Build a budget gaming PC for under £750 thanks to these Black Friday deals
A full-size system with plenty of upgrade potential.
We've already covered a RTX 4070 Super mini gaming PC for £1300 based around Black Friday discounts, but what if you want something even more affordable - something that doesn't require paying a premium for an extra-small case, power supply and motherboard? Here, we're going to achieve a powerful enough machine for 1080p gaming at high settings, yet spend less than £750.
The starting point for this build is the extremely affordable Ryzen 5 5600X, which has been reduced down to £99 - a great value for a six core, 12 thread Zen 3 processor with PCIe 4.0 support. It's got ample power for entry-level gaming and general productivity, and the inclusion of the Wraith Stealth cooler in the box means we don't have to spend any time, thought or budget on a third-party CPU cooler.
| Category | Product | Deal | Was |
|---|---|---|---|
| CPU | AMD Ryzen 5 5600X (with Wraith cooler) | £98.63 | £113.80 |
| GPU | PowerColor Fighter RX 6750 XT | £282.52 | £300 |
| Motherboard | Gigabyte B550 AORUS Elite AX V2 ATX | £100.98 | £144.70 |
| RAM | Corsair Vengeance 16GB DDR4-3200 CL16 | £28.98 | £42.28 |
| SSD | WD Black SN770 2TB | £92.99 | £102.99 |
| PSU | Corsair RM850e (Used - Like New, Amazon Resale) | £69.05 | £86.32 |
| Case | NZXT H5 Flow (2024) | £69.98 | £89.99 |
| Total | £743.13 | £880.08 |
Opting for a Ryzen 5600X means building on the venerable AM4 platform, with B550 motherboards offering the best balance of features and affordability. Luckily, there are options aplenty with on-board Wi-Fi and solid I/O for around £100-£120. One great option is the Gigabyte B550 Aorus Elite V2 which costs £101 from Ebuyer and comes with Wi-Fi 6, support for PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs and speedy USB-C. That means we need some DDR4 RAM, and this 16GB kit of Corsair Vengeance DDR4-3200 CL16 is just £26 from Amazon. That hits the sweet spot for price to performance, and gives plenty of headroom for gaming and most content creation workloads too. The WD SN770 2TB NVMe SSD for £93 from Scan provides solid capacity and excellent performance with up to 5150MB/s reads and 4900MB/s writes, respectively.
As for the case, I'm leaning towards the NZXT H5 Flow, which provides solid room to build in, a clean aesthetic and handy extras such as decent front I/O with wider cable channels to make it easier for ham-fisted fellows like me to route cables to a reasonable standard. It also comes with two 120mm fans pre-installed for convenience, too. From Amazon, it's £70 for Black Friday. The Corsair RM850e PSU might be overkill for what's inside, but provides a reliable, fully modular 80+ Gold unit with lots of headroom for upgrading, and for £69 from Amazon with the Amazon Resale 20 percent reduction, it's hard to turn down.
The piece of the puzzle that's quite difficult to decide on is with my GPU choice. I'm aiming for something in the £250-£300 range to keep this build at around £750 excluding Windows, and I've narrowed it down to either the £283 AMD RX 6750 XT, or £240 Intel Arc A770 16GB model. Both cards have their merits, with the Arc A770 packing in an extra 4GB of VRAM, better RT performance and support for AV1 encoding, while the RX 6750 XT performs better and benefits from better driver support. With these reductions in mind, the £336 (w/ code CHILLY5) RX 6800 also becomes a viable choice in and around that budget, which betters both of these cards.
Building this PC is probably what's going to occupy my time over the festive period, and I'm not totally scared at all! I shall return later on with a build update to see how it all runs.