Budget Gaming PC 2025 - review

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Budget Gaming PC 2025 - review

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since I basically spent something like the last four months or something of the last year setting up a new local computer here I finally decided that it would probably be a good idea to write a report here about it as reference for me as well as content to the site as usual so I guess that in the meantime while I still don't move on to other stuff that left pending this is what I got:

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Intel Core i3-13100:
 Core 1:
  temp: 34.000 ℃
  freq: 4300.000 MHz
 Core 2:
  temp: 31.000 ℃
  freq: 4300.000 MHz
 Core 3:
  temp: 31.000 ℃
  freq: 4300.000 MHz
 Core 4:
  temp: 34.000 ℃
  freq: 4300.000 MHz
 uncore: 3900.000 MHz
NVIDIA RTX 5050:
 temp: 43 ℃
 fan: 0 RPMs
 power: 12.55 W
 GPU:
  freq: 555 MHz
  use: 0 %
 MEM:
  freq: 405 MHz
  use: 17 %
 PCIe: 2.5 GT/s x8
JUHOR DDR5:
 DIMM1A: 30.250 ℃
 DIMM2A: 30.750 ℃
 Configured Memory Speed: 6400 MT/s
 Configured Voltage: 1.1 V
NCT6798D:
 CPU: 33.000 ℃
  FAN: 1246 RPMs
 SYS: 31.000 ℃
  FAN: 1237 RPMs
 PCH: 44.000 ℃
 Vcore: 1.120 V
 +12V: 12.420 V
 VCC3V: 3.392 V
 VSB3V: 3.376 V
 VBAT: 3.152 V
 AVSB: 3.376 V
Viper VP4300L:
 temp: 32.850 ℃
 Read: 8.81 TB
 Written: 2.57 TB
 Used: 0 %
 PCIe: 16.0 GT/s x4
Crucial P310:
 temp: 38.850 ℃
 Read: 861.35 GB
 Written: 1.04 TB
 Used: 0 %
 PCIe: 16.0 GT/s x4
System:
 Status: No errors detected
 Use: 7.67 %
so basically that's the thing that kept me busy on and off building up across the past year from time to time after I cooked my previous gpu and deemed the thing not worth to repair and better to just replace it entirely instead. the word "budget" there in the year 2025 with the ongoing semi conductor crisis due the ai cannibalism at the large scale becomes relative but as can be seen there that's pretty much the bare minimum that, I believe, that it makes sense to build by today. normally when I do upgrades I have a budget of around 350 € for the "core" components (i.e. motherboard+ram+cpu and maybe a gpu) and generally get the "extras" later on (i.e. the disks some cards if necessary, more ram, better psu etc) as the situation calls/allows for it. unfortunately this time, for other than the case that's worth (almost) nothing, I scrapped everything and build the whole thing from scratch which meant that it took both more time than it should have and spent more than usual. anyway on the upside at least that allowed me to sell the old parts I had installed to save up some money so the whole thing noted there costed me bellow 640 euros new and after selling the previous parts the final costs came down closer to the 500 euros range which spread over various months was more manageable and in tune with what I generally spend. unfortunately that was just the previous year mostly along the summer, this year as I just reviewed some parts for reference, the prices have sky rocketed due the ongoing semi conductor crisis as I just explained (i.e. ai companies purchasing entire memory/storage factories and at any given price). that being said I believe that probably with some time and luck (i.e. deals, stock surplus etc) you might be able to work out something similar along the year so take that merely as a reference at least by now.

ok, so now as for the introduction, just as said, I think that as can be seen there that's just a basic entry level intel/nvidia based made in china gaming pc to allow you to work and game by today standards, definitively, nothing over the top there. this time I took a risk and got most of those parts from aliexpress and direct china providers since that was about the best deal due the market circumstances as explained. hopefully in the end everything end up working as expected although not without effort. good, now as for the usual juicy breakdown, probably many things (more) to note there. first things first, the case I just re-used it from my previous build, nothing remarkable, it's just a compact micro-atx case that takes few space and can fit about everything so it gets the job done. the included usb ports might not be as good anymore but I guess that by now that's not a priority at the moment. it did come with a basic 500 W psu though, that I also tried to reuse as it should be enough but once I set everything up and started with the stress testing I also cooked it in a few days which got me another week off (i.e. while awaiting the purchase and delivery). that can only stress how important the psu really is in a computer and how trying to save up a few bucks might end up costing you a lot more later on. hopefully, I guess that at least all the pretty much standard by today failure prevention mechanisms (i.e. ovp, ocp, uvp, scp etc) worked and it did not take anything with it otherwise it would have been an absolute disaster. as a replacement, to be honest I did not really learnt anything from my own undoings here, I just picked up the next product in the tier, once again, I'm not gonna overspent on this. hopefully, that was just about enough to power up this without issues and this one survived all the testing and performed as it should and as bonus it even comes with a auto adjustable fan for better comfort which quite frankly it's always welcome after some hours of use. as for case ventilation since the system is just low/mid power I simply picked a bulk 80 mm fan sucking air from the main cpu/ram space. that fan is pinned to a 4-pwm connector on the board and regulated by cpu temp which as with the psu fan it also adds to the general computer use conform, so far so good.

now coming to the good parts, in line with the whole build I relayed in experience (i.e. I can make this work or so I think) and took another risk and this time I got a straight up Chinese Intel B760 based motherboard from Jginyue. I think that manufacturer outside of China and other similar tech "guru" circles is totally unheard of but to be honest I think, it even beat expectations. obviously it comes short from top brands like msi or asus but, quite frankly, after using it for a while it just comes across very similar to any other asrock or biostar motherboard that it just gets the job done which is exactly just what's needed. overall, I like that it kinda feels like a reference design engineering board, it just looks like these guys purchased the parts from Intel, implemented the reference design that came along them and put it straight up on the market. the bios doesn't have many add-on/custom options as typically seen on higher brands but at least it does have a lot of options (if not all) that probably were on the Intel reference design and typically many get cut out on other more mainstream boards which I actually liked and even though it doesn't have two bios chips to be safe at least it does have a external bios reset button in case of need so you don't have to bug about opening the computer just to reset some settings if something goes bad so it definitively looks like a solid product, better than expected. other than that as extra it even feature some relatively decent vrm config (ten phases 8+1+1) that probably could even beat other more mainstream boards although probably for the cpu that's installed that's less relevant beside the heat spreaders look a bit weak for some heavy load to be honest so I wouldn't get wild about them. the rest is just the normally expected from a entry level Intel B760 motherboard, nothing else to stand out I guess. as said I did not pick up a z board as with a entry level cpu you're not really gonna make use of it and neither a h one that although it might have some interesting and useful features (ex. bifurcation, eight dmi lanes etc) it would raise costs and it could probably be overkill.

as for the cpu I once again picked up one of the most economical options available in the market so I just went for a basic i3-13100 with a integrated gpu to be safe. I think that as the market share grew so it did their products and the once Intel/AMD enthusiast/budget roles probably reversed thus the reality is that in "recent" years (probably for a decade already) I've been falling out of love with AMD then this time I finally went and decided for a basic Intel cpu. the cpu is marketed as raptor lake though in reality this is just a updated alder lake version (i.e. mostly just higher clocks) instead meaning that it's not (or at least it should initially not be) affected by the infamous voltage issues wreaking havoc of that generation of Intel chips. anyway, so that cpu is basically just a classic quad core featuring hyper threading and all the rest of the usual pretty much standard nowadays features, again nothing remarkable. the hyper threading is not really useful for any major use (ex. gaming) so I actually just generally run it disabled unless I have some very specific need as the system performs/responds better without it. a upside of the simplicity of the chip (i.e. it does not have efficient cores) is that then you do not have to worry about special schedulers and/or to know if your software would make the proper use of your cpu, you just install this, set it up and forget about all that. in my opinion the potential difference in the electricity bill for a desktop doesn't make up for the hustle so I think that this is even a better fit for the use being than other more complex chips available in the market. I could have picked the 14100 instead though but I finally decided for the 13100 instead as that was way too many risks to take even for me since the 13th generation was the only one guaranteed to work on the motherboard I had got (the 14th generation came out later which meant it would have required a bios update I could have not performed with a "unsupported" cpu). "hopefully" even on that the motherboard delivered and it came out updated already so it could have took the 14100 unfortunately I had to stick to the 13100. in any case the difference between the two is small (a few percent) and being a slighter slow means it has more headroom and runs more comfortable but that would have definitively been a improvement since there's no possibility to tune these chips whatsoever. additionally I also got the oem tray version from China as well since that was about the best deal around at the time of purchase which meant then that I had to get a aftermarket cooler separately. in line with the whole build, after checking up the market I just decided for one of the cheapest options I could find and took a basic Thermaltake cooler with just two cooper heat pipes. that cooler is rated for 120 W, my 13100 is 60 W on average power and when stress testing it ran consistently on 80+ degrees, I highly doubt then that it could really keep up with something significantly bigger without major external cooling as well. anyway, once again, for the use being that was enough, just what's needed which is exactly what you look for in this kind of build and as a bonus it even looks and probably sounds/performs some better than a stock one besides just when turning off hyper threading the temps go down to the 60 degrees range which is even ideal, no complains on that either.

as advanced on the previous point one of the few extras I got this time was a igpu. the difference between the 13100 and 13100F was minimal thus after being left out in the dark for weeks due a broken gpu I decided that just for a few euros more it was what made the most sense to have a back up solution. out of chance that ended up proving life saving as my new gpu ended up taking three months to show up so if it wouldn't have been because of that I would probably still be cooked and you all wondering. as for the details, as typically with this class of devices that's just a basic desktop graphics card for up to 4k monitors I'd say for productivity work and similar light use although I must say that after testing it it's far more capable than anticipated. obviously, it doesn't even close to any modern dedicated gpu of any class however I'd say that it should even be enough to play, let's say, xbox/ps3 generation games (i.e. late 2000s/early 2010s) in high definition (or more) with sensible settings as you can see on the posted scores which for a igpu of a budget cpu is really not that bad. it's very hard to tell (if at all) how it would actually compare to some 20 years old dedicated gpus of the era but from what I saw and what I dug I believe that probably this thing should do similar to a Nvidia GeForce 9800 GT/ATI Radeon HD 4830 or better depending on the circumstances which as I said is not as bad or at least not as bad as I had expected it to be. I mean, that's basically just about how I remember to have played Quake 4 back in the day and Street Fighter IV felt exactly just as I remembered the arcades so kind of a surprise there to be honest. matter of fact, I think that by now I'll just use it to test the game here (Quake III Arena) as the dedicated one is definitively overkill for that. the only minor downside it seems like it struggles to keep up with anti-aliasing on most tittles though you just make up for that by simply running the games at higher resolutions so quite frankly very happy about it for the price to be honest. in addition to all that for those more media oriented the chip comes with native decoding support for pretty much all relevant codecs nowadays (with the exception of the lighter vp8) to make the browsing experience more enjoyable along with robust native encoding support for powerful codecs like vp9 or avc (h264) along with mpeg2 for some basic streaming for example that I believe that also adds great value to it.

a separate extended point deserves (the now discrete) gpu, the Nvidia RTX 5050. no surprises here as expected from a budget build I just got the cheapest (meaningful) gpu available and even that was hard to afford to be honest. unfortunately as said gpus are not only affected now in the present by the current on-going ai semiconductor crisis but also in addition coming off another crypto mining crisis of their own which means that it will probably take something like a decade (or even potentially more) for the situation to stabilize and the market to come back to normal so it's what it's. in similar fashion to the cpu I think that for the most part between Nvidia and formerly ATI the latter was always the budget solution while the former the enthusiast high-end one so I was always a ATI fan. unfortunately things never were the same since AMD acquired ATI and some twenty years later now it has become clear that the brand has been relegated to a second tier product so with the passing of time each year I've been falling more and more out of love with amd until this time I simply decided I had enough of it and go for Nvidia instead. I know some here might argue the "right" solution for a budget build like this would be simply to opt for a mid-high end amd chip with integrated graphics instead which is where amd stands out (they really have no competence there in the desktop market) and probably one of the mayor driving factors of the aforementioned ati acquisition however I disagree with that. I know for a fact (i.e. from actual experience) that the cpu+gpu discrete solution, even if a budget one, beats the integrated solution any day so as I just commented after several years of waiting I ended up tired of wasting money on budget amd stuff that looked solid on paper but later on never really delivered beside at the end of the day with the current prices the saving wouldn't even be as dramatic unless you'd go for a significantly inferior product. as I see it, it's the way it's, I wouldn't even consider that a real alternative.

ok, now coming to the actual card in line with everything else I got the cheapest one I could find which in this case it happened to be a single fan normal version (i.e. non oc) from palit. in line with the motherboard beside for the top brands most of these cards are just reference designs with very little differences (i.e. cosmetics, cooling and a, at your own risk, swapable bios) so the card itself looks pretty much like a oem one, nothing remarkable about it. I actually liked the fact that it was a single fan version, yes, it will run some hotter than a dual fan one and (when pushed) it will get noisier but for a micro-atx case and the use being it fitted better and for a small power card that's more than enough to get the job done overall. this time this one I got it from a local provider instead of China as there was no supply there. when it comes to the specs this card is essentially just a modern RTX 4060 / RTX 2080 which, quite frankly, for a "budget" build it definitively feels like something else considering the latter is a (former) enthusiast level one. that being said, wherever you read, all these guys just mock and trash this card all over the place like if it were a joke that it wasn't even funny. truth to be told, after using it for a couple of months already I find such "reviews" out of touch with reality and such "reviewers" more like a gag than anything else. as can be seen from the benchmarks the card is perfectly capable of playing modern ps5 generation games at 2k with sensible settings (i.e. defaults/mid) at high frame rates (i.e. 90+ fps) or even more depending on the tittle setup which is quite good so it goes well beyond the supposed 1080p high target. matter of fact, from experience, I'd even argue that the real target for this card is actually that of 2k default/mid settings and beyond rather than even the nvidia own marketed 1080p high target as on the games I played and tested that seemed to work a lot better for me. moreover that's even without factoring tuning (i.e. overclocking), I actually found that once everything tuned these cards in reality perform much closer to a NVIDIA RTX 3060 ti or AMD RX 6700 XT instead which even sets them a tier above their specifications something rarely seen in recent times (i.e. you get what you pay not something else, it's the way it's). ok, all that being said, don't get your hopes high now and think that this is the ultimate gpu, it obviously has various caveats and downsides (i.e. compromises) as it can not be otherwise from a budget product at the end of the day. the first and most important of them the vram with just eight gigabytes it significantly limits and handicaps it's use at least in my specific setup by today standards. the vram is the reason I "argue" (it's not really a "argument", it does in my setup) that it performs better at 2k mid than 1080p high as the former is generally lighter on the vram than the latter. as I'm saying, I don't know how it will play out on other pcs (from what I read on the internet it's full of people in similar situations), but I just found that nowadays most games just top out at 8 gb or more of vram and these cards do not like it at all when they have to run on shared vram and I'm not talking about some occasional slowdown here and there after a while, I'm talking about progressive degradation until it's not even really playable anymore until you restart (i.e. most likely vram fragmentation) which obviously it's not acceptable. that's probably the biggest issue with these cards and quite frankly it took me a good while to figure it out, it was definitively not straight forward. at least as I said you can always just decrease the settings and increase the resolution to compensate so after tuning everything I think that it even turn out better than the supposed intended target as I was saying however that doesn't take away from the fact that it's nevertheless a major issue. from what I saw I believe that by today standards 12/16 gb of vram should be the minimum requirement otherwise you'll be obliged to make compromises but unfortunately in line with the whole report is what the current global market situation determines so it's what it's. additionally in line with that another downside is the cpu connectivity, it is PCIe 5.0 but limited to only eight lines and to make matter worse once plugged to the system it only really works at 4.0 speed otherwise it doesn't even startup which is also another significant drawback considering the limited vram would probably benefit greatly from the enhanced bus speed to better swap/transfer assets. unfortunately, it's what it's from newer standards and budget and also not so budget builds as there's reports from people with 300+ euros motherboards with similar issues so it will probably take a time before the manufacturers "master" the PCIe 5.0. in the meantime a PCIe 4.0 x16 would have probably been better but the choices are limited. speaking of which, pretty much the only alternatives I found were old China RTX 3060 12 GB cards or the Intel B580 12 GB both for similar/comparable prices or if not then the AMD RX 9060 XT 16 GB. unfortunately none of that worked for me, out of that probably the more interesting would be the China RTX 3060, on the upside it does have 12 GB but on the downside is a sensible inferior card to a RTX 5050 when taking everything in consideration so it was not worth. the Intel one, first, it was slightly more expensive and more importantly although the specs are probably some better when you take into account the software/support I think that it didn't even compare. the amd one would obviously blow everything away included the price which obviously didn't make it a option for me. (that thing was "supposed" to cost just some more, everywhere I looked it costed literally more than all the rest of the parts together, what, the, fuck). some might suggest as well second hand, in similar fashion, the prices there on anything meaningful and with warranty are as inflated (if not more in comparison) so I wouldn't bother with that just to save up little at the end of the day as I didn't really locate anything competitive there worth the risk.

now I know that the most controversial part there is gonna be the memory choice. I'm aware that many/most people here would have suggest top end ddr4 here instead of bulk desktop oriented ddr5 and that might be true but just for today not tomorrow and when you build a computer you always look forward the future not just the moment so given the choice (i.e. at same or comparable price) between one and the other I took ddr5 which may be in some time (now is a terrible time as commented) it can be upgraded while the ddr4 you install today will remain as there's nothing more coming there. that being said, I also took another big risk here and like with the motherboard I picked up some 32 GB (2x16 GB) made in China memories directly from Chinese manufacturer JUHOR. as with Jginyue I think that manufacturer outside China and guru circles is probably totally unheard of unfortunately this time they did not play out as nice as the motherboard and although I ended up making them work even better than specified it took me like another month of extensive testing which is probably not what you expect when you purchase memory. similar with the motherboard, the sticks themselves seem pretty much like any other oem/value desktop memory, in that aspect I think they are comparable to well know Kingston memories for example. it stand out the fact that the chips are custom build for JUHOR which means that probably they are a huge player on their market by some other memory brand. it's exactly unclear which ones I got but from exhaustive testing I can tell they just perform exactly like good desktop Micron g die 5600 chips which again for the use being here is just fine so that's what I will assume. the problem weren't the chips or the build quality the problem strive in the custom timings beyond specification this specific manufacturer had set (probably to better market their products) that although for the most they worked they weren't 100% 24/7 stable as they should. as I already anticipated in the end I ended up making them work for good at 6400 MHz just with optimized well known standard timings and voltages instead so it was all good but it definitively took some serious work (and skill) and that's probably not the way it should be meant to be with high quality memory.

probably the stand out feature of the build is the storage as it counts with two performance class 500 GB PCIe Gen4x4 NVMe 2.0 drives, one directly attached to the cpu via the motherboard m.2 port and another through the pch (i.e. the B760 chipset) in the second m.2 port in the motherboard. all in all that's about the kind of io you get in high end (i.e. coffe lake refresh or better) servers so I think that's probably all that's need to be said about it. they are definitively a massive improvement over anything else. in particular, that's about a order of magnitude (i.e. 10x) faster than a high end (sata) ssd to put it perspective. I don't think it can be stressed enough how important the storage io really is now that the apps size has grown totally out of proportion and so, how much it adds to a overall computer smooth experience as it's something that's typically overlooked or simply relegated to a secondary option. ok, in particular the drives I got were a Viper VP4300 Lite and a Crucial P310 both in 500 GB capacity that's about what you really need for the system and few (not a entire collection, just a realistic amount that you're really gonna use) of games and apps. yes, this time I took some known brands here instead of another China option as at the time both those drives were very competitive deals so it didn't make much of a difference to save up little there at the end of the day. in any case, I can already anticipate that later on as prices got out of hand I did ended up getting other budget China drives as well for pc and they worked all the same in similar fashion to all the other stuff I got here so it wouldn't have been much of a deal either way but that's what I actually got here. despite the actual real specifications, performance wise the Viper VP4300 lite is definitively the best performer of the two as it can't be otherwise from a mid tier gaming class nvme compared to a bulk office tier drive. that being said the actual real difference is a lot minor than one might expect as the Crucial P310 came out much better than actually specified which is one again one of the major advantages of going for budget products, sometimes you get lucky and they actually overperform/overdeliver. at the time of purchase that drive was supposed to be just a desktop version of a pretty much mobile budget nvme option featuring qlc nand and a endurance rating of 110 TBW however turned out that the drive that showed up came instead with quality micron g9 tier tlc nand and and actual rating of 1400 pe cycles in the firmware so in practice it doesn't even come far from the viper option as it even surpasses it some aspects.

as for the peripherals along with the igpu another nice extra I got was a m.2 WiFi 6E desktop kit to complete to build also directly from China that for the very little money that it costed I feel like it was a great and handy addition to have as wifi becomes more and more the norm with each generation. the card itself is a 100% legit Intel AX211, not a clone or anything, and I must say that for the first time it really delivers a experience very close to a actual ethernet gigabit connection if not potentially better when used properlly obviously (i.e. wifi 6 fiber etc). in the end I still ended up switching back to the also solid integrated lan ethernet for convenience and to be safe but to be honest I'd say that for other than a few occasional spikes here and there it even felt a bit more responsive (ex. the card is actually a pcie gen 2 device as opposed to the old gen 1 still used in most, if not all, lan cards). the Bluetooth was also pretty solid with some random cheap Chinese headset delivering significantly better and richer sound that the actual anlog outputs in the embedded sound card. definitively a surprisingly great and handy addition for the price to update the build and the future.

ok and I think I'm finally done like year later as usual but at least the report came up a lot more complete and thought than otherwise. for the systems, no surprise in the viper directly attached to the cpu I run a mak licensed Windows 11 Pro installment mostly for compatibility assurance and casual gaming/testing (like making this kind of "review" for example) here and there and in the crucial one attached to the pch the usual Fedora workstation I've been using pretty much for the last 15+ years for everything else. so basically a pretty solid build that I'm virtually fully satisfied with it even a year later which I believe that at the end of the day that's probably the best metric/benchmark of them all. truth to be told, despite all the critics you can find everywhere I ended up gaming Forza Motorsport (2023) 3200x1800 mid settings at 90 fps with dlss in quality and Final Fantasy XVI also at 3200x1800 low settings 60+ fps like no problem without end (yes, those things also kept me "busy" or "afk") and after a year of daily intense use, it's still going strong like the first day, no data loss, no random shutdowns, no crashes. in my opinion for a budget build in 2025 that's as good as it gets.
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