Trying to build yourself the best $800 gaming PC possible? With that kind of budget you can easily build a powerful gaming PC that won’t need any upgrades for a long time! This $800 build is fully loaded with an Intel i5 11400F, a Radeon RX 6500 XT, 16GB of DDR4 RAM and 500GB of SSD storage, just to make sure you don’t fall short anytime soon!

All of that hardware gives you a seriously awesome custom gaming PC that will help you destroy your competition without doing the same to your wallet! It’ll easily be able to handle AAA games in 1080p at 60fps or better and it’ll even give you decent 1440p performance as well!

A budget of $800 is going to get you the core parts you need to build a really solid mid-level gaming PC with a lot of gaming potential – one that won’t need any kind of upgrades for quite a while. This beast won’t go obsolete for at least a couple of years, which is saying something when you’re talking about tech today. 

Have a question? Ask me in the comment section or look at our PC build FAQ. 

Complete Build Breakdown

When you’re picking parts to build yourself a gaming PC there are a lot of considerations to keep in mind. Do you plan on upgrading it in the future? Do you just want what you can get now, or do you want to eventually overclock your processor? Each path potentially poses a lot of new considerations if your goal is effectively balancing price vs performance.

But, why do all that when you could have me do it for you?!

Case: The NZXT H510i is an good mid-tower ATX case that takes everything the S340 did well and improves almost everywhere. It comes with everything you’ll need right out of the box, including the mounting hardware you’ll need and 2x 120mm fans. It can easily support custom or AIO water-cooling setups with radiators up to 280mm.

That all being said, there are lots of other cases that would work great for this build, so to make sure that your build is really your build, make sure you pick the case that you like best!

CPU & Cooler: Intel’s i5 11400F is a 11th gen processor that should handle pretty much anything that you throw at it! It has 6 cores and 12 threads, a base clock speed of 2.6 GHz and a max clock speed of 4.4 GHz which is actually faster that the popular Ryzen 5 3600. 

This CPU is also overclockable so you could easily squeeze out even more performance if you don’t mind spending some time testing. If you don’t want to overclock, check out this article which gives you 3 easy  ways to make your pc faster without overclocking. 

This CPU comes with a decent CPU cooler if you’re not pushing your CPU too much or overclocking. Upgrading to a larger air cooler would be recommended if you’re going to overclock.

Motherboard: The ASUS Prime B560M-A is an good mATX option for a Intel-based build. It gives you support for all of the features we need with room to expand down the line, including 4x SATA ports, multiple case fan headers, 8x USB ports, 4 slots for DDR4 RAM, integrated audio, a built-in ethernet controller, and even 2 M.2 slots. 

Graphics Card: For the GPU, we’re going with the XFX Speedster QICK 210 Radeon RX 6500XT that offers a good price vs performance ratio.

This may seem like a lower end card for a $800 pc build, and it would be if this was 2020, but over the last couple of years GPU prices have sored and it can be hard to get your hands on a decent GPU for a fair price. I think that this is a solid GPU which will preform well at high settings. 

RAM:16GB of RAM is the perfect amount for a gaming PC at this level. With that in mind, this build is running 2x8GB sticks of Corsair Vengeance LPX at 3000MHz. This leaves you with lots of room for future expansion and if you wanted to run more than 16GB that’s completely possible – when you do upgrade try to stick to the same speed as your RAM will automatically change its speed to match your slowest stick.

Power Supply: EVGA’s 500 BR power supply is a good, reliable, power supply. It’s rated to 80+ bronze and comes with a 3-year warranty + 24/7 technical support from EVGA. As the 500 BR is a non-modular unit, all cables are permanently attached. If you’d prefer a semi-modular supply, I’d suggest checking out the 500 BQ instead – it’s a little more expensive but objectively much better.

Storage: When it comes to storage, there’s a Kingston A400 480GB SSD in this build by default. Beyond that, you can easily add up to 3 more drives based on what the motherboard will support. All you’ll need are extra SATA data cables and the additional drives themselves.

Peripherals

Operating System 

WiFi

Since the motherboard in this build does not have built-in WiFi (most don’t) you will need a WiFi adapter if you plan on using a wireless internet connection. That said, if you have the option to run a wired connection, do that instead because it will be faster & more reliable.

Since there are tons of options available when it comes to picking a WiFi adapter, it can be a little confusing at first; but don’t worry because I’m going to help sort that out… Or, at the very least, I’m going to try to make it as simple as possible.

Basically, if you have a newer router/modem, chances are it’s on the AC protocol and supports both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands – perfect. If it’s older, it might be on the N protocol which is a little slower than AC, but your modem/router might still be new enough to be “dual band” and support both 2.4GHz and 5GHz. This is the first thing you want to figure out – search the model number which will be stamped somewhere on it if you’re unsure what you’re running.

Next, it’s basically just a matter of matching numbers with numbers and letters with letters. If you have a dual band (2.4GHz + 5GHz) modem on the AC protocol capable of 1300Mpbs, you want a dual band AC1300 adapter. 

Conclusion

If you came here looking to build yourself an awesome $800 gaming PC, I KNOW you found what you were looking for! This build puts out a lot of power for the price and, in my opinion, it’s probably the best value when it comes to a 1080p 60fps gaming PC, or even 1440p 60fps!

Like I said at the beginning of this build guide, it’s going to take more than a year for this build to need any kind of serious upgrades; and even then, you might only need to throw in some more RAM or something else easy like that. 

All-in-all, you will be hard pressed to build a better 1080p gaming PC for $800 in 2018; unless you’re building it with a specific game or purpose in mind! The power this build is packing is more than enough to handle all of your favorite AAA games in 1080p at 60fps without a problem! 

If you have any questions or comments about this build, don’t hesitate to ask in the comments!