Best Gaming Computers & PC Builds Under $500 in 2017

PC gaming has had a great year, and with this one coming to a close, and some extra money from the holiday season in your pockets, you might be interested in gearing up for 2018 by building a new gaming PC. Not everyone can afford a crazy beefy PC, and that’s okay! You can play many of today’s games on the PC for under $500. It’s important to note that while these recommendations will not be the tip top highest-end PCs, they are fully expandable and you can upgrade them in the future. If you’re looking for something a little bit higher end, check out this article for builds and PCs under $1,000.

We’ll be covering two different builds here today. The first one is a build that you yourself can whip together from parts, and the other one will be a pre-built computer that you can grab off the shelf. Let’s get started then, shall we?

This post was originally authored by Kyle Kreoll.

Best PC Build for Under $500

The Specs:

• CPU: Intel Core i3-7100 3.9GHz Dual-Core Processor
• Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-B250M-DS3H Micro ATX (LGA1151)
• Case: Rosewill RANGER-M MicroATX Mini Tower
• Power Supply: EVGA 430W 80+ Certified Power Supply
• Memory: Crucial 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR4-2400
• Storage: Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB 3.5″ 7200RPM Hard Drive
• Graphics Card: MSI GeForce GTX 1050 Ti 4GB GAMING X 4G
• Optical Drive: Lite-On iHAS124-14 DVD/CD Burner

This build, which has a PCPartPicker link here, is $488.45 (including applicable mail-in rebates) at the time of this writing.

Let’s briefly talk about the parts you’re looking at in this build.

The Core i3-7100 is a good entry-level dual-core processor that has a technology called “hyper-threading,” which allows it to create two additional virtual cores to help it work faster.

A 1TB hard drive is pretty sizeable. If you were to go out to a store and pick up a PS4 Pro, it would come with a 1TB hard drive. You can fit lots of games on this thing, and you can add a second hard drive down the line or even a solid state drive if you’re feeling like giving your loading times a real kick in the rear.

8GB of memory is enough these days for most games, but can be easily expanded to 16GB in the future, as there are a total of four memory slots and only two being used by this build. If you plan on adding more memory in the future, be sure to add memory which matches the memory used here!

EVGA is notorious for making high-quality power supplies. You can see an in-depth build quality breakdown by jonnyGURU here. 430 watts will be enough to power this build, as well as added storage devices.

The real kicker here, though, is that GeForce GTX 1050 Ti. This card is an absolute beast for the price, capable of running many of today’s games at a good pace, and in many cases hitting over 60 frames per second.

An added bonus of this build is that it’s a MicroATX case, which means it’s pretty dang small! 6.89″ x 13.86″ x 13.78″, to be exact.

Check out the next page to see our choice for the best pre-built PC for under $500.

Best Pre-Built PC for Under $500

The Specs:

• CPU: Intel Core i5-7400 3.5GHz Quad-Core Processor
• Memory: 12GB DDR4 2400MHz Memory
• Storage: 2TB 7,200RPM 3.5″ SATA Hard Drive
• Graphics Card: Intel HD Graphics 630 (PCI-Express Slot Available for Expansion)
• Optical Drive: 8X DVD-Writer Double-Layer Drive (DVD-RW)
• Windows 10 Home Included

Do you feel uneasy about building an entire computer yourself, and would rather just plop down some money and get to playing Overwatch already? Yeah, I feel you, the newest character’s pretty sweet. This Acer Aspire desktop, currently $479.99 at the time of this writing, can get you where you’re trying to go.

The Core i5 processor included in this computer is a better processor than the one in the previous build as it is a quad-core versus the dual-core i3. This will allow you to multitask and play games that benefit from more processing cores.

The 2TB drive is surprisingly large for a computer at this price tier, giving you lots of space for all kinds of stuff. Like the previous build, you can add drives if you wish.

12GB of memory will be more than enough for most games, and benefits activities outside of gaming as well.

It’s important to note that there is no dedicated graphics card in this build. However, the Intel HD 630 is actually a reasonably okay chip as far as graphics are concerned. It will run Overwatch on Low-to-Medium at around 60 frames per second, and you can add a low-cost graphics card with ease with the included PCI-Express slot. There are computer builds offered by CybertronPC for similar prices that do include graphics cards, but you may want to avoid this route as these are made from much older parts overall (DDR3 memory rather than DDR4, for example).