Building a midrange gaming PC around $1,000 (NPR 180,000)

Here at Gadgetbyte, we are planning to come with a new PC build every month. We are starting this new series with a midrange gaming PC build with a budget of around $1000. This PC will cost you around a thousand bucks in the US, NPR 180,000 in Nepal, or INR 100,000 in India.

Midrange gaming PC build around $1,000

Motherboard

For this build, we went for MSI’s B560M Mortar Wi-Fi. Though not as good as the expensive Z-series, it is a decent budget motherboard with few significant upgrades over the last-gen B460M.

• Also Read: Motherboard Price in Nepal

The Voltage Regulator Module on the MSI B560M Mortar Wi-Fi can deal with the Intel Core i5-11400, which we chose for this build. In addition, it has an extended heat sink design and is Wi-Fi 6E-ready. The motherboard has four RAM slots, and it even supports RAM overclocking. You can also opt for the cheaper B560M Bazooka or the slightly more expensive B560M Tomahawk variant if the price difference in your region is not that much.

Processor and Cooling

As for the CPU, we were confused between the Intel Core i5-11400 and the Ryzen 5 3600. Both have similar specs and pricing. We ultimately decided to go with the i5-11400, as it is slightly better in gaming.

• Also Read: Processors Price in Nepal

The stock coolers that Intel provides you with its CPUs aren’t that good. Thus, we got ourselves an aftermarket air cooler from Cooler Master, the Hyper H410R. It costs around $30 and comes with a thermal paste as well.

RAM and Storage

As for the memory, we bought two 8GB sticks of XPG Spectrix D60G DDR4 RAM with 3600 MHz speed and CL14 timing. But, you should be fine with 3200 MHz RAM sticks as well.

• Also Read: RAM Price in Nepal | SSD Price in Nepal

We have been a little conservative when it comes to storage. Although our motherboard supports the newer PCI Gen 4 standards, we avoided compatible SSDs on account of them being expensive. Instead, we installed a 256GB PCIe Gen 3 NVMe SSD from PNY. To store all the games on our PC, we also installed 1TB of HDD from Seagate.

GPU

You are probably already familiar with the market situation for graphics cards these days. GPUs are scarce, and as a result, their prices have skyrocketed. This is all due to the ongoing global chip shortage, scalpers, and crypto-miners.

Luckily, we were able to get our hands on the NVIDIA GTX 1660 SUPER from MSI, which we paid $400 for. The pricing is crazy given that it is not an RTX card with dedicated Ray Tracing cores. It is still a decent mid-range card, though. However, we should have been able to buy RTX 3060 for the same price, if not for the GPU shortage.

Case and PSU

Here, we were able to secure a good deal for the Asus TUF GT301. We got this for around NPR 12,000 in Nepal. At the time of the build, it was on sale at MDComputers in India too. Asus TUF GT301 is an ATX Mid-Tower case, which comes with four 120mm fans pre-installed, has bold aesthetics, tempered glass, and all.

We went with a 600W power supply from Cooler Master. It is a non-modular PSU with an 80 Plus White certification.

Cost breakdown:

Midrange Gaming PC Build Around $1000: Gaming Performance

Midrange Gaming PC Build Around $1000: Synthetic Benchmarks

3DMark Fire Strike

7zip

Blender 3D Rendering

PassMark Rating

Unigine Heaven 4.0

Cinebench 23