Black Friday sales bring something for everyone, be it a budget gamer or an enthusiast interested in playing at the highest possible resolution and maximum settings. This is the convenience offered by a PC, the freedom of choice and price.
Just like any gaming build, it is important to first finalize the resolution one wants to play at.
The resolution is what determines what graphics card can run that resolution at a stable 60 FPS, at the very least. After this, one must select a CPU that appropriately complements the GPU to prevent any bottlenecks. Finally, with a selection of good RAM, a fast SSD, and a compatible motherboard, a build stands complete.
This list was curated with a budget of $600 in mind and the recommended components were accordingly verified for compatibility. Let’s look at all the parts that are available to purchase during the Black Friday sales and can run 1080p at 60 FPS easily, from high to ultra settings.
Note: The recommended build reflects the writer's opinion and the performance may vary depending on other components like PSU.
5 deals worth getting for budget gaming during Black Friday Sale
1) G.SKILL Trident Z RGB 16GB (2 x 8GB) RAM DDR4 3600 (for $68.99 on Newegg)
After CPU and GPU, the most crucial component for maximum possible frames per second is a fast RAM. G.Skill’s Trident offers just that and more. Most developers recommend a minimum of 8 GB of RAM to play comfortably. 16 GB, on the other hand, ensures that your system is future-proof for the next four to five years at least.
The frequency of this RAM sits at 3600 Mhz, which is as good as modern RAMs get. CAS latency of 16 sets this model apart in this price range. To put it simply, the lower the CAS latency, the better the communication between the CPU and RAM, and thus an increase in frames per second. It would be criminal to ignore this deal during Black Friday sales.
2) Samsung 980 M.2 2280 1TB NVMe SSD PCI-Express 3.0 (for $79.99 on Newegg)
The next part of this 1080p budget build is a Gen 3 NVMe from Samsung. It is recommended over Gen 4 NVMe because the price-to-performance ratio of a Gen 4 isn't justified at the moment.
Even with a Gen 3 NVMe, one can notice blazing fast loading times not just for Windows, but for any application and modern games as well. It boasts Read and Write speeds of 3500 Mbps and 3000 Mbps, respectively. This ensures drastically improved map load time for newer games when compared to the hard disk drives of older generations.
3) ASRock B550 Phantom Gaming AM4 Motherboard (for $84.99 on Newegg)
A motherboard to pair with the components, which also offers WiFi A/C compatibility, would be the cheap but reliable B550 from ASRock. It also supports lighting for RGB enthusiasts, and it is also possible to turn it off from the BIOS settings.
What sets this motherboard apart in this price bracket is the support for WiFi, the caveat being that an adapter is needed to use the system, which is unfortunately not included in the box. Even then, this deal is worth grabbing during Black Friday sales.
4) AMD Ryzen 5 5500 6-Core AM4 65W Desktop Processor (for $99 on Newegg)
The Ryzen 5 5500 is a great budget gaming offering from AMD that is a good fit for the GPU recommended in this build, the RX 6600. This will prevent the graphics card being bottlenecked as the CPU is more than capable of processing calculations at a pace where it can easily keep up with the demands of the RX 6600.
The fact that Ryzen 5 5500 is a six-core CPU also makes it worthy to be a daily driver for anything apart from gaming. AMD’s Smart Access Memory feature allows both the AMD CPU and GPU to communicate better and deliver improved frames per second. This combination couldn’t be better thanks to incredible prices during the Black Friday sales.
5) MSI Mech Radeon RX 6600 8GB GDDR6 PCI Express 4.0 (for $239.99 on Newegg
The RX 6600 from AMD is a capable card that efficiently runs 1080p at 60 FPS or higher on almost all AAA titles. The 8 GB DDR6 memory leaves enough VRAM space to increase settings like shadow quality, something that adds to esthetics and not actual gameplay.
The RTX 3060 and RTX 3050 are also good cards with 1080p in mind, but the value proposition from AMD’s offering is simply unchallenged. The RX 6600 supports HDMI 2.1 and Display port 1.4, so there is no shortage of connectivity options. At $239.99, this is an incredible deal that is hard to resist during the Black Friday sales' period.
With this, the $600 budget-oriented gaming build is complete. It does reflect the times when such a construction is considered a budget build, but this is also as good as it gets with the current prices at an all-time low for the Black Friday sales period.