If we had $750 to build a new PC from scratch, what would we spend our money on? That was the challenge presented to the Full Nerd gang on PCWorld’s YouTube channel, and the selections diverged much less than in our recent $3,000 PC build challenge.
Keep reading if you don’t mind spoilers, or just watch the video below if you want to hear us walk through the hardware in our builds without knowing what’s coming.
The biggest takeaway? If you’re building a $750 gaming PC, AMD’s modern Ryzen 5 processors are what you want. While the $235 Ryzen 5 3600X earns the nod as the best pick for most people in our roundup of the best CPUs for PC gaming, the Ryzen 5 3600 is just a step behind, and it’s a killer value at just $173 right now. Every single one of us chose the 6-core, 12-thread chip as the brains of our systems. And it’s not just us: The builds submitted on the Full Nerd Discord server all tapped into Ryzen 5 as well, though some of those leaned on older Ryzen 5 1600 and 2600 chips to squeeze in even more savings while still tapping into 12 threads of goodness.