In the modern age of computing and technology, many will be surprised at what a $500 budget can get you. Long gone are the days of console domination, you can now get a PC for under $500 that can pretty much hold it's own against any of the top console contenders. With that, let's take a closer look at what makes this build, what we can expect in terms of performance, and what compromises were made along the way to stick to that strict price budget.

Budget - As you can imagine, putting together the best custom PC build for under $500 was no easy task. Many compromises were made along the way to be able to extract the maximum level of performance out of this build. Let's start with the hard drive. Unlike our $400 build, the $500 only comes with 240GB of SSD storage. Even though this is a sizeable chunk smaller, it was still worth reducing in order to accommodate the RX 570 GPU. This is where the main performance difference between the $400 and the $500 builds comes from.

The case was another area of compromise. We had to go for the Thermaltake Versa H22 over something a little more aesthetically pleasing. Even though we compromised on looks, we still wanted to use a case that was user-friendly and easy for first-time builders to use. The Thermaltake ticked all the right boxes in this department.

Performance - From a performance standpoint, both AMD and Intel builds are pretty closely matched here. As a collective, we'd expect them both to be able to handle 1080p/60FPS gaming across the most popular AAA game titles. We can thank the quality of modern-day CPUs and the powerful GPU for these build characteristics. Furthermore, both showcase excellent multi-tasking and workload tasks such as video editing and image rendering. The AMD build is better equipped for these kinds of tasks, but both can perform them to acceptable levels. You wouldn't want to go too hard on the rendering though.

AMD Vs Intel - The AMD motherboard is a new MSI ProSeries MAX B450 which comes with Ryzen 3rd Gen support. This means the AMD build is fully ready for future upgrades when the day arrives. The Intel comes with an equally impressive CPU and a like-for-like motherboard. Both CPUs should push the GPU to its limit and you won't be in danger of bottlenecking anytime soon.

You'll probably notice that the Intel build is a fair bit more expensive than the AMD, and that's simply down to Intel products being more expensive than AMD's right now. It's a real struggle to piece together an Intel build that lives up to our performance requirements and is future-proof. We toyed with the idea of using an 8th gen CPU, but overall we found it just wasn't up to scratch with our needs.