this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2026
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My kid wants to build a gaming PC for their birthday.
Am I cooked?
Your bank account certainly will be.
That said, if you buy refurb you can put together a decent rig on a budget.
Overcooked at this point
Recently built a computer for my kiddo. Beg, borrow, and steal. And keep an eye out for motherboard and memory combos from new egg.
See if there's a Microcenter anywhere near you. They fairly regularly have pretty good deals on CPU/MB/RAM bundles.
Those deals are still relative to the extortionate price rises, though.
SODIMM ram is still cheap. You could build them a ddr4 intel system with integrated graphics (ideally Arc cores or plenty of EUs) that will run some older or simpler games at 40-60fps with a little upscaling, and the whole thing could be done for 500-700 I reckon.
Either that or maybe build an AM4 if you find a used GPU at a good price.
Microcenter or some similar physical store is probably your own hope. They run pretty decent deals to bring you into the store.
I’d recommend visiting one for Black Friday/cyber Monday. It’s probably your only hope for things not to be ridiculously overpriced. Instead you’ll just pay for very overpriced items.
Build one without RAM and without storage.
Not necessarily. You could give them a budget and let them pick whatever fits inside that budget.