Best $600 Gaming PC in April 2022

In the following guide, we will be recommending what we believe is the best gaming PC for under $600 and exactly what is needed to take it from a bunch of hardware components to a fully operating gaming rig. We update our builds regularly when new and improved hardware options become available to ensure the absolute best products are being recommended. If you want to see our PC builds for various budgets, then check out our budget gaming PC page.

Before we look at the hardware though, let’s quickly go over what you can expect from this PC in regards to performance and features. Furthermore, let’s take a brief look at what separates our build and what compromises had to be made to ensure we got the highest performance out of the system.

What You Get For Your $600

Like all our builds, the first, and potentially most important criteria is to recommend a PC part list that comes under the set price. For this build, that was $600. Even though that sounds pretty generous, with the current stock issues and high demand, prices are higher than ever, making affordable gaming PCs very hard to put together.

This means that we had to make several compromises with this build in order to keep it within the $600 budget. An older CPU and GPU combination can be used here used instead and a small SSD has to feature to keep costs down too. Despite this, the build beneath is currently the best for under $600 and is very easy to upgrade in the near future when prices go back to normal.

Performance

For many, this is the most important aspect of a custom build. Once you’ve considered the price of a PC, the next thing you consider is how powerful that build is and whether or not it’s worth the money.

For those wondering what we mean by power, we’re referencing the PC’s performance power.

Performance power can come in many forms but for the most part, we’re talking about in-game performance or the PC’s ability to handle heavy workload tasks. This build has some ability to handle workload tasks and general computing is going to feel quite responsive. Our build has been equipped with a reasonably quick SSD storage solution so you won’t be waiting around for your PC to boot or games to load but you may need to expand on its capacity in the near future. Overall, we’re extremely happy with the performance of our $600 custom PC considering current limitations.

AMD Vs Intel

You might be wondering why we’ve recommended an AMD build? The Intel build is slightly more expensive, and that’s because Intel products have a slightly higher market price at the time of writing this. From a performance standpoint, an Intel build at this price would perform marginally better in gaming, however, for a complete PC system for both gaming and multi-purpose at this price point, AMD comes out on top.

One thing worth mentioning whilst we’re talking about AMD Vs Intel is upgradability. Right now, AMD is a much more forgiving brand if you want to upgrade your PC down the road. AMD has kept the same chipset for 3 generations now meaning their CPUs are backward compatible with older-gen motherboards. The same can not be said for Intel. Just keep that in mind when you’re looking at building a PC, apart from that, they’re both fantastic options for most gaming scenarios.

How We Choose

Our team has years of experience behind them building PCs for a range of needs and budgetary requirements. All this knowledge combined with hours of research, user feedback, and onsite benchmarking is what goes into choosing the best components for our builds.

We look for value for money, how the components perform together, and focus on gamer’s needs to make sure our builds are the best bang for your buck.

We build all these PCs ourselves, in-house, so trust us when we say we want to make them as good as possible. We actually use all these builds ourselves day-to-day in the WePC offices.

How We Test

We build each of our selected PC’s from scratch to make sure all the parts we recommend work well together, fit into the selected case, and provide the best performance possible for the price range.

Once built, the PCs are used in the office for everyday work as well as a range of games from light to heavy-duty. While we test, we also run benchmarking tests to see how well our builds perform, all while keeping an eye on the temperature of the components themselves.

We know how much some of our readers enjoy overclocking their PCs, so we made sure to test that out too. So, you can feel safe knowing that these machines can be pushed beyond their basic capabilities. But, please make sure you know how to overclock before trying to over-task your builds.

NOTE: Due to the ongoing effects of the global coronavirus pandemic, some retailers are experiencing stock issues. WePC constantly updates our pages to reflect current availability, so if the PC or part you want shows as out of stock, check back later or check out these alternatives.