Being a skinny-laptop person ever since my Sony Vaio PCG-505, I’ve never needed to scratch build a PC. Bunging some extra memory or a different HDD into the odd machine at work is about the closest I’ve ever come to it. But, when my daughter wanted to get a gaming PC on a limited-ish budget I suggested we build it to get the best deal.

I think we’ve done OK

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Here’s what we bought:

PCPartPicker Part List

Type Item Price
CPU AMD Ryzen 5 5600G 3.9 GHz 6-Core Processor £199.95 @ AWD-IT
CPU Cooler Cooler Master Hyper 212 RGB Black Edition 57.3 CFM CPU Cooler £44.99 @ Amazon UK
Thermal Compound Corsair XTM50 5 g Thermal Paste £9.98 @ Amazon UK
Motherboard MSI B550M PRO-VDH WIFI Micro ATX AM4 Motherboard £69.98 @ Amazon UK
Memory Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro SL 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR4-3600 CL18 Memory £132.99 @ Amazon UK
Storage Western Digital WD Green SN350 960 GB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive £101.15 @ More Computers
Case NZXT H510 Elite ATX Mid Tower Case £99.98 @ Amazon UK
Power Supply Corsair CXF 550 W 80+ Bronze Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply
Custom Corsair RGB Lighting Node Pro Lighting Controller Purchased For £46.99
Prices include shipping, taxes, rebates, and discounts
Total £706.01
Generated by PCPartPicker 2022-04-03 15:05 BST+0100

But actually, we’re returning the thermal paste, as both the motherboard and the cpu cooler came with some. And the Corsair Lighting controller was a “just in case”, if we couldn’t fully control the RGB PSU fan via some other means. As it turns out, MSI Center can control both the CPU cooler fan natively, and the Corsair PSU RGB fan and Corsair RGB RAM sticks once you’ve installed the Corsair iCUE software. No need for the controller. So that’s nearly £60 saved.

The PC has an iGPU at the moment, but we’ll be adding a GeForce RTX 3050 or similar once it’s been saved up for, and the current set up is more than capable of playing Genshin Impact (the primary reason for getting it in the first place).

The build was pretty straightforward apart from the CPU cooler, which took about 6 goes to get mounting bars oriented correctly. I’ve become a bit of an RGB hardware fan, and on being asked if we could swap out the boring top case fan for an RGB one and add more lighting strips, have readily agreed!