After nearly maxing out my credit cards on my first build, my cousin asked me to build him a gaming PC to replace his PS4. I took this as the perfect opportunity to see what I can do on the opposite end of the spectrum and see how much performance I can squeeze out of a much tighter budget. The goal here was to beat the performance of an Xbox One X without going over $500. This little toaster was the result.

I went Team Red on this build with a Ryzen 3 2200G which give solid performance for a sub $100 CPU. For the GPU, I took a chance on ASRock's new Phantom Gaming series with the Phantom Gaming D RX 570 OC which has some impressive specs for only $139.99 including 8GB of VRAM. B350 chipset motherboard, SSD boot drive of course because I'm not a backwards savage, 8GB RAM stable at 3000MHz with XMP and no compatibility issues whatsoever.

It runs hot, sounds like a little vacuum cleaner, and the case makes cable management a nightmare and has horrible airflow, but still turned out to be a solid performer at 1080p. Both the CPU and GPU overclock pretty well and get a pretty significant boost with that overclock. I have the 2200G stable running 3.9GHz at 1.35V and the RX 570 at 1450MHz.

I haven't done too much game testing yet but, although not the most demanding game, I was able to run Starcraft 2 at 4K high settings between 50-60FPS with dips to 30FPS during cutscenes and at 1080p well over 60FPS sometimes very near triple digit frame rates. In Cinebench the 2200G scored 556 for the multi threaded test and 143 for the single-core test at stock settings. Overclocked to 3.9 scored a 617 multi threaded and 162 single core.

The early stages of the build were not pretty so I ended up making a few design changes along the way to make it more personalized including getting the blue power button LED for a red one. My cousin being a huge Slipknot fan, I of course made that the theme complete with a Slipknot logo decal slapped to the side panel and a red and black color scheme. In it's entirety the build took close to a year thanks to a couple road blocks and lack of funds (who would've guessed it?). In the time it took to finish, I moved into a new apartment, failed 2 classes, and got a promotion. But hey, it's done now and it turned out better than I expected and I expect my cousin will enjoy it much more than his PS4.