With the Christmas holidays fast approaching, gamers will once again enjoy their well-deserved gaming break from studies or work at their homes or at internet cafes. Enjoying games going from Dota 2 sessions with your friends to playing Witcher 3 in ultra-settings with a cold beer on the side. However, with outdated PCs at internet cafes or at home, awesome games such as AC3 (which is free this December) may not run even with the lowest settings possible.

Our struggles with saving up money for a full-fledged gaming pc may come into play. However, with our PHP 20k PC Build guide, we’ll guide you along to build your PC with just PHP 20,000. In this article, we have prepared 3 builds for 3 different situations.

Build 1: Kaby Lake Ready Build

This build may be quite imbalanced, but it is meant to be that way. It is aimed for those who can upgrade the PC within 1-2 years’ time. We chose a cheap processor to be a placeholder until Kaby Lake releases, which should be around Q1 2017. With the money saved, we shifted the budget into building a more future proof pc build with some nice aesthetics to boot.

It should be noted that this doesn’t include the monitor and the essential peripherals.

The first build features a G4400 paired with a 1050Ti which shouldn’t bottleneck too much except for CPU-intensive games. Overall, this build can play games on 1080p decently with CPU-intensive settings, such as rendering, turned down.

Upgradeability wise, the Gigabyte H110M motherboard is Kaby-Ready through a bios update recently, letting you be able to purchase a Kaby Lake processor, another 8gb stick of ram, an SSD, and interestingly, a GTX 1070 given the PSU headroom.

Build 2: Balanced Build

Our second build caters more to people who won’t be upgrading their pc for around 2-3 years. The weaknesses of the first build was ironed out to create a more balanced setup. This comes with a drawback of downgrading other components to still fit in the PHP 20k budget.

It should be noted that this doesn’t include the monitor and the essential peripherals.

This build utilizes the combination of the 6^th gen i3 processor and a Pascal based GTX 1050. There is a big jump in performance from the G4400 to the i3 6100 mainly because of hyperthreading. Most modern application nowadays utilize four cores or more as it is very common to PCs nowadays. This build can run mainstream games on 1080p while AAA titles’ settings slightly turned down to get decent fps.

The MSI H110M motherboard is also Kaby-Ready in case the owner wants to upgrade in the future. I suggest going for an SSD and another 8gb of RAM before doing any upgrades to the other components. Do note that in case of upgrades to the GPU, I suggest going for a GPU with a maximum of only one 6-pin power connector such as the GTX 1060. It is because the PSU despite having a 500w label at the box, is only rated at 350w with a ‘peak’ load of 500w.

Build 3: Complete package

At PHP 20k, it is quite hard to build a brand new PC with monitor and peripherals and still claim it as decent enough to play at 1080p. I highly suggest going for a 2^nd hand PC if you really want to have a decent PC at this price range. Or better yet, save a little bit more and follow our PHP 30,000 Build Guide. Nonetheless, here is what we managed to do with a PHP 20k budget. Readers who will opt for this build must bear in mind that this build doesn’t really have room for significant upgrades except adding on a discrete GPU since the FM2+ platform is aimed for low end PCs.

In this build, we will be using AMD’s APU lineup due to budget constraints. The A10 7860k is a 4 core processor which is quite capable for its price with its main advantage of having 2x the power of Intel Skylake’s IGP. Having no discrete GPU also equates to low power consumption at only 176w peak load.

We chose the Philips since it delivers the best value for money for its 1080p IPS panel. Peripherals on the other hand is chosen due to Logitech’s reputation for fantastic durability.

You can also chose to buy a discrete GPU down the road and still keep the processor since it is actually a bit more powerful than the G4400. It can run mainstream games like Dota 2, CSGO, & etc. at 1080p without having the need for a discrete GPU.

With the impending release of next gen processors and graphics cards, you might be thinking of holding off for the next generation chips’ release. But this has been the case for the past few years, with every generation going by year after year. But for now, these are the setups that PHP 20,000 can buy for 2016.

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