The Best Gaming PC Build for Under $1,000

Putting $1,000 towards a custom built gaming PC is going to lead to a near high-end system. Essential components have become increasingly affordable over the years, allowing our dollar to return better performance. With that said, the following is the best build just under $1000.

All prices of the following components are updated as of September 28, 2016 and are in US Dollars. Any mail-in rebate offers are not included in the stated price. Tax and shipping costs are not included in the prices as they may vary. Base prices are subject to change.

Graphics Card - EVGA GTX 1070 SC 8GB ($399.99)

At the $1000 price point for a build, the prospect of getting a GTX 1070 is too good to pass up. The EVGA GTX 1070 superclocked (SC) can be found for $399.99. This is slightly above MSRP, but EVGA’s superclocked series offers clock speeds above stock, an upgraded cooler, and performs extremely well against competitors.

This particular model is fit with the ACX 3.0 dual fan cooler to keep your temperatures in check. According to tests by Guru3d, their EVGA GTX 1070 SC idled at 37C and only went up to 72C under load. By comparison, their reference GTX 1070 idled at 30C but hit 76C under load. Considering that the SC model is overclocked out of the box, the ACX 3.0 cooler proved its worth.

Its 8GB of VRAM will give you the opportunity to crank in-game quality and texture settings to their max. This SC model comes out of the box with a core clock speed of 1594 MHz and a boost clock of 1784 MHz, compared to the reference model's 1506 MHz core and 1683 boost clocks.

The GTX 1070 is hands-down the best graphics processing unit (GPU) at this price range. It outperforms Nvidia’s last generation beast, the 980 Ti, and all of AMD's current offerings. There’s no reason not to go with the GTX 1070.

Processor - Intel i5 6500 Quad Core 3.2 GHz LGA 1151 ($204.99)

Choosing the best central processing unit (CPU) while staying under budget was challenging. Your choice of CPU is contingent upon the motherboard and CPU socket you choose. However, we were able to squeeze in an Intel 6th generation Skylake i5 processor; the i5 6500.

Intel’s LGA 1151 socket is their latest iteration and the upcoming 7-series of CPUs, scheduled for 2017, will use the LGA 1151 socket. This gives users a path for upgrade. However, the i5-6500 packs more than enough for gaming performance today and the coming years.

The CPU comes with thermal paste and a cooler, which will be sufficient to keep temperatures reasonable under load. Since the i5-6500 cannot overclock through standard means, a higher end CPU cooler is not mandatory. If you wish to keep your temperatures down in the future, there are great budget cooler options. I would suggest the Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus for around $30, but that has to be considered outside of our current build.

An alternative to Intel CPUs at this price range would be AMD's FX-8350 8-core 4.0GHz CPU. While the AMD CPU may look faster on paper, comparing clock speeds and core count across different architectures is akin to apples and oranges. In a pure gaming sense, Intel's faster and more efficient individual cores push it well beyond the performance of its AMD counterpart. There will be little to no bottlenecking between our CPU and GPU, especially when we approach higher resolutions and higher quality settings.

Motherboard - Gigabyte GA-H170-GAMING 3 ATX LGA1151 ($84.99)

We went with Gigabyte’s GA-H170-GAMING 3 motherboard. It’s one of the more affordable ATX motherboards. User reviews indicate that it's more reliable than its cheaper Micro-ATX counterparts.

Gigabyte is known for its strong physical durability, so nothing is going to snap or break off when putting your components together. This model is an LGA1151 socket, supporting Intel's most recent 6th-gen Skylake CPUs. As stated previously, the option to move to the 7th-generation Kaby Lake CPU is open to you.

The Gigabyte GA-H170 GAMING 3 supports SLI or CrossFire, so the option to add an extra video card is available. Four DIMM slots for RAM and running dual channel is standard for ATX motherboards. It also features 6 SATA 6GB/s ports, 7.1 surround sound onboard, and four USB 3.0 ports.

The motherboard is at the core of your system, so building off of a high quality one with adequate features is imperative even though it does not directly impact in-game performance.

Memory - G.Skill Ripjaws V Series 8GB (2x4GB) DDR4-2133 288-pin ($40.99)

G.Skill has a lock on the budget memory market, offering several configurations for every modern motherboard. The Ripjaws series also comes with neat heatsinks.

We decided to go with a two 4GB sticks for two reasons. Games today still do not require more than 8GB to run, and two sticks will allow for a dual channel configuration.

Our motherboard of choice has four DIMM slots, so if you need to jump to 16GB, that option is available. If you run several programs at the same time or in the background that may be resource hogs, 16GB is something you will want to consider. Luckily, another 8GB of RAM is only going to cost you about $40.

If you happen to go with a different motherboard, pay attention to the pin count for compatibility. Our Gigabyte GA-H170 takes 288-pin DDR4-2133 memory.

Storage Drives - PNY CS1311 120GB 2.5” SSD, WD Blue 1TB 7200RPM HDD ($44.99, $49.99)

A solid state drive (SSD) is a must in a mid-high end system. Here we went with a 120GB SSD from PNY. This drive can serve as the boot, but has enough room to load a few of your most demanding or frequently used programs; perhaps the game you're focusing on for an extended period of time, your favorite multiplayer game, or your most intense photo/video editing program.

The PNY CS1311 120GB SSD has a track history of reliability. There are technically faster SSDs on the market, but the difference will be negligible for our purposes. SSDs are very fast regardless. This particular model sports 550 Mb/s read speed and 510 Mb/s write speed. At $45 for an SSD, it’s an incredible deal.

A 1TB hard drive is recommended for everything else, since most of us need some sort of mass storage. The Western Digital Caviar Blue will give you the best bang for your buck at around $50. This is your standard 7200 RPM hard disk, and it has the reliability of most Western Digital drives.

Power Supply - Corsair Builder 500W 80+ Bronze Certified ($49.99)

A power supply will make or break your system, choosing the right one is crucial. With our single video card, two-drive configuration, the 500W Corsair Builder series PSU is sufficient to power our system.

According to PCPartPicker.com, our hypothetical system will consume around 340W at peak power draw. You never want to cut close to your peak wattage so it’s smart to have some extra room for safety and overclocking, if you wish to go that route.

A slight downside is that the Corsair Builder is not modular, meaning cable management will be challenging. Extraneous wiring will have to be cleverly tucked away or left hanging around somewhere in the case. Cable ties and smart work around your case should solve the problem.

Case - Deepcool Tesseract ATX Mid Tower Case ($33.99)

We simply wanted a case that works and gives us sufficient cable management options. The Deepcool Tersseract gives us that while being cheap and stylish. At about $34, this case is ideal for our budget and build.

We went with the slightly more cost-effective white model. The Tesseract is sleek, but also has all the expected features of a quality case; options for case fans (includes one rear fan), tool-less install, a rack for storage disks, a front USB 3.0 port, cable management options, and enough room to sport that new beast of a graphics card that'll go in it.

Operating System - Microsoft Windows 10 64-bit Home Edition ($85.70)

There’s no reason to not go with Windows 10 64-bit. Around $100 for a fresh operating system (OS) is par for the course, but a few shops may give a small discount.

Windows 10 is going to give you access to games available through Xbox cross-buy (think Forza Horizon 3 and Gears of War 4). Windows 10 doesn’t stray too far away from Windows 7 (the previous flagship OS) in terms of functionality and program compatibility.

Performance

Since the system could not be built at the time of writing this article, performance data can only be extrapolated from those who have tested the hardware. To get a rough idea just how powerful this machine will be, check the following articles:

Guru3d.com: EVGA GTX 1070 SC Review

TechPowerUp.com: EVGA GTX 1070 SC Review

EuroGamer.net: Intel Skylake Core i5-6500 Review

Conclusion

Our grand total before shipping is $995.62. As stated previously, no mail-in rebate discounts, shipping costs, or taxes were included in the pricing of these components. All parts, except for the Windows 10 OS, were chosen to be purchased on Newegg.com.

It was critical that we paired a 6th-gen Skylake i5 CPU with a GTX 1070 for this build. As a consequence, concessions were made with other parts in the system such as storage space of drives, RAM capacity, and opting out of a modular power supply. We also tried to squeeze in the slightly more powerful and overclockable Intel i5-6600k CPU, but the pricing didn't work out making it too difficult to stay under budget. The i5-6500 is no slouch, though.

The objective was to build the strongest gaming PC under $1,000 and we guarantee that this setup completes that objective.