How To Build a $550 Gaming PC in 2020!

alright guys this is a little weird because I feel like I'm waking up from a dream or something like that I am at the tail end of being sick my house is still at the tail end of being remodeled that's ongoing and the entire world is in the midst of a global pandemic and while we hope everyone is staying safe and staying home as we ride this one out you're probably going to be looking for some activities to do especially if you're stuck at home and maybe you're interested in building a computer for my part I just wanted to get back to doing something that felt a little bit more normal and what's more normal for me and my channel then building a PC this computer can be assembled for about five hundred and fifty dollars course there's new a 500 dual fan CPU cooler features quad direct contact copper heat pipes an intuitive slide and lock fan mount system that allows for valuable hate for DRAM clearance and we'll run cool and quiet with you two included ml 120 fans installation is painless thanks to the old fast retention system which supports all modern desktop sockets and it comes with Corsairs high performance xtm 50 thermal paste pre-applied click the sponsor link in the description to learn more so technically this is my monthly build for March although it's probably the beginning of April by the time you watch this video and we're building everything around the AMD Rison 5 1600 which seems like a CPU that's a couple years old this is the new Rison 5 1600 though which is technically like a 2nd gen rising processor but it only costs $85 and it's a 6 core 6 thread CPU does not have integrated graphics though so for that we're leaning on the Radeon rx 574 gig which you can find for about 120 dollars and those are the key parts that the rest of the build is built around the other important thing to point out from the echo about this system is that it is a micro ATX build that's a little bit smaller than your typical standard ATX system so if you want to spend just a few more dollars and give yourself a little bit more flexibility in the long run check out the video subscription and I'll post a full-size ATX case and a full-size ATX motherboard that you could easily swap in with the rest of these parts to get yourself a full sized ATX build all the rest of these parts will also be listed down in the video's description by the way and the nice thing though about micro micro ATX is you can get yourself a pretty small form-factor a smaller footprint on your desktop and for the case we're going with the thermal tight thermal take versa h18 @tg this is a nice little entry level it's about $55 it has a tempered glass side panel plenty of ventilation and it ships with a single fan so I've added one more fan alongside this since the case only has one fan that it comes with I'm adding a second fan for an intake at the front this is a 120 millimeter fan and you can usually find a decent one of those for around $10 here's our CPU that rise in five 1600 and again don't let the one or the 1000 series fool you this is a twelve nanometer processor which is the same that all of the 2000 series AMD processors are based on the way you can tell the difference is the AF right there before box the older version is not AF the newer version is AF and again this is linked in the video's description and it's 85 bucks currently available on Amazon for a motherboard we've got the B 450 Oris M from gigabyte this is a solid motherboard it's got decent power delivery and if you're building your own system like this and you're getting all your parts then I'm assuming that you care a little bit you care about your system and then it's not something that you just want to put together and then use and forget about it's something that maybe you want upgrade in the future so upgrade path is very much a part of this entire build you could upgrade the CPU although I think this one will be fine for you for now you could upgrade the GPU you could add more storage you could swap it into a different case if you wanted to upgrading your motherboard can be a bit of a pain in the butt if you do it in the future though so for that reason you want to start out with one that will probably last a while and the B 450 RSM is good enough that you could pop in a 3900 X or even a 39 50 X and get away with it you might not be able to overclock those higher-end AMD rising processors but it is compatible with rise in 3000 series CPUs like the 3900 and 3900 X and if you're looking at a B 450 motherboard which is technically a 2nd gen motherboard and you want to make sure it works with these newer processors the 1600 AF as well as the rise in 3000 series processors then make sure it says AMD rise in 3000 desktop ready on there that means it's going to ship with the updated BIOS that will automatically recognize those newer processors since our CPU is just 2 CPU and does not have graphics we need a separate graphics card and I think the best entry-level graphics card right now is the Radeon rx 570 this is the 4 gig version and you can find 4 gig versions of these for around 120 dollars and this specific one from gigabyte horas which has a two fan cooling solution is currently available for one hundred and twenty dollars and again linked in the description finally we're gonna need some storage and we're gonna need some memory for storage if you're on a budget you're going to want to start out with a standard 2.5 inch SATA SSD say that means the SATA connection down there as well as the SATA protocol for communication with the motherboard this is a 250 gig version that I'm using for the purposes of this build irie highly recommends a 500 gig class SSD you can find those for about 60 bucks whereas the 250 gig class ones are about around $40 so for about $20 more you can get about double the capacity that said if you're on a really limited budget you can shave about $20 off the cost of this build by going with a 250 gig model bear in mind you also have the option of going with an MDOT to nvme SSD like this one these will be faster for read and write speeds and they're kind of convenient because they just slot into a little slot on the motherboard so you don't have to do quite as much wiring up and installing that said these tend to cost a little bit more if you do have a few extra bucks to spend on the build I might recommend upgrading your main SSD to one of these realistically speaking though it's not going to affect your gaming performance so just stick with a standard SATA SSD again if you're on a budget next we're gonna need memory for that I recommend you get a 16 gig kit that'll be 8 gigs across 2 sticks and you want ddr4 and I recommend ddr4 3000 speed or ddr4 3200 speed if you want to get the most out of your processor that said Rison CPUs can be a little bit finicky about the memory that you plug in with them so that's kind of the nice thing if you go with like a 3200 speed kit for example if it won't run at 3200 speed you can often just back it off to about 3000 speed and it'll still work but if you are concerned about which memory to pick just go ahead and check the video's description and check the memory that I have linked there now lastly you're going to need a power supply and for the purposes of this build I am using this power supply but you should not use this power supply because it's 1,300 watts I'm recommending a 550 to 650 watt power supply make sure the efficiency rating is 80 plus bronze or better 80 plus gold is even a little bit better than that but power supply prices have gone up this is super super overkill for this build I am only using it because one we're on lockdown it's hard for me to get any different power supplies and this is one of the that I have that's available and second I have been recommending power supplies that have all black cables just purely for aesthetics this one does have that and it is actually kind of a nice feature of this case even though it is a very inexpensive and entry-level case it has a basement down at the bottom for the power supplies and I'm pretty sure this one will fit so those are the parts I've chosen because manufacturing has been interrupted there's a lot of up in the air questions about pricing and everything but I did just double-check all these parts or at least all the equivalent parts for all the stuff I'm installing today and they're all available and they're all available at reasonable prices still so you should be able to get everything you need for this build for about five hundred and fifty dollars if you're in the US all of that said I have my trusty screwdriver so let's get started so the first thing I've done is pulled the case out of the box and I'm not actually going to start building it yet but I always like to check the case up just to get an idea of the layout and most tower style cases are going to have a layout similar to this mother bird goes in there you're probably gonna have some intake at the front or at least space to install fans for intake at the front usually via mesh or something like that this case has an exhaust fan pre-installed at the back so we're gonna leave that where it is and then down here in the bottom is what's known as the basement the power supply is going to go down here at the back and then often you've got some extra space up here potentially for drives and that sort of thing I just pulled off the tempered-glass side panel and I do have a mouse mat set out here so if there's anything that's delicate I can set it on that that's convenient to have of course have my Phillips head screwdriver and then I pulled out a little tray so as I'm collecting little pieces like the thumb screws that hold on the tempered glass side panel or the rear side panel I can put them there and keep them at least somewhat organized your case should come with some documentation and if it's your first time building or if it's a unique case it helps to read through that there might be some details or some special features that you're not aware of or don't know how to use and then you should also get a set of screws maybe some zip ties and sometimes even a front panel speaker it's also probably worth pulling off the rear side panel at this point again just to get a look at what we're working with and again one of the reasons I like this case is because it's it's well designed again and and affordable so you've got some pass-throughs like here and here and over here for routing cables from this back area out to the front to be plugged in a very generous cut out here and that's for the back of the motherboard so if you have swap out your cooling solution and you need to remove the back plates you can access it right there rather than uninstalling your entire motherboard here's why the power supply is going to sit down at the bottom and there is a bit of dust ventilation down there it's not the nicest one but you can't at least pull that off and clean it from time to time if you need to and then you're gonna have a bunch of cables like this coming off these small ones here or for front panels we'll talk about those later then you have connections for like your USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 as well as HD audio and if these look the same and you're worried about getting mixed up don't worry they're keyed a little bit differently so you can't accidentally plug one into the wrong plug at least not unless you really really force it which you shouldn't be doing you don't need to do that with computer building at all one thing I will point out about this case is in order for the lights on the front to work it has this extra power connector that's labeled LED this is known as a molex plug this is an older-style plug but just bear in mind that it's there because you will need one of those plugs for power for that LED coming from your power supply I've just been removing everything from their retail boxes making sure everything's in order and nothing's broken and all the accessories are there where they should be and I'm ready to move on with the motherboard setup there's some stuff I want to install to the motherboard before I install the motherboard into the case that's going to be the CPU both of our sticks of memory if I was doing an MDOT to nvme SSD I would want to install that now that installs just below this heatsink by the way but we're not doing that for this build and then you'll also want your CPU cooler most Rison processors ship with a cooler in the box a wraith cooler of some variant this is the wraith stealth which is the smaller one which isn't the best cool in the world but it comes in the box so it's essentially free so it will definitely get you by do bear in mind that there's some thermal paste pre-installed on the bottom of this heat sink fan that means you don't need to buy a thermal paste and that means you don't need to worry about thermal paste application but try not to touch this if you can avoid it and just be aware that it's there once you have this out of the box so we'll start with our cpu installation first and these a.m. for motherboards come with two brackets pre-installed on either side of the cpu socket that we actually don't need for the stock coolers so I'm going to remove the top brackets and the screws but I'm going to leave the backplate on there the back plates here on the back of the motherboard this will become loose once I remove these four screws I do recommend hanging on to these pieces just keep it in a ziplock baggie and your motherboard box with the rest of the unused accessories from your build into you may need it in the future so now we can go ahead and install our CPU we're gonna remove that from the clamshell case bear in mind that CPUs at least these types of CPUs from AMD are pga or pin grid array CPUs which means there's a bunch of pins on the bottom of the CPU they're very delicate so once you have this out try not to touch the pins and definitely be very careful not to bend them they need to line up with all of the little holes in that socket in order to line them up properly we're going to look for the triangle there's a little gold triangle on the corner of the CPU you can see from the bottom as well as from the top and then there's also a little triangle on the socket itself although that's a little bit harder to see it is right at this corner down here so if you flip up this little retention arm it's at the opposite end of that where that is and at the opposite corner so with this arm raised up and that should be fairly easy to do and it should stay up once you have it up just line up the triangle corners and drop the CPU straight down into the socket it should not require any force to drop in it should just drop down in there if it's not dropping in there don't force it lift it up check your pins make sure none are bent out of alignment once it is in just drop this retention arm down and your CPU is installed next we're going to install our heat sink fan for the CPU and there's four mounting points for this it is reversible so you can install it this way you can flip it around and install it this way the main concern here is making sure that this plug coming off of it which is a four pin plug plugs into the CPU fan header which on this motherboard is right here next to the memory slots so I'm just going to install it this way and again remember there's thermal paste on the bottom and once that makes contact it's going to compress down so it has good contact between the CPU and the heatsink these are spring-loaded screws so I recommend just getting a couple turns on each one to get them threaded into that backplate and it's best to start with opposite corners and then tighten down opposite corners just a few turns at a time rotating around and swapping between the ones you're tightening in-between to make sure you put too much pressure on one side of the CPU versus the other so now those are all threaded in there so I'm just going to start giving them a couple turns each again opposite corners and these screws are basically going to bottom out once they stop turning you know they have turned enough and your cpu heatsink fan is installed but not plugged in yet again we got a route that cable over here and plug it into the CPU fan header and then of course if you're being picky about aesthetics maybe trying to find a good way to tuck through the rest of that cable away hide it and now to install our memory you might notice the memory where it plugs in on the bottom there is a little notch cut out that's not in the center that's slightly off-center and that make sure you can't install it the wrong way also we have four memory slots and two sticks of memory we want to make sure the memory is running in dual-channel mode and you should double-check your motherboard manual for this but almost always you're gonna go with every other slots and the first slots you usually populate are the ones that are farther away from the CPU once you've figured out which slots to install to just open up the caches on either side make sure that notch is lined up start the memory in the slot and then give it firm pressure on both sides and it'll snap into place with a very satisfying snappy sound so the motherboard is pretty much good to go now with CPU memory and heatsink fan installed but I'm gonna set that aside for now and switch back to case prep because I want to get everything set up and installed to the case as much as I can before I go ahead and install the memory and that's going to involve installing our big beefy power supply I pulled the motherboard IO shield out of the motherboard box that's one of the motherboard accessories that you definitely shouldn't forget about I also grabbed a SATA cable I was in there for our SATA SSD which I will also install to the case along with our 120 millimeter intake fan the i/o shield helps protect the inputs and outputs on the back of the motherboard so double check which orientation your motherboard will be installed usually these audio outs are going to be done at the bottom and then from the inside of the case we just want to snap this into place sometimes it takes a little bit of pressure but if you're having difficulties just use the butt end of a screwdriver and should pop in eventually want to install that fan up here as intake so we're gonna pull this front panel off the front panel of most computer cases not all computer cases but most can be pulled off like this grip the bottom and pull this case does have some IO up here so there's some cables that are fed back through the case I can pull these out all the way if I really wanted to get at it but I'm just gonna set that aside gently for now so I can take my fan and pop it on here in the front I keep in mind with fans that the airflow is directional if you're not sure which way the air is going to go usually the bracket is where the exhaust comes out so since the brackets there the air is going to come this way that means this is the intake some fans are nice and they put some arrows on the side that's indicating which way the fans gonna spin and which way the air is going to flow and if you buy your own extra fan it should come with its own little fan screws these are slightly different than the rest of the screws that you might use in your system so just remember to use the fan screws that came with your fan and the front panel pops back on in pretty much the same way I would like to install this SSD next and fortunately we have a couple SSD mounts here on the rear panel or a side panel or however you want to call that also there is a 3.5 inch mount that's down there at the bottom he's both installed pretty much the same way though there's these little screws with rubber spacers that you install on three of the four corners there's a fourth corner that already has the rubber grommet pre-installed there so each plug is going to set into the wider gap and then push over into the smaller gap to secure it so pretty much like that and then you push it that way to kind of pop it into place and then if you want to be thorough you can secure it from the back with an actual screw a bear in mind for this case they've labeled the Baggies these are the standoffs used for 2.5 inch SSDs and they have a separate baggie here for a 3.5 inch hard drives so if you're not satisfied with the 500 gigs or 250 gigs of SSD storage you might want to drop in a mechanical hard drive like this one if you've got an old one maybe you can format it to drop in there for some extra storage for that it's going to use the bottom mounts on the hard drive so there's four screw holes down here two on the bottom two on the top from this orientation so you'd mount those pegs through there and pretty much the same way and then it would slot into that little little mounting point area right there and the hard drive would end up being you know like right about there although to be honest it looks like it conflicts with the 2.5 inch drive back there so if you install mechanical here maybe install your SSD and upper mouth there so now it's time to drop some motherboard in and for that we want to make sure that there are standoffs wherever necessary so this case actually has mini ITX and micro ATX both label on here that's very basic for mini ITX there's only four mounting points two here and two here everything labeled with a 2 is for micro ATX but bear in mind like this is labeled with the 2 with a standoff this is labeled with the 2 without a standoff so micro ATX the mounting points on the motherboard itself are not always as universal as all that so you'll want to double check but other than the 4 here here here and here that should be for mini ITX you're probably going to have one on the top right as well one kind of midway down on the right side you might not have one on the bottom right corner you're probably going to have one here but it can also be a little bit higher than that so watch out for that and then probably one last one down here by my count that is eight so I have one two three four five six seven and eight I have a rear exhaust fan here with a cable so I want to make sure I hold that up and out of the way and then I'm gonna drop my motherboard in angling that rear i/o over here to go into the i/o panel that I installed a few moments ago and unfortunately this case does have one stand off that has a little pokey part to it I don't know the right word for that but it sticks out a little bit so once you set the motherboard in the right location it should somewhat hold it in place so you can get the screws installed and for motherboard screws the rule of thumb is to tighten them snugly but not too tight if you ever need to uninstall the motherboard you don't want to unscrew the screw and also unscrew the stand off that is beneath the screw because that is very inconvenient so all eight of my screws are now installed the motherboard is secure and I can start plugging some stuff in before I install the power supply and start plugging in like these big plugs for power I'm gonna plug in the fans so this cable already kind of tied up a little bit and route it over here we're just looking for fan headers on the motherboard or trigger usually going to be these little four pin ones there's a good one there and they're often labeled on the motherboard system fan to the four pin motherboard headers will work for either three or four pin case fans this is a three pin for example that means it's just voltage control not PWM the plug itself though has a little catch on one side and that will line up with the three pin part of the three pin header and then you'll just have one little extra pin sitting off to the side I routed the cable for this front fan back and through over here so I can plug in it as well and while we're at it we might as well plug in the rest of these front panel cables so I just passed these through from the other side of the case we've got a USB three got a USB right here these little individual ones USB three header is right there so let's go ahead and plug that in there is a notch on one side so we just want to point that up so it lines up with the plug it's kind of a large and cumbersome header but next to that we have a couple USB headers and those are labeled on the motherboard you can also double check the motherboard manual for where those are located here's our USB header again one blank pin on there so line that up with a blank pin on the plug on the board there we go audios down here on the left so we'll do the same with the HD audio okay and then there's these guys front panel connectors so note that there's an LED right here sometimes you have another system led the LED is labeled with a plus and a minus and that does make a difference for which pin outs you plug it in to reset switch and power switch do not so those are a little bit easier but most motherboards now are going to have a little diagram on the board itself that will tell you which of these pins you should plug which thing into but once again you can double check your motherboard manual for that here are the four pins on the farthest left on the top and bottom rows are for power LED and HD LED here these four pins on the left side or for power LED and hard drive LED the next four pins are for power the top two and reset the bottom two pretty much does its that is universally reviled as kind of the most annoying part of a computer build but congratulations now that's finished so we can move on I'm not ready to install my super overkill power supply and I think it should fit this is a modular power supply which is convenient because it means you can only plug in the cables that you need if you don't have a modular power supply and they all come permanently attached that's okay just take all the excess and stuff them into the bottom down here and you can hide them and tuck them away because I do have a modular power supply though I've plugged in only the cables that I need that is for the motherboard the main 24 pin power connector and the Supplemental eight pin CPU power connector for the case I needed some molex plug so I had to plug in a set of those and these come in a set of four only gonna use one of those but that's okay same thing for the SATA power plugs this is for the SSD these also come in a daisy chain of four so that's okay too I need that for that and finally since I have a discreet graphics card you may or may not need supplemental power for that depending on how high end of a graphics card you need this one has an eight pin power connector so I've got a PCI Express graphics connector for that and if you're looking at the eight pin PCI Express graphics connector and you're thinking hey that looks a lot like the CPU one how do I can tell those apart the CPU one is either going to be in a solid block of eight or possibly split into two sets of four whereas PCI Express graphics power usually has a block of six and then maybe a little two pin add-on I am facing the fan down because this case has that fan intake or a little bit of a dust filter down there for the power supply so that's that's good so usually you'll point the fan down occasionally you can point it up and then we're just going to secure it from the back of the case with four screws and these screws will usually come with your power supply power supplies almost always come with these screws sometimes the case will have them too though before I plug in all those power cords I want to plug in this cable this is a SATA data cable serial ata data cable this comes with a motherboard the plugs are the same on both sides as for the physical plug one of these is just angled 90 degrees which can be convenient in installation scenarios bear in mind as you're plugging in a SATA data cable to an SSD your hard drive that it is keyed as well it's got sort of an L shape to the bracket so it only plugs in one way this motherboard has six serial ata connection points you can see two of them facing up right here and that's where you can also see that L shape to the actual plug and then this group of four more down here and these are angled so I just got one end plugged into the motherboard fed the rest of the excess back behind the motherboard tray and this other one if I can get it to the right angle I'll plug into the SSD there we go well I'm over here I grabbed one of the SATA power plugs from the power supply these are also sort of l-shaped so again you can only plug them in one way watch out for the l-shaped plug and now our SSD has power too and now we're just taking our power cords from the power supply and sort of passing them through to where they need to be when it comes to the actual system so our 24 pin we're gonna pass through right here eight pin CPU is gonna go up to the top right corner it's multiple places we could pass this PCI Express graphics power cable but I'm just gonna send it through right here below these SATA SSD and I don't forget that led plug the molex plug for the case I can plug that in right now and you just tuck in all those excess cables up here into the front so here's that eight pin CPU plug our 24 pin four main motherboard power and all these are gonna have a clasp on one side and then there should also be a catch on one side of the plug itself back over on this side I've just been pulling any excess back through here and pushing and tucking anything that I can down into the bottom if it's your first time building in particular I wouldn't go to the trouble of zip tying stuff together and tying it all in nice and pretty yet remember there's gonna be a solid side panel here you're not gonna see any of this stuff so it's totally okay to have a little bit of a rat's nest on here and to tuck it away and out of sight out of mind right meanwhile though over on this side everything should be looking relatively neat and clean of course we do still have this cable sticking off here and that's because we have on line Pease to install and that's our graphics card you're gonna loosen this screw and then let us sort of get a little bit more space there I'm just gonna take this all the way off here we go we want the top PCI Express slot that's full length and that's closest to the CPU and then that should line up with a couple of the expansion brackets over here for micro ATX it's pretty much always going to be these top two so your most two screws and these covers should just pop out or you should be able to remove them pretty easily and then we take our graphics card PCI Express slot should go towards the motherboard IO should go towards the rear of the case again I can't seem to do this without blocking all available light but you can see the i/o is kind of a lining there and once we're aligned with this lot we should be able to give it a push and then once it snaps in there's a catch on this side of the PCIe slot that will sort of hold it in place of course we're going to want to secure it with these screws as well and finally we are going to plug in the Supplemental PCI Express graphics power to the graphics card lacus and this has another daisy chain coming off of it so if you had a graphics card that needed more than the six or the eight pin there you could I don't like these just hanging around so I'm gonna zip tie this to the cable down here to keep it a little bit tight here at this point the system is put together but we don't know yet whether it's gonna work or not hopefully it will if we did everything correctly it is considered an okay time now to reinstall the back side panel PC building superstition however dictates that if you reinstall this side panel before you do a test boot your overconfidence will be your undoing the pc building gods will frown upon you and you will have something wrong that you'll need to fix that said it is now time for the moment of truth so i'm going to plug this in flip the switch on the back and try out the power button and hey look it appears that this computer that I've just built is functional so there it is guys for about five hundred and fifty dollars in twenty twenty you can build yourself a pretty nice gaming PC with a discreet graphics card as well as a six core 12 third processor and on a platform that has an insane amount of upgrade paths because of course this is compatible with AMD's Rison 3000 series it should be compatible with AMD's rise in 4000 series that were expecting later this year but it's a little too early to absolutely confirm that but then of course you could add more memory if you wanted you could remove this graphics card and upgrade it to an RT X xx atti if you wanted to you could add more storage and then of course there's the whole peripheral situation with monitors and keyboards and mice and all that good stuff so if you guys are building a system like this please send me a tweet at Paul Hardware on Twitter let me know how it went send me a picture of your rig I love looking at systems that people have put together especially if my videos helped you out and of course I'll put links to all these parts down in the video description so check that out if you want my best advice for what parts you should choose right now if you're going to build a computer for about 550 bucks finally if you enjoyed this video and you want to help support me and my youtube channel then check out my store at Paul's Hardware net I have a bunch of shirts mugs pint glasses and other various paraphernalia that you can get it's really high quality stuff and it's the best way to help support my youtube channel thanks again for watching this one you guys and we'll see you next time [Music] you

Channel: Paul's Hardware

Views: 2,592,310

Rating: 4.9388413 out of 5

Keywords: how to build a computer, how to build a gaming pc, pc gaming, CPU, Motherboard, computer, how to, tutorial, guide, walkthrough, install, installation, setup, AMD, ryzen, AM4, socket, chipset, 1080p, 1920x1080, video games, power supply, case, memory, video card, gpu, vga, personal computer, paulshardware, budget, learning pc hardware, beginner's guide, system setup, setting up a new computer, steam, origin, live streaming, $550, Ryzen 5 1600 AF, 1600 AF, 6 core

Id: PubJxQBKBio

Length: 30min 4sec (1804 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 02 2020