Our previous £800 build, published in March, used an RTX 4060 and a 16GB DDR5 kit that cost about £45. Neither is possible now. New RTX 40-series cards have more or less disappeared from UK listings, and ramprices.uk's tracker shows the median price per gigabyte of DDR5 roughly three times what it was a year ago. We have rebuilt the guide from scratch around what you can actually buy today.
The honest answer is that £800 no longer buys a sensible new AM5 or DDR5 gaming PC. It still buys a good 1080p machine, but only on AMD's older AM4 platform with DDR4 memory. That is what this guide recommends, along with the trade-offs.
Forge PC has not built or bench-tested this exact system. The parts list is based on manufacturer specifications and published reviews, which are credited below. All prices are approximate lowest UK prices for new stock, checked on 12 November 2026. They exclude Windows, a monitor and peripherals.
The short version
The £800 build: Ryzen 5 5500F, B550 board, 16GB DDR4-3200, Intel Arc B570 10GB, 1TB NVMe SSD, 650W PSU, case. About £792.
The safer graphics option: swap in an RTX 5050 for about £858. Tom's Hardware sees it as the safer choice, and it is much faster with ray tracing in Tom's testing, but it has only 8GB of VRAM.
Stretch pick: a Ryzen 5 5600 and RTX 5060 for about £973.
Why not AM5? At today's prices the move to AM5 and DDR5 adds about £218 to the core of the build before you have bought a better graphics card.
Who it's for: 1080p gaming at medium to high settings, and people happy to upgrade the graphics card later.
The £800 build
Part | Our pick | Approx. price |
|---|
Processor | AMD Ryzen 5 5500F (6 cores, cooler included) | £85 |
Motherboard | Gigabyte B550M Aorus Elite (micro-ATX) | £87 |
Memory | 16GB (2x8GB) DDR4-3200 CL16 (Netac) | £111 |
Graphics card | Intel Arc B570 10GB (ASRock Challenger) | £284 |
Storage | Kingston NV3 1TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe | £130 |
Power supply | MSI MAG A650BN PCIE5 II (650W, 80 Plus Bronze) | £45 |
Case | Montech XR (three 120mm ARGB fans included) | £50 |
Total | | about £792 |
The processor, motherboard, SSD, power supply and case prices are from Scan. The memory price is the cheapest 2x8GB DDR4-3200 CL16 kit on ramprices.uk's Amazon.co.uk tracker. The graphics card price is the cheapest new listing on SpecPrice's UK tracker. Each of those figures was checked on 12 November.
Why each part
Processor: Ryzen 5 5500F
The Ryzen 5 5500F is a six-core, 12-thread AM4 chip. AMD's specifications list a boost clock of up to 4.4GHz, a 65W TDP, PCIe 4.0 support and a Wraith Stealth cooler in the box, so you don't need to buy a cooler. As an "F" model it has no integrated graphics, which doesn't matter in a PC with a graphics card. It has 16MB of L3 cache, half the 32MB of the Ryzen 5 5600.
That cache difference is why the Ryzen 5 5600 (about £125) is the chip we would pick if you can find another £40. Games tend to respond well to extra cache, which is the whole idea behind AMD's X3D processors. We haven't tested the 5500F, though, so we can't tell you how big the gap is. Avoid the older non-F Ryzen 5 5500 even though it is slightly cheaper: Scan lists it as PCIe 3.0, which would halve the bandwidth available to an eight-lane card such as the Arc B570.
Motherboard: Gigabyte B550M Aorus Elite
AMD's B550 chipset gives you PCIe 4.0 for the graphics card and main SSD. Gigabyte's board has two M.2 slots, according to Scan's listing. Cheaper A520 boards exist, but they run at PCIe 3.0. The Ryzen 5 5500F is a recent addition to AMD's AM4 range, so check Gigabyte's CPU support list for the minimum BIOS version it needs. If the board in stock might have an older BIOS, ask the retailer, or choose the long-established Ryzen 5 5600 instead.
Memory: 16GB DDR4-3200
Our RAM guide recommends 32GB for a new gaming PC in 2026, with 16GB as the floor. At this budget the floor is the right call: a 32GB DDR4 kit cost about £198 on 12 November, and that extra £87 would come out of the graphics card budget. Buy a two-stick kit so the memory runs in dual channel, and you can add a second pair later.
Graphics card: Intel Arc B570 10GB
The Arc B570 was the cheapest current graphics card on SpecPrice's UK list on 12 November, and it has 10GB of memory, more than the 8GB on NVIDIA's RTX 5050 and RTX 5060. Intel's specifications give it 10GB of GDDR6 on a 160-bit bus, 380GB/s of bandwidth, a PCIe 4.0 x8 interface and 150W total board power.
In Tom's Hardware's GPU hierarchy (updated 24 June 2026), the B570 averaged 63.5fps across 11 raster games at 1080p ultra, against 69.3fps for the RTX 5050. The gap is much wider in Tom's ray tracing tests at 1080p ultra, where the RTX 5050 averaged 31.2fps to the B570's 19.8fps. Tom's Hardware also says recent software problems, which took months to fix, made it consider the B570 "more of a gamble" than a firm recommendation, although those issues were eventually corrected.
Two practical notes. Intel's support guidance for its earlier Arc A-series cards says Resizable BAR (AMD calls it Smart Access Memory) must be switched on in the BIOS for optimal performance, and we would treat the B570 the same way. B550 boards support the feature. Also, the £284 price was from a single retailer (GamingKit) on 12 November, so it may not last.
Storage: 1TB NVMe
With modern games often taking 100GB or more, a 500GB drive is a false economy. Kingston quotes the 1TB NV3 at up to 6,000MB/s reads. That's plenty for gaming: our SSD guide explains why faster drives make little difference to load times.
Power supply and case
NVIDIA lists 550W as the required system power for both the RTX 5050 and the RTX 5060, so a 650W unit leaves headroom for the upgrades below. The Montech XR comes with three ARGB fans, which saves buying fans separately.
Two other ways to spend the money
Build | Change from the £800 build | Approx. total |
|---|
Safer GeForce | RTX 5050 8GB (£350) instead of the Arc B570 | £858 |
Stretch | Ryzen 5 5600 (£125) and RTX 5060 8GB (£425) | £973 |
Choose the RTX 5050 if you want NVIDIA's drivers, DLSS upscaling and much better ray tracing, and you're mostly playing esports or older titles. The catch is 8GB of VRAM. TechSpot's testing has repeatedly shown 8GB cards running out of memory in newer games at high settings. See our VRAM guide.
Choose the stretch build if you can find another £180 or so. In Tom's Hardware's hierarchy, the RTX 5060 averaged 88.5fps at 1080p ultra in raster games, about 28 per cent more than the RTX 5050. It is still an 8GB card, though. If you can reach about £1,100, a 16GB RX 9060 XT is the better long-term buy, as our £1,200 guide explains.
What about AM5?
The AM5 socket is the better long-term platform. AMD said at Computex 2026 that it will support AM5 through 2029. AM4 is still getting the odd new chip, including the Ryzen 5 5500F and a Ryzen 7 5800X3D 10th Anniversary Edition this year, but they all use the 2020-era Zen 3 design, so there is little room left to upgrade. But here is the cost on 12 November of moving the core of this build to AM5:
AM5 core | Approx. price |
|---|
Ryzen 5 9600X | £160 |
MSI PRO B840M-B | £90 |
16GB (2x8GB) DDR5-5600 (Team Elite) | £231 |
Arctic Freezer 36 cooler (the 9600X has none in the box) | £20 |
Total | about £501 |
That is about £218 more than the AM4 processor, board and memory above, which would push this build to roughly £1,010 with the same graphics card. For an £800 budget, AM4 now makes more sense. If you expect to upgrade the processor in a couple of years, save up for AM5 instead. Our CPU guide covers the options.
What about a pre-built PC?
Pre-built systems aren't escaping the memory crunch either. On 12 November, Scan's own Scan Gamer RTX system with a Ryzen 5 8400F, 16GB of DDR5, an RTX 5050 and a 1TB SSD cost £1,179.98. That price includes Windows 11, assembly and a system warranty, none of which are in this parts list, and it uses the newer AM5 platform. Even so, it costs about £320 more than our RTX 5050 version of this build, before you add Windows to ours. A Windows 11 Home licence is £119.99 from Microsoft's UK store.
Where to buy
Scan, Overclockers UK, Box, AWD-IT, CCL and Amazon UK all sell these parts. Prices move daily, so compare the whole basket rather than chasing the cheapest single item. With Black Friday on 27 November, check our Black Friday guide for which deals are worth having.
Our verdict
In November 2026, £800 buys a capable 1080p gaming PC if you accept AM4 and DDR4. The Ryzen 5 5500F, Arc B570 and 16GB of DDR4 come in at about £792 with a 1TB SSD. If the B570's software track record worries you, the RTX 5050 version is the safer, slightly faster option for about £858. If you can stretch closer to £1,000, the Ryzen 5 5600 and RTX 5060 make a meaningfully quicker machine. Just don't let anyone sell you an "AM5 gaming PC for £800" without checking what has been cut to hit that price.
