Building my cousin a computer to get into wow, i built mine 3 years ago for $900. Was curious to see if there was a way he can build a computer for around 400/500? That will get him into playing wow. I know the motherboard and graphics card are going to be the most expensive thing
I'm a big fan of simply grabbing a
crazy bargain from Dell on a
refurbished "business" PC and dropping-in a low-power
GTX 1050 Ti card for "instant cheap gaming"... but if you're serious about custom-building a
new rig that will squeeze-out every possible bit of performance for under $500, than this is the best I could come up with:
Assumptions for the build requirements:
- ...that you can reuse/acquire an already-available OS/Monitor/Keyboard/Mouse.
- ...that generalized gaming performance is more important than specifically-targeting WoW.
- ...that you will be shipping to a ContiguousFreedomLand™ locale.
- ...that not all suppliers will require sales-tax for your state (otherwise it may exceed $500).
The result: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/QQYtZR
I trust that I'm not surprising
anyone by going with
AMD™ at this price-point... they aren't particularly elegant or efficient, but if you configure them properly then even the "cheap" ones can brutishly pound-out FPS like a jackhammer.
That last bit deserves special emphasis: their
Ryzen™ CPUs are
"uniquely-sensitive" to memory bandwidth... so once you've gotten everything running smoothly,
overclock your memory or you will have
wasted money!
Also, don't take every specific part on the list as "gospel"... by the time you read this, the
PartPicker™ algorithm will have changed some of them anyway. It's safe to trust it, but if you've got prior experience and some compatible parts then avoid any unnecessary purchases.
Good luck!
