$800 Build PC for Gaming & Productivity

Antec Dapper Dark Phantom DP301M

 If you can stretch your budget up to $800, you can build a PC with the ability to play games, broadcast your gaming to Twitch  and even do some serious photo editing.
For the best $800 PC build for gaming and productivity, we chose Intel’s Core i5-11400. For less than $200, this CPU offers 6 cores and 12 threads with a maximum boost clock of 4.4 GHz and a competent cooler in the box. This Rocket Lake processor easily beats AMD’s now-dated Ryzen 5 3600 (see Intel Core i5-11400 vs AMD Ryzen 5 3600) in gaming and productivity.

For GPU, we recommend the Nvidia GTX 1660 Super, which retailed for around $249 before the current shortage. With this card and the Core i5-11400, you should be able to play mid-range games at high settings and even high-end games should look decent at 1080p.

The Asus Prime H570M-Plus motherboard is a feature-rich, but affordable choice that has such extras as USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports, Thunderbolt 4 headers and dual M.2 ports. And it supports PCIe 4.0 so you can get a super high-end SSD like the Samsung 980 PRO at a later date.

We picked the WD Blue SN550 SSD again, but jumped up to 1TB capacity, which provides plenty of room for games and media files while offering sequential read and write speeds of 2,400 and 1,750 MBps, respectively.

The Antec Dapper Dark Phantom DP301M case is a great value. While it’s not full-featured enough to make our list of the best PC cases, it is easy to build in and has excellent cable management, along with a tempered-glass side panel for under $60. It also has an attractive RGB light panel on its front, though you can only control it using a button and not via software.