$1200 Gaming PC Timelapse [GTX 1660 & AMD 2600]

Andy Ruffell / 5 years ago

$1200 Gaming PC Timelapse

With the release of the GTX 1660 GPU from NVIDIA, making an affordable gaming system is becoming even easier. Coupled with an AMD Ryzen 5 2600, 16GB of RAM memory and an amazing looking SSD and chassis, you’re able to have a great looking system with extreme performance for $1200. Take a look at what we were able to come up with for that price point.

The Chassis

With addressable RGB being the popular option for builds in 2019, we took to utilising one of the latest chassis from Aerocool; the klaw.

$1200 Gaming PC Timelapse [GTX 1660 & AMD 2600]

With a unique slash front design, it seemed the logical choice with given a budget of this magnitude.

Add in some tempered glass and a PSU shroud and it makes it an absolutely fantastic value for money chassis.

Also, did I mention, it comes with 3 addressable RGB fans included!

The Components

With AMD offering great value for money at the moment, the X470 chipset seemed a bit overkill for what we were trying to achieve. This is where the affordable B450 Aorus Pro from Gigabyte came along.

Giving us a sleek design, RGB accents and more than enough connections for even the most demanding system, it’s an extremely well specced board considering its modest price point.

Coupled with the above motherboard and striving to stay within budget, the AMD Ryzen 5 2600 with its 6 cores and 12 threads was the CPU destined for this build.

Giving you more than enough power and performance was a great starting block for any gaming system, especially if wanting to utilise steaming capabilities as well.

AMD loves fast memory, and we love RGB, especially when it comes to the styling behind this build. With that in mind, the trusted TEAMGroup Nighthawk RGB memory was a perfect fit giving us 16GB in dual channel 8GB modules with 3000MHz speeds was more than enough to keep this churning along.

If the budget permits, we’d always recommend going for slightly faster speeds or a higher capacity, but overclocking is always an option too.

Storage

Sticking with the addressable RGB theme, there was only one SSD that sprung to mind. Again from TEAMGroup, the Delta RGB 250GB gives us more than enough storage as an OS drive, while looking simply amazing at the same time. Yes you’ll pay a little more for it, but can you really put a price on aesthetics?

While 250GB is more than enough for an OS drive, games are taking up more and more space these days. A WD Blue 1TB drive gives fantastic value for money and will be more than enough space for even the latest games.

Graphics Just Got Affordable

With the graphics segment heating up again slightly, and the launch of the latest generation cards from NVIDIA, the GTX 1660 was a no-brainer.

The Gigabyte Gaming OC edition gives us fantastic looks, silent performance and pre-overclocked performance straight out of the box.

Well Deserved Styling

A system isn’t complete in my mind without some custom cables at the heart of it and when it comes to the best value around, the Cablemod PRO cables in black really give that finishing touch to this whole build.

With cable combs included and good durable quality, we just had to include them.

Enough Power To Last!

Wanting to stick with Aerocool, the Project 7 850W gives us the styling, performance, durability and headroom that a system like this deserves.

If you want to overclock your CPU and memory, they’ll be plenty of room for it, and if you fancy swapping your GPU out at a later date for something beefier, there’s definitely space for it too.

Don’t Forget Your Operating System

Obviously a system wouldn’t be complete without the operating system. While there are cheaper places to get hold of Windows 10 64-bit, we decided to stick to a trusted retailer that tout great customer service.

Our Thoughts

All in all, the build looks simply amazing. I believe that for the money, while you could chop and change a few things, it’s a well balanced system. Overall, it should be able to play the latest games with ease.

Streaming capabilities are more than capable while also giving you the performance needed to render videos, do work related tasks and much more.

All of the links to the product pages and retailers are listed below and we invite your comments as to what you think of this build. Would you do anything different? Let us know below.