Black Friday Budget PC Builds! 🛑 $700 / $1000 / $1200 PC Build

All right, it's finally here. Black Friday sales in 2026. So what's the best budget gaming PC build that we can build right now? Welcome back to PC Builder. I'm Jason. We're going to take a look at the best budget GPUs that you can get right now. And yes, GPU prices are going up and they are selling out. And what's the best CPU platform to pair them with to build the best gaming PCs for Black Friday 2026 at the budget level? We'll start off with a $700 gaming PC build, We're going to go all the way up to $1,200 to maximize your FPS. Let's jump into it. This video is sponsored by TP-Link and their BE9300 Wi-Fi 7 PCIe adapter for PC. Want to upgrade your PC to blazing fast internet without the hassle of running ethernet cable? Get the BE9300 Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth PCIe adapter. Unleash the full potential of Wi-Fi 7 with speeds up to 6 gigahertz, lower latency, And improved reliability with multi-link operation. Enjoy wider signal coverage with two multi-directional antennas on a magnetized base for optimal signal reception. It's easy to install with drivers on an included USB drive. Boost your Windows 11 PC to new internet speeds with the TP-Link BE9300 today. Using the link. In the video description, obviously, to build the best budget gaming PC on Black Friday, you need a GPU, right? And unfortunately, as I've been saying in my recent videos, GPUs are selling out faster this holiday shopping season than they have ever. Basically, since I've been doing this, there's only a handful of GPUs left at the budget level. I want to quickly go through them so you can dial in. And I would not wait for any kind of sale on these. I would pick them up where they're at because prices are actually going up. Now, at the... Ultimate budget level here, if I'm looking for a brand new GPU, we will go through some used ones in just a moment. I only had about $200 to spend. I would target the ARC A750. $200, you can still pick up at Newegg. The ARC A580, about the same level of performance, slightly behind. Often you can find that for a while, like $199, $189. Right now it's out of stock at both Amazon and Newegg, but those are the ones I would look at the ultra budget level. They have XeSS 3. Pretty decent Intel upscaler on them. Overall, if you need something super cheap, I would focus there. But if you can spend just a little bit more money, I would also look at the B570 10 gigabyte. Right now, Newegg is running a pretty good deal with it. You get a 240 millimeter all-in-one liquid cooler with a digital display on it and the GPU for $289. Kaboom. And this is a really good deal right here. We'll go over the performance difference in just a moment, but you do get 10 gigs of VRAM with it. And then of course we've got the Arc B580. Now unfortunately the B580 has gone up in price. There have been from time to time some deals with this one as well, a liquid cooler deal. Right now it's not on. For $329 right now, $329, you get 12 gigs of VRAM and a relatively fast 1440p GPU as we'll go over in the benchmarks in just a moment. Just a quick check in on what your NVIDIA competition this is. Unfortunately, the RTX 5050 seems to have completely gone out of stock just about everywhere. The rare models I can find are like $600. Why would you do that when you can pick up the RTX 5060? Right now, $459 for the Gigabyte one here. It's a three-fan model. It's fairly decent. Remember, this is supposed to be a $299 MSRP GPU, but NVIDIA has massively raised prices. Unfortunately, as AMD, as we'll see in just a moment, But there are a couple of models here that you can pick up. There's a couple of different Windforce ones here by Gigabyte, a two and a three fan model. I'd probably pick the three fan model up just personally. There's a PNY one for $469 as well. I don't expect big sales on these. Maybe you'll see about a $20 savings, possibly around Black Friday, but just as likely their price could go up on them and they could even sell out. On the AMD Radeon side, the first thing is recently Hardware Unboxing, aka TechSpot, Did some additional testing on NVIDIA GPU overhead and for the CPUs that we're going to look to use. Yeah, it did make quite a bit of difference in terms of GPU performance, so you might want to consider going with like an RX 9060 non-XT. There are some now non-XT 8GB GPUs out there. It's about 15% slower than the RX 9060 XT 8GB right now over at $420 over at Best Buy. And then, of course, we've got the RX 9060 XT, 8 gigabyte. Over at Best Buy, also for $460, these are a little bit harder to come by. So how much FPS can you expect from these GPUs? Well, this is the TechPowerUp RTX 5050 review. This is the average FPS at 1440p across a wide range of titles. I believe it's 23 titles, 1440p ultra settings. These are the FPS that you should expect, possibly even faster since this review is a little bit older and there has been some time for optimizations for these drivers. Starting at the top, we've got the RX 9060 XT 8GB, about 66 average FPS, and yes, you can use the FSR 4.1 upscaler with it. The RX 9060, kind of between that and the 5060 8GB, depending on the test suite, the one they use favors NVIDIA a little bit more. So the 5060, they're pretty competitive at 66 average FPS itself. Remember, it also has DLSS 4.5. Then we've got the ARC B580 with 12 gigs of VRAM. So two thumbs up there. XeSS upscaling, which is super nice. And the A770, it's a pretty good stand in for both the A750 and the ARC B570. They're right around that same performance level. The ARC B570 obviously has 10 gigs of VRAM, so that's a little bit of an advantage. All right, let's jump into that $700 gaming PC build for 1440p or 1080p gaming. This is about as cheap as I would build a gaming PC for Black Friday right now. The good news here, I'm going to show you the CPU platform. The GPU can be switched out for any of the GPUs I just showed you to increase the performance. But let's start off with the CPU platform and why I think this is the best way to go right now. I would go with the Ryzen 5500F. You're like, 5500F? There's a 5500, there's a 5600, I'm so confused, the 5500 non-F is a disabled APU. I was recommending it when it was kind of the only game in town, and it was like $70, but right now it's about $90. This is very close to a Ryzen 5600, it's PCIe Gen 4, we're going to want that for the GPUs, the budget GPUs that we're using right now that only use half of that GPU connector, so this is going to give us the speed to get more performance out of those GPUs. And it's $104. It finally got a price cut to about its MSRP, comes with the included Wraith Stealth cooler to it. Two thumbs up all around on this one. Now for our motherboard, if we are using the 5500F, it's a relatively new CPU, I would get a motherboard that has BIOS flashback on it. That way, Make sure that we can flash the BIOS without a compatible CPU to upgrade it to use the 5500F. I like this board. It's a Gigabyte B550M Gaming X Wi-Fi 6. On sale right now, it's $154, but with the $7, $5 promo code, brings down like $79 or something really, really crazy. This has BIOS flashback. It's not on the back of the motherboard. It's actually on the bottom right hand corner. This is a nice board. It's got good VRMs to it. The reason we want B550 is it is PCIe Gen 4. A520 boards and B450 boards, while they technically will work, they will limit us to PCIe Gen 3 regardless of the CPU. So get a B550 motherboard, and if you're using the 5500F, get one with BIOS flashback. For the RAM, we're just looking for, honestly, the cheapest 16GB kit of DDR4-3200 CL16 or 3600 CL18. Those are effectively the same speeds. Right now, the cheapest name brand kit is this T-Force Vulcan kit for $109. $19 after the promo code, you do a little bit of math there, there are some other kind of more less name brand kits out there like colorful kits for about $105 if you want to save every penny. Now for the rest of the platform, these are all going to be identical. So I'm only going to go through this once I would recommend 512 gigabytes of NVMe storage. Right now this is $79 actually even cheaper than it shows on the PC Part Picker page, Which is great. And the good news here is I expect NAND storage prices to go down next year. We just want to get what we need for right now and then next year when prices go down you can pick up an additional one or two terabytes of storage. 500 gigs should get you through in the meantime. For the PC case, I like the Phanteks XT M3. $49 after rebate, we recently used it in a Ryzen 5500F build. Really nice build. We did it on a member live stream. If you want to join, you can click the join button down there and join us for our live streams every month. $49, three included ARGB fans. It looks phenomenal. And honestly, it's a really quality case. For the PSU, I would go with the Rosewill VSB6, 550 watt unit, $50, semi-modular. It's a great unit. It's C-tier rated on the PSU, SPL, PSU tier list. So if you want something that's higher rated, feel free to spend the money if you want to upgrade it. But this is honestly good enough for a budget gaming PC. So for $700, again, using the ARC A750 on this one, you're going to get a pretty performative 1440p or 1080p gaming PC build. Honestly capable of playing all the latest titles with upscaling on them. And remember, you can upgrade that GPU to any of the GPUs that we just looked at with this platform. The good news here is you can also in the future drop in a identical RAM kit and get 32 gigs of RAM or drop in a 5800X3D or 5600X3D. If for whatever reason you don't have the Ryzen 5500F in your market, what would I do? I'd probably look at the i3-14100F first. It's actually only about $10 more for this combo here than it is for the base combo for the 5500F. Now, the 5500F is going to give you more performance for sure. However, this is going to be pretty good in gaming and still going to be. PCIe Gen 4. This is going to use the i3-14100F, 13100F, or 12100F. They are all effectively the same CPU. The 14100F is just clocked faster than the other ones. And this does come with the included Intel stock cooler, which is perfectly adequate with it. But it is a four Four-core CPU, just FYI. And of course, I would pick up a B660 or B760 motherboard that uses DDR4 RAM. I like to use B760M-AYW here for $89. And that same 16GB kit of RAM that we just used for the Ryzen build, overall, this is basically going to give similar-ish levels of performance slightly below it. But if you're in a hard market, this might be something to pick up. I do want to highlight if you are able to pick something up from Newegg, they are offering some pretty amazing DDR4 combos with the Ryzen 5600X. We haven't seen that in like a zillion years basically, but it does seem like AMD and both Intel are catching up in terms of their older CPU production. Those are coming back into the market where they had completely gone off basically. So check this out. For $254, there's a white one and a black one. And yes, they do have the 5700X, but I'm going to show you in just a moment. It doesn't make any sense. There is the 5600X 3D if you want even more performance out there. But check this combo out. $254, you get the 5600X. Now, it comes with included Ray Stealth cooler that would be perfectly adequate. But on top of that, they're going to give you the Gamdias Boreas E2-410. It's basically a budget tower air cooler. It's matte black. I like the look of it. And they're going to give you a 16 gigabyte kit of DDR4 3200 CL16 RAM that's RGB. And remember, you can get the black one, you can get the white one for $254. Now, if you add all that up, basically, it comes out to three with a motherboard. Obviously, we're just going to use the same motherboard we used for the previous combo. $333. Now, just check this out. If we check in on the previous price of that combo, it was $304 with just the CPU, the RAM and the motherboard. This case, we're getting that and a cooler for only about $30 more. So check out those Newegg combo deals I'm going to link them down in the video description. It's a nice little upgrade. So let's check out this $1,000 gaming PC build that I just put together using that Ryzen 5600 combo. Now, the good news here is I've actually finished at $980. So you have a little bit of wiggle room if you're not able to pick up the combo and you just buy like the Ryzen 5600 on its own for about $150. And of course, a different kit of DDR4 RAM with it. You can pick this up right now, the 5600. For whatever reason, PC Part Picker only has the white cooler in here, but you do get an aftermarket cooler, which is really nice. We've got our B550 motherboard. We've got our RGB RAM. And then we've got, similar to the other build, we've got the Patriot P300 in here. This time I decided to go with the 6600 XT 8GB. It is a $459 GPU. It's definitely not a cheap GPU out there, but it will give us substantially more performance. And again, this is a build that we can upgrade in the future and we can kind of flex that GPU with the Ryzen 5600. I finished off with the same case and PSU for just under $1,000. This is going to play pretty much every title, and you can upscale most of them to 1440p. Gotta be one of the better builds that you can do in Black Friday, given the current situation. Now, for those of you considering an even faster GPU, and maybe you just want to put together a cheap platform, you can consider the Ryzen 5600X 3D. It's right here, Micro Center sells it on the Amazon site now, so it's available to a wide audience, at least in the US. Now, the 5800X 3D, unfortunately, while it is getting a price cut during Black Friday, It's still $320, right, down from $350, but still $320 right now. And you're only going to get about the same performance as the Ryzen 5600X 3D. Obviously, the difference here, this does not come with a cooler. So you will also have to get a cooler with it. $20 budget tower air cooler will do just fine. But you're looking at an upgrade cost here, $240 for the CPU. And I put together just as a quick comparison, it's now $435 if we throw in a Thermalright Assassin X, a budget tower air cooler, along with our $220 Ryzen 5600X 3D, the same motherboard and the same RAM kit that we were previously using that are relatively cheap, $435 total. Now, if you compare that to what we just paid for a Ryzen 5600X combo by itself with the motherboard and the cooler, it's about a $120 upgrade. So I would recommend. Put the $120 in your GPU first before you do this, but if you do go with an even faster GPU, like a 7900 GRE or something like that, you will see some level of performance gain. So if we throw the 5600X 3D combo with that same cooler, the motherboard, and the RAM into our previous build with the RX 6600 XT 8GB, it would basically give us a cost of $1,082.92. Now you can see here, I would definitely recommend Putting that money into my GPU, going up to something like a 6600 XT, maybe 16 gigabyte, although I know those are more like 650 to almost $700 right now. See if you can increase that GPU first, but if you can't and you do want to get something faster for right now, this is one option. Those of you wondering what an AM5 build would look like, basically as cheap as possible. If we use a Ryzen 7600X with right now $164, although you can of course pick up the 7500F OEM tray version. It just comes in a clamshell with no box to it, no cooler for $113. I know I suggest that in a recent video. I know some of you were less enthusiastic about that idea, but if you want to put on the table again, it will save you $40 and give roughly the same performance level. You can also pick up like the ASRock B650M-X, $99 right now. Wi-Fi version for some reasons, $20 or $30 more. It doesn't seem worth it. I would pick this up instead. You can always upgrade the Wi-Fi later. And then, of course, right now, we all know. 16 gigabytes of DDR5 RAM is relatively expensive, but right now, $250 for an RGB kit looks super nice as well. And this is a kit that I use all the time. Relatively easy to clock up on it. Overall, that'll get you right to that $1,176, so basically about $100 more than the 5600X 3D build that we looked at with the 6600 XT 8GB here. Again, I'm recommending that you put that additional money into your GPU with a DDR4 platform instead, but for those of you just hell-bent to get on DDR5, here you go. All right, all the builds that I've just gone through are linked down in the video description. You can check those out for current pricing and availability. I'm also gonna link our DDR4 and DDR5 Newegg RAM Combo Kits there, or Global RAM Combo Spreadsheet. Check those out for the best deals that I'm finding right now. If you got value out of this video, please give it a like. 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