What a world we live in: we're at a point with memory prices where I'm recommending builds based on their RAM configurations. I'm exaggerating a little, of course—this is a great gaming PC overall, for its $899 price at Newegg—but it's certainly a factor to consider these days.
In the context of an AI-induced memory price crisis that everyone seems to be saying is going to last for quite some time, that's no small matter. I can no longer recommend a gaming PC with slow or low-capacity system memory on the promise of being able to upgrade it cheaply and easily down the line. Some retailers are already restricting memory purchases, and who knows what will happen over the coming months.
Still, good memory alone isn't enough to earn a recommendation; the rest of the build needs to be good value. Thankfully, here we have a solid budget build that seems almost perfect for the price.
The CPU here is the Intel Core i5 14400F, which is a refreshed version of the Core i5 13400F that we rate very highly and was, for a long time, the best budget CPU. The 14400F is a 10-core chip, and six of those are the P-Cores that boost up to 4.7 GHz and will be used for more intensive tasks like gaming. It's not the fastest CPU on the market, but it certainly won't bottleneck the RTX 5060, and it should be fine for some light productivity work and, of course, everyday tasks.
This is where the 'almost perfect' part comes in, though, because I can't help but notice that it's a pretty small air cooler sitting on top of the CPU. And sure, it's hardly a Core i9 CPU we're trying to cool, but Raptor Lake refresh chips aren't renowned for power efficiency, so I would assume there will be some thermal throttling going on here in CPU-intensive tasks.
I'd definitely make the CPU cooler the first upgrade, and you don't need to spend a lot. The Arctic Freezer 36 (above) would be an excellent fit in this rig, and you can get the RGB version for $48 at Amazon.
Most games won't be particularly CPU-intensive, though, so on this front you should be fine. The RTX 5060 performs a fair bit better than the RTX 4060, and is more than adequate for modern gaming at 1080p. At 1440p, you'll definitely want to turn some settings down to hit smooth frame rates in good-looking modern titles, but you'll still get by just fine at this resolution. Especially with DLSS 4 upscaling and Multi Frame Gen (MFG) involved.
And you'll be able to have that without any concerns over rising memory prices: 32 GB of DDR5-6000 memory should serve you well for a long time. And don't forget the 2 TB of storage, which is great for game libraries these days, given today's games' large installation sizes.
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