What you get for $400
For $400, you have to curb your expectations of what you want this PC to do. For gaming, you can expect around 30FPS in 1080p and 60 in 720p, which is perfect for e-sports titles, but not so much the AAA story-driven games. There have been a lot of compromises made when trying to confine to this tight budget, one of the most notable forfeitures is the dedicated GPU. With that being said, we do have a very efficient CPU to do all of the heavy lifting, the Ryzen 5 5600G is one of the best value gaming APUs on the market and is perfect for our purposes. We have paired the Ryzen 5600G with ultra-fast DDR4 3200MHz memory, as the 5000 series Ryzen core communication speed is directly tied to RAM speed, giving the Ryzen 5 a fighting chance.
Performance
This $400 gaming PC build is expected to hit the 30 – 60 FPS mark in 1080P, and 60FPS and over in the lower 720P resolution. This isn’t ideal for those resource-heavy AAA titles, but it’ll do just fine for those E-sports players who need every drop of FPS possible. To be frank, you’d get much better performance out of our $500 PC build if you just saved up the extra $100.
$400 PC vs Console
In reality, there’s no way that this $400 PC can compete with the likes of a PS5 or an Xbox Series X in gaming workloads. Consoles are incredibly optimized and the games that are made for them are tailor-made to the hardware that these consoles carry, and we can’t compete with that level of optimization. However, with our $400 build, you can use it as, well, a PC. Surf the web, create a website, develop a game, do some software development, all things you can’t do (or would be a pain to do) on a games console.
If you want a very capable home server or media PC, then this $400 PC build would be a great consideration against a console. you can still do some light gaming until you save up enough money to pick up a 6600 XT for example, and then you’re off to the races. But if we’re talking of exclusively gaming, there is much more value to be found in a console.
Can you overclock on a $400 budget?
The short answer is yes, you’re probably overclocking right now and you don’t even know it. Do you know how you have to enable XMP or DOCP to make the most out of your memory? That’s overclocking. If you’re thinking about pushing the 5600G beyond its limits, then we would suggest overclocking the GPU component rather than the CPU component. Doing both will produce too much heat, and give you diminishing returns. Remember, you have to increase your cooling capacity if you want to overclock your CPU, which will cost extra for a better cooler.
Should you buy second hand?
Buying second-hand can be a great way to save money if you’re looking to make your budget go as far as possible. There are only a couple of things we recommend you stay away from when selecting second-hand parts, these are HDDs and Power supplies. There’s still a lot you can save when opting for second-hand components on a $400 budget. Ryzen 7 5700X CPUs go for around $130 right now, along with RTX 1650s that go for around $100. Even if you built the PC now, and used second-hand parts to upgrade the system later down the line, you’d still be saving money.
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