What is the cheapest gaming machine you can make?

 So, apparently in a recent interview, Valve basically said that "Obviously, if you just don’t have the budget for it, you don’t have the budget for any real gaming PC at that point." And, I wanna emphasize, this is bullcrap. 

You obviously can make cheaper gaming PCs, I came up with a performance equivalent build for around $740, and you can arguably go lower than that.  Once again, the problem with the steam machine is the form factor. They went all in with the SFF PC trend, trying to make a low profile device, leading to higher costs, a limited power budget, and worse performance. The CPU was especially bad, being a 30W mobile part that performs closer to a 3600x than a 7600x, despite being zen 4. This allowed me to come up with a build with a Ryzen 5 5500 (3600x equivalent) and DDR4 RAM (cheaper, largely bypasses the RAM crisis), saving hundreds of dollars compared to what THEY did.

I wanna emphasize that the steam machine's flaw is the design. They went all in with DDR5, got hit by the crisis, and then got a machine that performs like a Zen 2 part anyway because they went in with power efficiency. The machine I suggested above won't be as efficient, and it will be significantly larger, but hey, that's the tradeoff. Because the problem is form factor, getting rid of form factor reduces the costs.

With that said, I had a thought, what IS the cheapest reasonably performing PC you can make these days and what does it cost? Normally I'd say $500-600, but with RAMpocalypse and the GPU price hikes, obviously a true budget machine is kinda dead. Still, I did figure, what if I adjusted this and reduced the price as much as possible? What would I get?

Well, making a couple adjustments, I came up with this.

 So, this costs $663. A bit higher than $500-600. It's more $600-700. Around $650ish. The main changes include:

Cheaper SSD (probably about as good in practice)

Lower end PSU (550W, still C tier on the cultists PSU list) 

RTX 3050 8 GB

The GPU I wanna talk about most. The market is screwed with GPUs. Currently, true budget GPUs are harder to come by than cheap RAM...as you can obviously tell. The $240 3050 8 GB is the lowest I'd recommend here. Now, you CAN probably find better deals on the used market, but I dont trust the used market and for two, the deals are person to person so not everyone has access to the same deals, so...yeah. But yeah if you want new, $240 for a 3050. It's not AWFUL AWFUL, I mean, you can run new games on it, but yeah it's the lowest possible card that I'd recommend.

Basically, you need a card that:

1) Has access to modern features (RTX 2000 series or RX 6000 series or better)

2) Has enough VRAM (8 is a hard requirement these days, so no 3050 6 GB or 2060)

3) Is actually available (so sadly the 6600 deals have dried up)

And the 3050 is the worst that is available that meets those requirements. I'd probably recommend investing a bit more in a 7600 or 5050, but you could also spend a bit more than that on a 5060 or 9060 XT, and then OOH! another $100 on a 9060 XT 16 GB!...and then you're spending double. So recognizing I'm trying to cheap out as much as reasonably possible, yeah...

So...yeah. Is this a great machine? Well, not really. It'll get the job done. 

Btw, full disclaimer, have not tested this build, do not own it, I'm just spitballing here, do your own research. But yeah.

Point is...you DO NOT need to spend $1050 on a gaming PC, even today. I'd say the floor is about $650, with the steam machine's equivalent performance coming in around $750. 

This actually is a relatively good experiment because it shows me PC gaming isnt really dead. But yeah. This isn't the best machine either. And heck, if you wanted to make further compromises, you could probably get it to $600 by going with a cheaper non wifi build and going with the 6 GB 3050, which absolutely WONT run certain games with a hard 8 GB requirement, but it's still....probably the one card that's cheaper that I'd recommend if you REALLY wanted to cheap out and are fine being limited to older games.

So yeah, the even LOWER floor at $600.  Would I recommend THIS? Only if you're fine with the compromises I mentioned, I mean it will still kick the crap out of not having ANY GPU at all, but yeah, it's below what I'd consider is acceptable today. It's also the kind of PC you'd have to hard wire since it has no built in wifi. 

But yeah. That's the cheapest you can realistically go. I wouldnt recommend going THAT low, if anything I'd probably want to spend a bit more on more quality components here, but yeah, these are options...that's the wonderful thing, PC gives you tons of options and choice, you can make whatever you want. These are just the cheapest things i could possibly come up with.

And again, disclaimer, do your own research before purchasing, I'm recommending this with minimal research myself, it's more an intellectual challenge to prove it can be done, at least in theory.