Best Gaming PC Build Under $1000 in 2023

 

Best Gaming PC Build Under $1000 – November 2022

Introduction

Over the past few months we’ve seen a significant amount of product launches from the biggest manufacturers. AMD, Intel and Nvidia have all thrown their hat into the ring with new components making now an excellent now time to put a powerful gaming PC together. Whether you’re building on a budget, or you’re hungrier for high performance components, you can start building a gaming PC right now.

In today’s article we’ll be showing you how to put together the best $1000 Gaming PC Build for 1080P gaming. We’ve spent plenty of time researching the best components money can buy, while still remaining price conscious so we can ensure we sit under the $1000 mark. Below you’ll find a detailed summary of each component that went into this build along with some peripheral recommendations, and of course – benchmarks!

Main Components

CPU: Intel Core i5 12400F

The best CPU for a budget gaming PC build like this one is Intel‘s Core i5 12400F CPU, a real focal point of this build. The Core i5 12400F launched in the first quarter of this year, giving consumers the opportunity to something more mid-range but without breaking the bank. The Core i5 models (primarily the 12600K and KF SKUs) are known for bringing incredible performance to the market while still keeping costs down based on the lower core/thread count, and lower clock speed.

The i5 12400F teeters in-between the budget and mid-range markets, sacrificing some of the performance found on the i5 12600K but at a lower price. With six cores and 12 threads, this chip is certainly no slouch, and a respectable boost speed of 4.4GHz ensures fast single-threaded performance, too. Although you won’t be able to deal with heavier workloads such as video editing or 3D rendering, this CPU is perfect for 1080p and even 1440p gaming, depending on the graphics card you choose.

Key Specs:

Base Clock: 2.5GHz

Boost Clock: 4.4GHz

Base Power: 65W

Max Power: 117W

Socket: LGA1700

Core Count: 6

Thread Count: 12

Buy the Intel Core i5 12400F 

The reason we’ve chosen the 12400F over a 13th Gen CPU is because of the price. Although Intel’s new 13th-Gen CPUs have mostly remained the same in terms of price, and offer excellent performance, there are only currently three major SKUs that consumers have access to with the 13th-Gen launch. This means we don’t have the more budget oriented Core i3 and lower priced Core i5 CPUs as of yet that have been delivered from 12th-Gen.

However, we’re expecting these to be released at some point next year with incredible clock speeds and an enhanced core count compared to their 12th-Gen predecessor. For the time being, this makes the Core i5 12400F one of the best CPUs that you can pick up under $200 right now!

CPU Cooler: Deepcool AK400

To keep our CPU nice and cool we’ve picked out Deepcool‘s AK400 tower air cooler. Typically, for a budget build we would’ve used one of Intel’s stock coolers, but the Core i5 12400F requires a little bit extra to keep the CPU cool. Liquid cooling isn’t a requirement for this build, and unfortunately it would put us over budget. Choosing the right cooler for your PC build is a vital part of bringing costs down, but also ensuring you don’t get more than what is needed. Online marketing would tell you that you should buy the most expensive 360mm CPU cooler, but for a budget PC this is an entirely redundant move.

The Deepcool AK400 has a wide range of compatibility with different sockets, including LGA1700. The install is extremely simple cutting down your build time significantly, while offering a high-performance fan and heatsink tower ensuring the heat from your build is dispersed efficiently and quickly.

If you’re struggling to install this cooler into your PC, the fan can be fully detached from the tower and then reattached once the tower is mounted properly to the motherboard. The fan header also uses a traditional 4-Pin PWM style making it fully compatible with the motherboard we’ve chosen and a variety of different fan/RGB hubs, making it easier to install more if you decide to upgrade in the long run.

Motherboard: Gigabyte B660 DS3H AX.

To connect all of our components together, we’ve picked up Gigabyte’s B660 DS3H AX. This motherboard is a favourite of ours at the GeekaWhat office, so much so that we’ve given it an award for great value. This motherboard is a more barebones design utilising the B660 chipset from Intel’s 12th-Gen range. B660 motherboards are designed to bring a cheaper alternative to the market by slimming down on certain features, but still providing access to the powerful range of Intel CPUs. We’ve taken a look at a large variety of B660 boards on our website, and the B660 DS3H AX from Gigabyte takes the cake when it comes to value for money.