A close friend of mine asked me if I could build him a budget PC system for his daughter. He said it will be used primarily for his daughter’s school work, but at the same time he wanted to use the PC for some light casual gaming. He knew I’ve been reviewing PC hardware for quite some time, so he trusted me and told me to decide what to build. I said I was more than happy to do so, and I promised to build him a decent system … it was all good until he told me that his total budget was USD $500! Yes … $500. I immediately thought … oh boy, maybe I was too quick in promising him 😀
Well, a promise is a promise … so now the fun begins. With a budget of $500, I’m going to have to figure out what kind of components I can get, that will give him an affordable system that offers decent performance, with room to upgrade at a later date.
After some serious shopping around I managed to buy all the components needed to the PC build for just under USD $500. To achieve this, we had to be prudent in our selection and choice of components. We decided to stick with the standard stock heatsink and fan that came with the Ryzen 5 3400G processor, so no AIO or watercooling. We also decided not to use a discrete graphics card as it will increase the price significantly, instead we’ll use the integrated Radeon Vega 11 Graphics that’s built-in the Ryzen 5 3400G.
Components used
Here’s the total cost for this PC system build as follows:
| Motherboard | ASRock B450M Steel Legend | $95 |
| CPU | AMD Ryzen 5 3400G (4 Core/8 Threads) | $150 |
| Cooling | Default Stock CPU fan cooler | $0 |
| Ram | Patriot Viper Gaming RGB DDR4-3000 16GB Memory Kit |
$83 |
| SSD | XPG SX6000/7000 256GB M.2 PCI-E Gen3x4 | $36 |
| PSU | FSP Raider II 550W 80Plus Silver PSU | $60 |
| Chassis | Darkflash/G-Storm Pink Micro-ATX Chassis | $65 |
| VGA card | Onboard Radeon Vega 11 Graphics | $0 |
TOTAL |
~$489 |
OK, now that we’ve purchased all the components, we’ve extremely happy to say that we’re within the budget of USD $500. This is only the first part. The next part is the fun bit … putting this together and making sure the system performs.
I’m pretty sure the system will perform as it should, and it should be more than enough for my friend’s daughter’s school work. Now the question is … will the onboard Radeon Vega 11 Graphics be enough for some light casual gaming?
Let’s begin the Project Pink Storm PC build, and start off with the product introduction of all the components used, with photos and links to the our reviews (if any).
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