Budget Gaming PC Build: Full Parts List and Build Guide

Building your own gaming PC is the best way to get more performance for less money, and it’s way less scary than it looks. Every part here was chosen with one question in mind: what gets the most frames per dollar right now, without dead ends when you upgrade later?

The goal: smooth 1080p gaming in modern games, on the cheapest set of parts we could find that are all still in stock and all actually work together. We checked availability on 22 September 2026, and we have to be honest about the timing: memory and storage are in the middle of a historic price spike, because the companies that make DRAM and NAND are pointing their output at AI data center hardware instead of desktop RAM. Tom’s Hardware’s RAM price tracking has been following the climb all year, and Framework has warned buyers it keeps going. That changes what “budget” means in 2026, and it changes some of the advice further down.

This is a researched build, not a build we assembled ourselves. Everything below comes from maker spec sheets, retailer listings, published reviews and what owners report. Where a number comes from, we say so.

These are the frame rates this hardware is known for, gathered from published benchmarks of the same parts. Where the numbers come from is listed under the table, and they’re not our own measurements unless we say so.

Sources: the GamersNexus Arc B580 review and the TechSpot Arc B580 re-review. Read those numbers as a ceiling, not a promise: both sites benchmark graphics cards on a very fast CPU so the card is the only limit. A Ryzen 5 7600 will land close to them in scenes where the graphics card is working hardest, and a bit below them in games that lean on the processor.

In plain English: esports and older games run far above 60fps and you will not think about settings at all. Big modern single-player games land somewhere in the 45 to 90fps range at 1080p depending on how heavy they are, and the heaviest ones need you to turn something down. Turn down shadows, volumetric fog and ray tracing first, in that order; they cost the most frames and you notice them the least while you’re actually playing.

1. Prep your space. Clear a big table, grab a screwdriver, and keep every manual nearby.
2. Install the CPU on the motherboard while the board is still out of the case. Line up the marked corner and don’t press on the pins.
3. Install the RAM. The motherboard manual shows which slots to use first for two sticks. This board only has two slots, so both sticks go in.
4. Install the SSD in the M.2 slot and screw it down.
5. Mount the CPU cooler. The Wraith Stealth that comes with the Ryzen 5 7600 has thermal paste already applied to its base, so don’t wipe it off and don’t add more.
6. Put the motherboard in the case on the standoffs, with the rear I/O shield lined up. On this board the shield is already attached.
7. Install the power supply and run the main cables before the graphics card gets in the way.
8. Install the graphics card in the top full-length slot and connect its single 8-pin power cable.
9. Connect the front panel cables (power button, USB, audio). The manual has the pin map.
10. First boot. Enter the BIOS, check that everything is detected, turn on the memory profile (EXPO or XMP), and turn on Resizable BAR, which Intel says Arc cards need for full performance.
11. Install the operating system and drivers, in this order: Windows from a USB stick, then the AMD chipset driver, then the Intel Arc graphics driver, then Windows Update.

For gaming, the GPU does most of the heavy lifting. If you’re short on money, save on the case or storage before you save on the GPU. That is truer than ever in 2026, because the parts that have gone up most in price, memory and storage, are exactly the parts where spending less costs you the least gaming performance. Cutting from 32GB to 16GB of RAM or from 2TB to 1TB of storage costs you very little at 1080p. Cutting the graphics card costs you frames in every single game.

A bad power supply can take other parts down with it. Pick a reputable model with enough wattage for your graphics card. Two rules of thumb: check the card maker’s own recommendation (ASRock says 650W for this B580), and pick a unit with a long warranty, because a 5- or 10-year warranty is the maker telling you what they expect it to survive. Leaving headroom also means the supply runs in its quiet, efficient middle range instead of flat out.

Used parts can save a lot of money, especially graphics cards. Buy from sellers with good ratings and a return policy, and test the part as soon as it arrives. Graphics cards are the one part where used genuinely makes sense: they are easy to test (install a driver, run a game for an hour, watch the temperatures), and eBay’s buyer protection gives you a way out. Used power supplies are the opposite, because capacitors age and you cannot see it. And note that with memory prices where they are, second-hand RAM has become weirdly good value for the first time in years.

A good power supply and a motherboard with spare slots make it easy to upgrade later. The clearest upgrade path for this build: socket AM5 will keep taking newer Ryzen chips, so the processor can be swapped without replacing the board, and the 650W supply has an ATX 3.1 PCIe Gen5 connector ready for a future graphics card. The weak point is the two RAM slots, which means a memory upgrade is a replacement rather than an addition.

Right now, often not. This is the one year where the usual answer flips. Big system builders buy memory, storage and graphics cards in bulk on long contracts, so they are absorbing price rises that individual buyers get hit with immediately, and Tom’s Hardware’s own build guide currently says a prebuilt is usually the smarter buy because of the RAM and SSD shortage. Building still wins on two things: you know exactly what is inside, and you can upgrade any single part later, which many prebuilts make hard with proprietary boards and undersized power supplies. Check both on the day you buy.

Guides written for beginners generally suggest setting aside most of a day, roughly four to eight hours, with the assembly itself being the fast part. Experienced builders report two to three hours. What eats the time is reading the manual before each step, the tiny front-panel connector pins, redoing your cable routing, and installing Windows and drivers afterwards. Don’t rush it, and don’t start it an hour before you want to play something.

Often, yes: storage drives, cases, and sometimes power supplies can carry over. Check that each part is compatible and still healthy first. Two warnings specific to this build. DDR4 memory from an older PC will not work, because socket AM5 is DDR5 only, and the slots are physically different. And an old power supply is the riskiest thing to reuse: if it is more than about seven years old, or you don’t know its history, replace it. An old SATA or NVMe drive, on the other hand, is free storage and worth keeping.

Yes, at 1080p, but not maxed out. GamersNexus recorded the Arc B580 averaging 46fps at 1080p High in Black Myth: Wukong on their test bench, and 51fps in Starfield at Ultra. That means the heaviest games in the world are playable on this build with a couple of settings turned down, while the games most people actually play the most, competitive shooters and older titles, run several times faster than that.