is compact and cheap at $48.96. One of the main goals for this build is to be small gaming computer system. This case comes in at only H 10.9″x W 10.2″ x L 12.4″ perfect for an M-ITX gaming build. It has 2x USB 3.0, 1x Headphone, 1x Mic Front Ports, Internal Bays: 2x 3.5″, 2x 2.5″ 1 x 200mm front case fan included, 2 x 80mm fan mounting points in the rear. At this size you could easily put your PC almost anywhere.
This system would also make for a good home theater PC (HTPC) or media center computer. The only draw back is if you are looking to play DVD or Blu-rays this case has no place to install a drive to play them. But who uses those old things anyway in the age of online streaming from Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, Netflix and the other streaming services out there.
CPU
The Intel 3.70 GHz Core i3-6100 is the CPU i choose at $104.99. It is only a dual core with 4 threads running at clock speed of 3.7Ghz but should handle all the current games. You don’t have to have the top of the line cpu to game. Most game titles don’t take advantage of extra cores. GPU is far more important to your gaming performance. The Intel Core i3 should hold up good to all the current game titles.
MOTHERBOARD
This MSI H110I PRO Mini ITX DDR4 LGA 1151 is a budget motherboard at $74.99 but should do just fine for a small budget build system that wont be overclocked. Its Mini ITX form factor. It supports up to 32GB of DDR4 2133 RAM with 2 slots. It has one PCI-E 3.0 X16 slot, 1 M.2, 4X SATA 6Gb/s, onboard audio and 1 Gigabit Ethernet port. The board has a M.2 slot so if you want to add a SSD onboard into it later on you can.
RAM
(Updated 1 Dec 2016)
For the RAM i went with an Kingston HyperX FURY Black 8GB 2133MHz DDR4 Crucial 8 GB DDR4 2133 288-Pin. Cost is $44.99. This is only a single stick of RAM. It will run a little faster in dual channel but this is a budget build. This leaves the option add another 8GB stick later on for a total of 16GB. If you know you wont want more than 8GB RAM in the future then go ahead and buy this Kingston HyperX FURY 8GB Kit (2x4GB) 2133MHz DDR4 dual channel kit.
GRAPHICS CARD
(Updated 1 Dec 2016)
I picked the ZOTAC GeForce GTX 1050 Ti mini 4GB. Updated since many new graphics cards have been released since i wrote this blog. This graphics card uses NVIDIA’s latest GPU architecture Pascal.
The current price is $139.99 this eats up almost 1/3 of the budget but is the key to a gaming rig build. It will fit in the case without any clearance problems. This is not a top of the line graphics card but is the best at the $150 price range. It will be able to play most current games at high to medium settings at 1080p and get 30fps+. If you bump up to 4K resolution, you will have to drop the setting to medium to low on most current games to get playable frame rates. I recommend staying at 1080p for this gaming PC build. If you want something better and you have extra cash, it would be best spent on a better graphics card. Check out my optional graphics cards selections near the bottom of the page.
HARD DRIVE
Yes, I know the Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 500 GB 7200RPM SATA 6Gb/s at $37.45 it isn’t a SSD or a huge storage drive but this is a budget build. This would be another thing that you may want to spend the extra money and get an SSD in addition to this drive or a 1 TB drive. See my optional drive picks at the bottom of the page.
Power Supply
The power supply I choose a EVGA 500 W1 80+, 500W. Cost is $36.44. It is 500 watts and 80+ certified. If you go with a higher end graphics card then the GTX 950 you might need to get step up to a bigger power supply.
Optical Drive
The case does not have a 5.25 bay to install one. You will have to load your OS on a USB flash drive to install it or if you have a old DVD drive laying around you can just plug it in to the computer temporarily to install the OS from CD/DVD.
OS
I’m not including a Operating System in the price of this build. It will be up to you to select the operating system you want. I still use Windows 7 Pro but I am sure a lot of you will want to get the latest Windows 10 64 bit. It has been claimed that Windows 10 has some performance gains over 7 but I have not tested it out in benchmarks or real world gaming yet.
A free option is running SteamOS which is a Linux based OS turning this small gaming system build into a Steam Machine. I can’t offer insight into the SteamOS because i have not had a chance to try it yet.
$500 Intel Small Gaming System
(Prices and parts updated 1 Dec 2016)
| Type | Component | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Case | Thermaltake Core V1 Mini ITX Cube | $48.96 |
| Motherboard | MSI H110I PRO Mini ITX | $74.99 |
| CPU | Intel 3.70 GHz Core i3 6100 | $104.99 |
| RAM | Crucial 8 GB DDR4 2133 | $44.99 |
| Graphics Card | ZOTAC GeForce GTX 1050 Ti mini 4GB | $139.99 |
| Hard Drive | Seagate Barracuda 500 GB 7200RPM SATA 6Gb/s | $37.45 |
| Power Supply | EVGA 500 W1 80+, 500W | $36.44 |
| Computer | 2016 Budget $500 Gaming Computer | $487.81 |
The total cost of this small gaming computer system is $501.74 just barely over the $500 budget. This system will perform very good considering the budget of this build.
Another good use for this would be as a HTPC media center system. Even though I think they are obsolete (Why HTPC Media Center Computers are Dead).
Feel free to comment at the end of this post and let me know what you think of this 2016 budget $500 gaming computer system build. If you have recommendations for future PC builds let me know what you would like to see.
Recommended/Optional Components and Accessories
Below are some options for some different parts to upgrade the system. These will of course will push it over the $500 budget but if you’re a hard core gamer you may want to upgrade a few things.
Fans
I highly recommend getting 2 of these ARCTIC F8 80mm Case Fans to mount in the back of the case to help with the cooling this system down. These are rated for 31cfm at 22.5dba so the are quite and move a decent amount of air.
Graphics Cards
If you are looking for a slightly better GPU I would go with the Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1060 Mini ITX OC 3GB over the XFX AMD Radeon RX 470 4GB. The cost is about the same right now little more but does outperform the GTX 960. But i know some of you that are reading this have a brand preference AMD or Nvidia so pick which ever best suits you.
Hard Drives
| $110.34 – Samsung 850 EVO – 250GB – M.2 Internal SSD |
| $135.99 – Samsung 850 EVO – 500GB – M.2 Internal SSD |
| $49.99 – WD Blue 1TB SATA 6 Gb/s 7200 RPM 64MB Cache 3.5in |
I put a 256GB and 500GB SSD m.2 drives on here. The nice part about M.2 is your drive is that it mounts on your motherboard with no wires or finding an open drive bay to mount a regular 2.5 SSD drive. I highly recommend getting an SSD because of the speed which your system boots, applications load times and games loading is much quicker than a standard spinning platter hard drive.