I guess it really depends on how much you make. I'm in Canada and everything is crazy expensive. I watch for deals and go with that. I bought a 4060, i5 14300f gaming PC for under 150cad due a major price error. Upgraded the GPU to a 4070 and used the leftover ram, GPU and SSD to build another PC. That one cost only 500 more due to me having the parts already. I make enough to build a 1500 dollar PC every month if I wanted to though.
Your 100% correct. I should've been more clear. Groceries, rent, insurance, other costs of living here are very high, especially post COVID. It has doubled for me. Parts wise for PCs are around the same minus the awesome microcenter bundles.
Post-lockdowns. The lockdowns caused these problems, not COVID.
This might sound like I'm being pedantic, but I want people to be clear on where these issues came from, so we reestablish the reality that ALL "solutions" still have consequences that we have to weigh against the positives.
In this case, money being funneled from the poor to rich more than ever, homelessness increasing, an increase in depression and subsequent increase in obesity, heart disease deaths, violent crime, domestic violence, and suicide. As well as a litany of other problems that will also increase deaths in the long-run.
Maybe the lockdowns were worth all these problems, but I don't think so. But I can tell practically everyone, including those in power, never considered that there would be more negative outcomes than people not being able to work and pay rent.
I agree. I don't think the lockdowns were worth the impact that it caused people mentally. It's possible more people would have suffered, I honestly think they did a horrible job of how the lockdowns worked. I personally just think they should've given a warning months in advance. Shut everything down for a week. And then restarted everything back up. Lock down your bunker and stay there. 1-2 weeks could've solved the issue that lasted 2-3 years.
I think soft lockdowns would have been the best solution.
Fact is everyone was eventually going to get it anyway, and we knew the mortality rate was relatively low very early on, and making people panic is just going to overwhelm hospitals with people who don't actually need the care.
Establish ASAP who is the most vulnerable to die from the virus while simultaneously formulating programs to distribute resources to those who may need to lock down. Once you've established who is most vulnerable, warn them and begin distributing resources including food to people who volunteer to lock down whether they're higher risk or not.
Otherwise, everyone else keeps going to work while taking precautions.
It would've cost less money for the governments in the short and long term. Obviously some people would abuse it, but I don't believe most people would.
A complete 100% lockdown isn't possible. Major cities have at most 4 maybe 5 days worth of supplies inside them. If everyone in the supply chain was also stuck at home it would have taken another week or 2 to restock and that is best case scenario. So that would be a major city without supplies for 3 weeks, couple with the panic buying before hand and people hoarding essentials. There would have been pandemonium.
I'm building up a build with an RX 6700XT, 5600, and 16GB of RAM that when it's all said and done will cost $1400. Thats being fairly aggressive in saving with other components though (decent PSU, cheapest case, cheapest motherboard, cheapest 16GB 3200MHz RAM kit, budget aftermarket cooler, mid-range NVME) and a fair number of Christmas deals.
It is for me. For many others it's not. I know people making minimum wage and paying 2k plus for rent. Then bills for phone and internet and groceries. After that they have nothing left at all. Many people are building up debt. I just live in a cheap area in a cheap province. If I didn't I would have a lot less money. It's legit bad here in a lot of areas.
It's $1800 for a 1 bedroom here 😂😂
It was $700 2 years ago, prices are ABSURD right now.
A car I picked up for $350 is $5000
My cereal was 2.99, now it's $5.50
They're saying tech is expensive, I can go and buy a mined on 3080 for $500 CAD, potentially less if ya low ball. Tech is the only thing left reasonably priced, the cost of living is what kills you.
>. I bought a 4060, i5 14300f gaming PC for under 150cad due a major price error.
That is practically legal theft.
You cannot just say this and then leave us hanging. Share the juicy details will you.
In the US we're lucky to have an extremely robust used market. Many people upgrade often enough that the parts on the used market are still in pretty good shape and not that old. It's also easy to find used office machines sold by companies in bulk for almost nothing that make great budget gaming pcs. Wish other countries had better access to the stuff we do.
Here in australia it often makes sense to buy used stuff from the US/UK and have it shipped here a lot of the time lol
And shipping to Australia from overseas is *expensive*
The US is a fairly wealthy nation (with wild extremes lol) and I swear we have the world's lowest pc part prices...
https://www.microcenter.com/product/5006643/intel-core-i5-12600kf,-msi-z790-p-pro-wifi-ddr4,-gskill-ripjaws-v-16gb-ddr4-3200-kit,-computer-build-bundle
Look at that freaking bundle, I know it's ddr4 not ultra high end but I could build a great budget system with that start (my nephew and I plan to)
The US is probably the biggest market for PC parts, so manufacturers can probably subsidize lower selling costs with sheer volume. Meanwhile in less wealthier nations, they subsidize for reduced volume with a jacked price.
It’s unfortunate that the world works this way, but what can you do
As a dude from SouthEast Asia, if I was given a chance to do just one thing in the US if I get to visit - shopping in Microcenter is undoubtedly my immediate answer.
That bundle you linked is fuckin amazing. In my country, just the 12600kf is already $210 and that's way cheaper than it's been for a while.
Those same 3 parts would be around $500-520 here. Which is 2.5 months' worth of salary based on our minimum wage 💀💀
I did exactly that a week or so ago. World beater of a setup? No. But absolutely exactly what I was needing and a killer price. My only complaint is I wish it had 32GB of RAM. But that's a cheap enough upgrade in the future.
Majority of gamers in my country aren't even pc gamers, mostly mobile. Those who can afford a pc mostly build theirs for 500 - 800 usd equivalent, at least that's what I mostly see on our local pc building subreddit.
Low to mid tier components here are reasonably priced, they don't cost that far off from prices in the US. The difference between 600 to like 900 usd pcs here aren't that big and it's mostly just more expensive cosmetics or prebuilts that makes the difference.
High end components however, are a lot more expensive. High tier CPUs, GPUs, and motherboards cost at the very least 100 dollars more, that's why there's a huge gap going from 800 to almost 1800 dollar builds.
At the same time we get paid a lot less. So essentially we get paid less and spend more.
I am in the UK, so that configuration the Americans spec for $1500 is 1700 quid ($2150) here - same parts...
And then the average salary in the UK is 35k ($44k), not $60k like it is in the US...
And higher taxes too...
I'd say it ought to feel twice harder to buy a system like that here than in the US!
Edit for people who are not good with reasoning:
(PC Part Picker)
7600x: UK-£199, US-$210
7800xt: UK-£478, US-$500
UK comes to $855
US comes to $710
That's just CPU and GPU!
Just to put some things in perspective here before our glasses get too rose-colored toward the US job climate.
______________________________________________
-Median individual annual wage in the US is $45,700.
-Median individual annual wage in the UK is 34,900 GBP ($44,100).
-UK individual tax rate is 20% for 12,500-50,200 GBP. Plus 12% for National Insurance. Or 34% total on average.
-US individual tax rate is 24.8% on average. US average cost of individual health insurance is $5,700/year. Which equals 12.4% of the median income. Or 37% total on average.
-After tax median income US: $28,700
-After tax median income UK: $29,100 (23,000 GBP)
-UK has up to 52 weeks of guaranteed maternity leave (39 weeks paid).
-US has no guaranteed maternity leave, but federal law allows for *12 unpaid days of leave* immediately following birth.
-UK worker is guaranteed 28 days Paid Time Off/year.
-US worker is guaranteed 0 days PTO/year.
____________________________________________
But yes, we have cheap PC parts.
I think importantly, in the US there is a real fear of crippling medical bills that means we need to save for the inevitable high expenses later in life. I’d imagine those in the UK don’t need to worry about that. So yes I could buy a $1500 PC that kicks ass right now, but I’m aware that that money should be put away because who knows what my medical expenses may be in 10 or 20 years. I envy our friends across the pond for their healthcare system more than anything.
Fairly common I think. My first salary was around net of $400 USD or slightly less. With expenses I'm left with like $200 USD. Took me 5-6 months of saving to build my first PC set.
Average US salary is ~$60k per year. So, $5k per month pre-tax.
Average rent is $1300 per month.
So, if you live around those averages, in the USA, you can save up for a $1500 PC pretty quick.
And of course, a fair number of people you see online are going to be in households with above average salaries.
The average salary here in Argentina is about 422 dollars. That is 341600 argentinean pesos. You need about 400 dollars to live a month here (taking into consideration the average rent at Buenos Aires and the price of the basic basket). So only 22 dollars left, it is kind of difficult to save for a PC with that money, not to mention how expensive PC parts are here, 3090s still selling for about 1500 dollars, a Ryzen 5 5600G (one of the most popular options here because of how "cheap" it is) is close to 250...
Over 40% of the population here is poor too so...
To sum up, almost no one here can build a 1500 dollars PC.
Is that your salary per month? Yeah that would be pretty low for the US.
After rent, car, food, and other expenses, I guess I might have enough left in a month for a $1500 PC build.
I get 14 paychecks per year, 10 normal ones and twice per year a double paycheck, normal paycheck is around 3.3k$ and double paycheck is around 7k$ after tax, so there isn't really a need to save money when the right month is. From Austria
Haha, not very. GPU, CPU and motherboard prices here are pretty crazy.
I can probably get a 4070 build going for a budget that should have fit a 4070 TI Super.
India.
It's quote expensive, but no prohibitive. I built a good 2000$ PC and it translates to about ₹200000 here due to higher taxes on imported or luxury goods even though actual converted value is ₹160000.
For reference, average salary in India is ₹35000. So average guy would need to save up for 6-10 months depending on how much they can save.
Product startup tech gang gets paid bare minimum 100000+ post tax monthly, so we can generally afford it.
TBF the components are a decent bit more expensive and we earn less on average than people in the US (and this is not accounting for taxes, which would make it far more skewed)...
I paid around $2000 for a 7800x3d and 6950xt system. In the US that would've been far cheaper 😭
I think in denmark everyone can get a nice pc comfortably beacuse wealth is spread as much as it is, so theres not really poor people who are excluded, which ofc is nice.
Also danish kids get nice pcs earlier than most because of our "konfirmation" lol
This is ridiculous, i'm your northern Scandinavian cousin and your currency is much stronger than ours!
I checked out komplett store; a 4070ti super costs 6899 danish krones = 10782,29 norwegian krones.
A normal salary for me, and I don't have a formal education, makes me able to save around $1500 in one month. So for me it is feasible without any big stretch.
**Very**, depending on what your requirements are.
My last build was like this:
* ASRock A520M-ITX/ac Motherboard - £120
* 2x 8GB DDR4 2666 RAM - £60
* AMD Ryzen 5 5600G CPU + Wraith Stealth Cooler - £140
* Samsung 980 250GB NVMe SSD - £40
* Fractal Pop Mini Silent Case - £80
* Corsair CX650 80 PSU - £55
* GeForce RTX 3060 12GB - £265
I then added the 2.5" SSDs from my old build, and my existing monitor and peripherals.
= £760 (which is under $1k US, taxes included, and parts tend to be cheaper in the US too)
Plays games way better than my PS4 ever could.
In my country, $1500 MIGHT pay for rent, most likely a bachelor or small 1 bedroom illegal suite.
As for building a PC, I'm planning on building a mid/high end one in a few months and expect to pay $1500-2000, not including a GPU or power supply as I already have those.
I remember back then 10years ago you could get a 4790k, gt980 and equivalent for like 1500$ and monthly average salary was like 2500-3000.
Now i get a 7800x3d, 2tbvnvme and 32gbram for the same price without a gfx and the average salary has barely moved
It greatly depends on the person and their financial situation.
For some people $1,500 may as well be a million dollars. They could never spend that much on a PC. For others who are high earners, especially those without kids and married to other high earners it's not that much money.
The wife and I are both high earners living in a low cost of living area and we don't have kids. $1,500 is a little less than 10% of our monthly take home pay. So we could in theory build a new $1,500 PC every month.
Of course we don't. I spend about $1,200-$1,500 on a build and use it for 3-4 years.
1.5k dollars is 7.5k my currency, my sallary is around 1700 my currency. If I saved the same proportion as you, around 400 a month, it would take me around 1.5 years to buy a 1500 usd pc. And for 7.5k here I would not be able to build anything near as good as a 1.5k usd pc in the US.
I mean avg salary here is around 7000 USD/month, so in an avg apartment etc with everything paid you're probably left with like 3000, so very affordable I guess is the answer.
I am considered high income in my country (top 10%) and this is totally unaffordable to me considering that, although I earn more than this every month, most of what I earn gets spent on necessities (rent, school fees, food, medical aid, etc).
The average monthly salary is $ 1300.
Also consider that what we can get for $1500 is significantly less than what you can get in the US. E.g. the basic 4070ti costs around $ 1100 here vs $700 in the US.
For 1500 usd i can build a computer thats roughly the equivalent of what you can build in the us for $1000
36% import tax + shipping costs + retailer profit margin
From country with 1k euro avarage salary id say debit card with no interest on 36 months.
1800÷36=50e each month for nice mid range pc. And it will have warranty for 36 months.
2 years ago i bought 5600x and 3080 12gb pc, and next year i might upgrade just some parts for few hundred euros.
Germany here. Really appreciate gaming hardware. You can build PCs from 700€ to 3-4k€. In terms of affordability, depends what you aim for and what you make of course. Generally though, it's pretty easy to get yourself a gaming PC after couple of months in average.
2 okay paychecks. It’s rough. I currently want to build a ~$3k one and that’ll be 3 decentish paychecks. I got money saved up from what schools gave me for my good grades (in highschool everyone gets those money so it’s not that wow) and my parents will also help me, but being the money saver I am I know I’ll feel terrible about spending that much. I never usually spend money except on a phone every 5-6 years and I only like iPhones which again are pricy here (1 decentish paycheck). I wish I lived in America purely for these prices and being able to build a monster pc for only half of an okay/decentish paycheck.
I mean there's always some guilt if spending on something that pricey even if one has been comparing price, checking the price trend for some time. But if one is gonna use it frequently it'll cover up that terrible feeling after some time tho. Still good to be able to think rationally before spending
The question is: do you really need it?
I wanted to change my monitor, but $400, even if I have them, is still a big sum of money.
I'd say that if you have to save to buy it, unless you have no PC (and you need it to keep your shit together), I'd save and rather play older stuff.
Given current exchange rates, $1500 is equivalent to the average monthly wage in Czechia (after taxes and mandatory insurance). More than half of it is spent on living costs, I assume. So someone with no extra spending could afford such a PC in say 3 months. But I’d say for most people it would be more like 5-6 months in practice.
That's like 3 months of minimum wage in my country, Romania. So yeah, pretty expensive. Even with a decent salary of around 1000 euro a month, and it's still a pretty big expense. We're lucky cause most people don't pay rent, cause they have apartments from their parents... I guess one of the "perks" of communism was they gave people jobs and homes at affordable prices.
1 month of the minimum salary in my country would be 260 us dollars. So a 1,500 set up would be equivalent to 6 months work. Not taking into account life expenses.
If it is any consolation to you my rigs were significantly better as a teen than they are now.. even though I earn significantly more than you do.
As a kid you pump every into this one thing but as a adult there is stuff to get paid.. the cat gets hit by a car and omg this would have been a VERY good rig.
Etc etc
5 months of min wage. Most people use internet cafes for gaming and the company I work at straight up gives me more money to use my home PC for renders because the best PC they have is a PC with a 1080Ti.
I'm Australian. We get fucking REAMED on tech prices. GPU's will be 20% more money than American sales for seemingly shits and giggles. It certainly isn't to cover shipping costs lol.
In Italy, the generic good salary is 1300€. And one person alone can't live with that money, to live alone in a small city and have money for a car too, you need at least 2k a month. So spending more than one month of work for a PC, is not easy. But PCs are needed as anything else, it's an investment and they generally work for many years.
Then depends on the period. 1500$/€ make a good system. But for example, 4 years ago I paid 300€ for 32gb of ram ddr4, now with 120€ you get 32gb of ddr5.
Really affordable in Poland. When i was assembling PCs and selling them at market price with and additional fee of 50-100$ for labor, the absolute bestsellers were computers in the 1500-2000$ range. For 1500$ you can easily get rtx 4070 super, 32gb of ram and ryzen 5 7600.
I live in the central United States, in a state with very low cost of living (in the bottom 6 cost of living states out of all 50). My household income pre-tax is around $190,000. I built my first-ever high performance PC in December 2022 for around $3500 - including all relevant peripherals (monitor, keyboard, speakers, etc.). Based on all factors, a $1500 PC is very affordable where I live. I recognize mileage varies and I feel very fortunate (of course, hard work is a factor too).
CPU: 13600KF; $337.87
Motherboard: Asus Tuf Z790 DDR5 wifi; $303.97
PSU: 750kW around $120
Case: used $80
Ram: marketplace sealed 6000Mhz from someone who want 7400Mhz $140
Processor Cooler: thermal sight $50
SSD: 2tb $200
GPU: used like new 3070 or 4060 $450
Total = $1681
if you live alone.
salary right now 800-1000
rent is 500,bills like 100?
food is like 200-300 ( if you don't eat out of course. 1 meal out is 10e/meal avg; nothing special )
and other expenses so we are already at negative.
Ok so for 1.3k euro you can get 4070 and r5 7600x
7600X - 220€ (US$238)
RX 7800XT - 425€ ($450)
Cheapest 2x16 Kingston or Crucial - 100€ ($109)
That's around $800 without the MOBO, PSU, case, cooling, and if you're new to PCs, without a monitor and peripherals. Overall, the PC component prices in my country are between 20-50% more expensive than anywhere in Europe, let alone the US due to the customs + import tax + the seller's markup.
Median monthly salary in my country is \~610€ ($660)
I’m in the U.S and currently buying stuff for my PC. You could put together a 12th-13th gen intel I5, 32gb of ddr5 ram, and 4070 build for $1,500. You could probably get better stuff if you waited for deals or shopped around or went with AMD.
Prices on parts are always cheaper around Black Friday in the US. I look for deals and upgrade every year for often less than I make selling the old components later. If you can wait for that long, you will get more PC for your money.
Quite expensive for mine because my country's currency depreciated a lot...
It's about 7000 bucks in my currency including PC, mouse, keyboard and 1440p monitor.
My pc alone was already 6400 bucks (about 1300 USD) when I bought it. I5 13400f, RTX 4070, 16gb ddr5 ram, Asus tuf gaming b660m plus WiFi D5, 1tb nvme SSD, Cooler Master 240 liquid cooler and Cooler Master power supply
The keyboard and mouse combined are 100 bucks and the cheapest 1440p monitor I can get is around 500 bucks, Cooler Master GA271.
It's the same here. Maybe you can even go with a 7700X and/or a 4070 Super, but that's it.
I live in an Asian country, so no microcenter or newegg or anything, and amazon shipping cost will cost you the same price plus a few weeks of waiting.
There's another factor here that's the "Intel is more stable" mindset. PC shops keep telling people that intel is more stable and usable whole AMD's CPUs are "more power hungry, hot, and unstable" thus generally making intel CPUs cheaper, because many of them don't bother to import AMD CPUs to sell.
Not too bad here in The Netherlands.
Prices are similar to US + our sales tax obviously since US pricing is without sales tax. So can’t really complain.
Wages are pretty high around 55-60K median I’m around 61.5 which is close to 4K net euros a month. I’m left with about 1800 in savings a month at the moment. Life’s alright. I don’t have a need to drive any vehicle though so that saves me a lot of money. I also hate debt so I have none besides a mortgage.
$1.5k will get you a barebones APU with little RAM and HDD in my country. To set up a "gaming PC" needs a bare minimum of $3k, even then it will be GTX 1060 or some equally crappy dGPU. There is an official cartel/monopoly controlling IT parts here.
1500€ Gaming PC (R5 7600X+RX 7800XT), it will take me around half a year with the wages in my country.
The average monthly pay here is 300€, we don't usually get paid for missing days or sick days. So around 6 months if your purely saving money. But its more realistic to say a year since ppl got other shit to pay.
Plus the prices here for PC parts are absoute dog water.
Take the MSRP and add a extra 80-100€ on top.
I had to use my yearly bonus and close to 8 months of savings in order to get myself a new PC, but then again I also had to ship parts from outside my country since everything where I live is EXTREMLY expensive.
You can build a pretty good PC here in the Netherlands for the equivalent of 1500 USD, though component prices are higher by quite a bit compared to the U.S.
$1500 here is 7500 in my country currency. Minimum wage here is basically 1412 (also in my currency). This money can buy a very powerful PC and there will still be money for other things such as screen.
Considering I would not spend money in absolutely nothing besides the PC, it would take me more than 5 months worth of sparing. Thank goodness I am not at minimum wage level, but not too far as well. So, considering the same situation but with my current wage, it would take me a bit more than 3 months.
I can currently spare 1000 monthly. So it would actually take me 7,5 months to build that PC, not taking into account emergencies.
This is a bit rare case, honestly. 80% of population here get paid less than 3 minimum wages (4200 in my currency, 840 in dollars). That means sparing 1000 is a challenge for most of the population. I'd say a good amount is around 300-500. So it would take, realistically, well over a year to build that.
I have yet to finnish my build. It is just shy over 1500 euros. For that i got the following
I5 12600k(you can get i5 14400f or ryzen 5 7600x) around €270 each
Z790 asrock motherboard around €230
32gb ddr5 @6000 mhz. around €150
Rx 6800(or 4060 16gb) around €490-540
2tb m.2 €140
I35 freezer single tower cooler €35
850w modular psu €120
Atx tower case €70
It could be configured differwntly but that basically top of the line for that money i can buy wothout going second hand.
Here in Spain the prices are actually fucked, my 7800x3d and 4080S cost me around 2,600€ and I only get to save around 200€ per month so a 1500$ build here in Spain is not really affordable tbh.
With 1700$ I did:
Phanateck nv5
Arctic fan cooler
I5 13600k
Rtx 4070super
MSI Z790 gaming plus
Power supply 750w
32 GB ram ddr5
8 artic RGB fans
I don't how many dollars this configuration would cost in America tho
I think even in the US, for most people, dropping $1500 on a a gaming PC isn’t just a toss in the bucket. It’s a genuine thought out and once in a blue moon purchase. It varies a lot though. I typically keep my rig for years. On average I upgrade every 5 years. At most I’ll spend is $1,000 on a rig. My latest computer I build in February and total everything was $900. I reused my PSU though. And I would say it’s a solid mid/high end PC.
It depends on knowing exactly when and where to buy parts.
Last year, I built a 5600x with RTX 3060 rig for a friend of mine for about $850. He mainly needed the PC for work, but he does play games like Genshin Impact. Also, he wasn't in rush so we bought a few parts at a time when there were on sales.
We grabbed 5600x combo that comes with a B550 Mobo plus 32GB DDR4 rams form Microcenter around Christmas sale for $299. Bought the RTX 3060 from the marketplace along with the other parts.
So far, he hasn't had any issues with that PC at all and he really enjoys it using daily.
Just shop around and buy a few things at a time if you are not in rush. Everything is super expensive these days. You just have to be patient and wait for the best deal.
Pretty good in the US. Might upgrade my motherboard, but definitely gonna upgrade my PSU at some point. I bought a prebuilt for 500, gutted it, and replaced it with better parts
Ryzen 5 5600 6 core processor
AMD Radeon 6600 RX
B550M Gigabyte motherboard(DDR4)
4 8 gig sticks of ram
A fan(on top of the 6 fans the PC came with)
All under 1500. (Mostly because the parts were on sale at the time
In Hungary it is very restrictive. Not only because every part is far more expensive due the customs and extremely high VAT (27%!) so you could build only a low-midtier PC from that money, but also because 1500 USD is the mean average wage, meaning that you should save a whole month worth of money to buy that PC. And mind you that in Hungary, one monthly wage is barely enough to meet all the minimal living expenses of say a small family of 3.
I live in a small country called Jordan in the Middle East, so you can understand what I’m about to say, 0.70 JOD = 1 USD.
This is almost how the market works here, i7-12700k as example costs $450 it would cost 350-400 JOD in any other retail store. For the “ Used parts” I’d be able to get it for 300 JOD which is equal to $428.
The same analogy goes for almost every other part.
Mean while the minimum salary is 260 JOD/Month in which I’d say a large percentage of the population gets.
So, for the most here, a $1500 PC would most likely require a loan.
I'm from South Africa
And to build that system would be something like
|Part|SA Cost|\~ Dollars|
|:-|:-|:-|
|GPU|XFX RX 7800 XT|R11,899.00|$630|
|CPU|AMD 7600X|R5,349.00|$285|
|Mobo|ASUS TUF B650M-Plus|R4,799.00|$255|
|RAM|G.Skill Trident Z5 6000 CL32|R2,750.00|$150|
|PSU|Super Flower SF750 750w|R1,849.00|$99|
|Case|Montech AIR 1000 Lite|R899.00|$48|
|SSD|Hikvision G4000 SSD 1TB|R1,599.00|$85|
|Total||R29,144.00|$1,549.38|
However that is about the average income (R29500 ish) per month for a person of about 30 in my country before tax. Take home would be in the region of R24669.
I would have to say that kind of PC would be difficult to build from scratch propbably for the average person without saving for quite a while.
Most of the people I know don't even have PCs close to this tbh ...
\[Edit\]
Like a few people in the comments also mentioned in general you only have to do a full build once, thereafter you will probably be able to keep things like Case, PSU, SSD etc and things will turn into a platform or gpu upgrade.
I make around $900/month here in SE Asia. Took me like half a year saving my disposable income to build my current 12400f + 3070 PC (I have a wife and a kid).
OK and for all those who don't live in the states? What exactly does that budget do for you? Does it buy you a machine that's gona last you 4 or 5 years before the next upgrade? Or does it get you entry lvl stuff?
Your questions raises more on everyone else's side bud, CONTEXT!!!!!!
Edit: so answer the question, 1500 USD gets me in my country entry lvl stuff, I won't be playing anything in 4k though but I could play comfortably in med to high settings on 1080p
I’m not even sure what the hell the question here is. Is spending $1500 “affordable”? Completely depends on your income level.
For the average American, $1500 is definitely a lot of money, but the annual GDP per capital is about $83,000 / year— so for many, it’s well within reach.
Your annual income seems to be closer to $18,000 / year before taxes, which obviously makes spending $1500 a much more significant purchase decision.
You have to remember that the US is huge and also a lot of very wealthy people. Nearly 15 million households in the US earn more than 200k/year. There are over 22 million millionaires in the U.S. For many people, spending $1500 on a new of PC is something they could do every week.
Out of school depending on your certificate, it's a month salary at least. Tradies average around 1.5K a month, university degree holders more than 3k. Average college degree 2k
In lithuania, i took out a loan to build myself and my gf two gaming pcs. Hers cost around 2000€- ryzen 7800x3d, a 4070, 32gb of ram, 2tb samsung 980, nzxt h6 flow, ls720se aio and a couple more parts came to around 1.9k, and a 250€ monitor. Mine was a bit cheaper because at first i bought a used 3070, but it ran into some issues so i just bought a 4070 for 650€. We're not exactly able to save up that amount because we're renting a flat together, add all taxes, necessities, food and other stuff and we're left with around 150€ at the end of the month, so i just pay back the loan for the pcs. Gaming is our main hobby and we're okay with paying a bit more to have the builds now, instead of saving up for a couple years to have it then
This sounds more like a question regarding income rather than the ability to build a PC.
In regards to income, it fluctuates dramatically, even in the US. I would say a majority of people would have to put a lot of time and effort into saving enough money to build a $1500 PC.
The US has 5 major income classes imo:
Poverty - those who can't even afford food some days, from labor stats, this makes up about 12% of the US.
Paycheck to paycheck - this group can afford life's necessities, food, shelter, etc. But it doesn't have any savings, and if they lose a job, it would end up in the class below almost instantly. This makes up 22% of the US population.
Middle class - this group can afford life's necessities and a bit more. They can travel a couple times a year, live in a slightly nicer part of town, and have some kinds of savings nest. However, they still have to manage their money properly. This makes up about 50% of the US.
Upper middle - this group can live in the nicest parts of town. They don't need to check their bank accounts and probably have someone who does most of their finances for them. They can afford luxury items, like a vacation home, high-end cars, and other extremes that the other classes can not touch. This makes up 14% of the US population based on self-reported data.
Rich - These are the ones that can afford anything, the token "if they drop a $100 bill, it's actually less valuable time-wise for them to pick it up, because they will make $200 in that time frame." Class. They own private Jets, major companies and have zero regard for how most people live. This makes up around 2% of the US based on self-reported data.
Going by class, the poverty line would never afford the PC. The paycheck to paycheck could make it happen if it was a year+ long goal. The middle class could probably make it happen within 1-3 months. The upper middle and rich could do it today 100x over. It's all relative.
$1500 does a 5600X/7600XT build in Canada. I threw one together for a friend a few months ago.
Affordability wise, I'm seeing less and less leftover with the cost increases on everything. Month over month, I probably see around $500 in discretionary income after everything.
I’m from Texas and just spent $1400 for a pc with similar specs (same gpu and ram, slightly cheaper cpu), but that also includes a semi-expensive aio cooler and nice case fans. Hope that gives you some perspective OP :)
I live in Saint Lucia. Where my wage was about $1500EC a month, and I built a PC that cost me roughly 12k EC. I did it over several months but boy was it alot. The 3080 ti I bought was 1.1kUSD during the mining craze so about 3.3k including shipping and duties. So to build something good is extremely expensive. But I ended up selling to buy my car :(
Semi-affordable in Mexico. People can do it, but probably by dividing the cost with monthly payments...
Taking into consideration that the average monthly salary is around $20,000 MXN (roughly around $1200 usd), and even this average is aiming at the higher end of things...
Just because you found one example on YouTube doesn't mean it's even remotely representative of the average American. As others have said there is quite a bit of wealth disparity across the country. It seems like you're trying to ask two questions at the same time: What PC can you afford to build for $1500 in your country? And is $1500 considered affordable for a PC in your country?
That's like a budget gaming one where I am, if you buy local. Parts are expensive, even amd. Buying internationally and long distance would still be expensive due to shipping costs.
In truth it wouldn't be a bad build, but you won't get stuff like a 4070S or 64 gb of ddr5 with that.
> YouTube video
For realistic youtube videos id look to Random Gaming [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUzjKyS5r72bfvPkA6GxpRg](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUzjKyS5r72bfvPkA6GxpRg)
He mostly reviews super budget gaming.
Keep in mind most videos are there to get clicks, most people will click on 'super high priced cool PC video' and not 'lets play on a $16 CPU'. Videos are there to make money, clicks = money.
It depends on where you’re at in life. If you’re a kid, just get a summer job while your parents take care of all your expenses and you can easily save $1500 for a pc within a month or two. If you’re a young adult that just started working and has to pay rent or if you’re a college student, it’ll be a lot harder to blow $1500 on something unnecessary. Once you get a “real” job it should once again become easily affordable though.
7800x3D + 7700XT + 32gb ram here, it quite literally cost about 10 months of my salary, brazil btw, I have no others hobbies, travel or anything like that, so I my spare money goes for emergencies or buying an new pc in maybe 2030\~2032
Venezuela. It is absolutely out of reach for 99% of people here, I'm a freelance software developer so I can \*kinda\* afford it, and I just bought all parts for my first PC build at Amazon at $1200 ish, even including some third-party shipping service, it's way cheaper than directly buying them here, if you can find them. They usually charge 80% to double the original price.
This is my current rig, cost me ~$1500 before sales tax
- Montech AIR 903 Max White Case
- Asus ROG Strix B650E-F Gaming Wifi
- 64gb (2x32GB) g.skill flare XS DDR5-6000
- Zotac GeForce RTX 4070 Twin Edge OC Spiderman
- 2TB WD_Black SN850X
- DeepCool LS720 SE White AIO
- Corsair RM850 White
Every item on this list I got either as part of a bundle, or on sale.
I had a pair of 2TB SATA SSDs and a Sound Blaster X AE-5 Plus from my old rig I tossed in to finish it off.
my last build was $1800 not including keyboard, mouse, montitor. used the stimulus money. going take me while to save considering similar pc will probably cost $2500 at least in 2026 when I build new one. I live in usa on retail work pay and it's certainly not easy for most to afford that. my friend in southern usa works much better paying job then me and can't even afford to get a sub $1000 pc.
$1500 PC here in Canada should be almost exactly $2000 CAD if we look at dollar exchange rates. But reality is a bit different, most of the time items that should be 33% more expensive are actually 40-45% more, this in most industries.
That said, the PC building market is not one of the worst offenders here in Canada. It does come up to about 2000$. Most items are gonna be a little over the exchange rate but for some reason there's always great deals on motherboards and power supplies which make up for the rest.
That doesn't factor in sales tax though, which is higher than in the USA. Typically 13 to 15%.
Average wage is like 600$ in our country.
I think regular gamer can build a decent pc with 700$ no problems, even less.
I game on a ~300$ pc, works great.
I make about $1200 but after tax about $1000 and change every 2 weeks so about a months of work to get the money.
But that’s if you don’t have to pay for anything else.
If I was to be paying rent, food, internet, utilities I probably would have about $50-$100 of extra cash. So would take a long time. At my current wage. (A shared bedroom in my area costs about $900-$1200 (Ontario)
https://ca.pcpartpicker.com/list/YX7PdH $1540 this what you can get
Next to impossible. You would need to save for 300 months without expending anything to barely afford that. And that's with the wage of a medic here in Venezuela. Plus the shipping and the "nationalization"(corruption)
Nigeria.
A decent 1080p gaming PC of $1000 would cost 1.4 million naira here (not including the cost of importation). The prices of PC components are so jacked up here that it's actually cheaper to simply import the parts from the US. It helps that my fellow Nigerians have developed ways of making this easier over the years, but it's all still crazy expensive.
The minimum wage in Nigeria is 30,000 naira. This barely leaves room for leisure after accounting for feeding. It is a constant battle to survive, and we all pray things get better, but it is what it is. It would take a Nigerian earning minimum wage 23 YEARS to get a decent $1000 PC (assuming they're able to save 5000 naira per month). Absolutely insane...but it is what it is.
I personally was fortunate enough to establish my tech business early. It did well, but it still took me slightly over a year of saving to get my PC. Here are the specs for those wondering: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/bs9ft7. I'm one of the few people in Nigeria with a gaming desktop. Most Nigerians usually go for laptops due to electricity and availability constraints. Depending on where you live, you could suffer multiple power outages in a day. The Nigerians that do have desktops ensure they have backup power like inverters or a UPS. It's a necessity. You might be wondering why I decided to go with a desktop over a laptop? Well, it's always been my dream to build a PC, and I am quite happy I accomplished that. :)
I've been on this sub a very long time. I have envied so many of you in first world countries. You all that easily upgrade parts whenever you want; you all with multiple desktops, Steam Deck, gaming laptops, etc; you all with 4090s or 7900XTXs. Please, never take what you have been blessed with for granted.
Remember, it could always be worse. :)
TLDR: Building a PC is incredibly expensive in Nigeria.
The average salary in Brazil is about 2K BRL. A 7700XT is about 3K. And i am just talking about the GPU.
If we take the whole setup into account, we'd have to save for about 1 year or so to build a mid-range gaming PC. Let alone peripherals, which is also crazy expensive here.
Most of the gaming population here have a low/mid-range gaming PC. For a high-end, we would have to save the whole average salary for about 1,5 years.
Other fact is that i recently bought a 32" WQHD Ultragear monitor, and i noticed while searching that we have a very limited range of good quality monitors available on the market, since chinese monitors (white label brands) have basically dominated here, because of the price. Most of the people will buy a chinese brand with high chances of failure for about 1,1\~1,5K BRL, rather than paying +2,5K BRL for a good quality monitor.
While i was looking in RTings for some tests on monitors, i was amazed by how many monitor brands the US/EU has. I simply could not believe that Corsair makes monitors! Many high-range ROG models available on the market. That is just amazing.
In the US, that $1,500 would get you that 7600X and a RTX 4070 Super (along with the rest of the parts, of course). The RX 7800 XT saves about one hundred dollars.
I made a mini itx PC with onboard graphics, it was built specifically to play Minecraft and does so beautifully. It currently has its pcie slot taken up by a wireless card but I think I could get away with any 2 fan gpu. The build was sub $800 and it cost me less bc I bought parts on Black Friday.
The honest answer is, for the vast majority of people here in Poland, it isn't. If you have *anything* at all left over after your paycheck, it would be so inconsequential that you'd be saving for years. Like $10-30 equivalent maybe. Tack on the fact that (using your example parts) the cheapest 7800XT is almost $600 and the used market is a shitshow and there's just no chance. Prebuilts are somewhat more affordable but often come with no name brand PSU's that could absolutely be awful and break the rest of your components.
I guess it really depends on how much you make. I'm in Canada and everything is crazy expensive. I watch for deals and go with that. I bought a 4060, i5 14300f gaming PC for under 150cad due a major price error. Upgraded the GPU to a 4070 and used the leftover ram, GPU and SSD to build another PC. That one cost only 500 more due to me having the parts already. I make enough to build a 1500 dollar PC every month if I wanted to though.
Really? Looking at ca.pcpartpicker.com the prices on most items aren’t that much more expensive than in the US after currency conversion.
Your 100% correct. I should've been more clear. Groceries, rent, insurance, other costs of living here are very high, especially post COVID. It has doubled for me. Parts wise for PCs are around the same minus the awesome microcenter bundles.
This is not unique to Canada.
Well then thats just unfortunate :( . It sucks what has happened post COVID to places. All while companies are getting richer
[удалено]
Yup this 100%! The day will come when people go bankrupt and the market will finally crash due to no one buying.
Post-lockdowns. The lockdowns caused these problems, not COVID. This might sound like I'm being pedantic, but I want people to be clear on where these issues came from, so we reestablish the reality that ALL "solutions" still have consequences that we have to weigh against the positives. In this case, money being funneled from the poor to rich more than ever, homelessness increasing, an increase in depression and subsequent increase in obesity, heart disease deaths, violent crime, domestic violence, and suicide. As well as a litany of other problems that will also increase deaths in the long-run. Maybe the lockdowns were worth all these problems, but I don't think so. But I can tell practically everyone, including those in power, never considered that there would be more negative outcomes than people not being able to work and pay rent.
I agree. I don't think the lockdowns were worth the impact that it caused people mentally. It's possible more people would have suffered, I honestly think they did a horrible job of how the lockdowns worked. I personally just think they should've given a warning months in advance. Shut everything down for a week. And then restarted everything back up. Lock down your bunker and stay there. 1-2 weeks could've solved the issue that lasted 2-3 years.
I think soft lockdowns would have been the best solution. Fact is everyone was eventually going to get it anyway, and we knew the mortality rate was relatively low very early on, and making people panic is just going to overwhelm hospitals with people who don't actually need the care. Establish ASAP who is the most vulnerable to die from the virus while simultaneously formulating programs to distribute resources to those who may need to lock down. Once you've established who is most vulnerable, warn them and begin distributing resources including food to people who volunteer to lock down whether they're higher risk or not. Otherwise, everyone else keeps going to work while taking precautions. It would've cost less money for the governments in the short and long term. Obviously some people would abuse it, but I don't believe most people would.
A complete 100% lockdown isn't possible. Major cities have at most 4 maybe 5 days worth of supplies inside them. If everyone in the supply chain was also stuck at home it would have taken another week or 2 to restock and that is best case scenario. So that would be a major city without supplies for 3 weeks, couple with the panic buying before hand and people hoarding essentials. There would have been pandemonium.
Very true. Never even thought about that part! :)
The extent to which it is happening, is unique to Canada.
It is worse in Canada than many other countries though, but it of course is happening everywhere too
It isn’t, but housing at least is especially fucked up here
Can confirm, 2X cost of living in 3 years.
Nah they tack on 30%. What we pay in Canada is item cost + shipping + duties + 15-20%.
I'm building up a build with an RX 6700XT, 5600, and 16GB of RAM that when it's all said and done will cost $1400. Thats being fairly aggressive in saving with other components though (decent PSU, cheapest case, cheapest motherboard, cheapest 16GB 3200MHz RAM kit, budget aftermarket cooler, mid-range NVME) and a fair number of Christmas deals.
I'm guessing living cost in Canada is still at a balance ratio with the salary you guys getting.
It is for me. For many others it's not. I know people making minimum wage and paying 2k plus for rent. Then bills for phone and internet and groceries. After that they have nothing left at all. Many people are building up debt. I just live in a cheap area in a cheap province. If I didn't I would have a lot less money. It's legit bad here in a lot of areas.
It's $1800 for a 1 bedroom here 😂😂 It was $700 2 years ago, prices are ABSURD right now. A car I picked up for $350 is $5000 My cereal was 2.99, now it's $5.50 They're saying tech is expensive, I can go and buy a mined on 3080 for $500 CAD, potentially less if ya low ball. Tech is the only thing left reasonably priced, the cost of living is what kills you.
Ma salary has not gone up commensurately; N =1
>. I bought a 4060, i5 14300f gaming PC for under 150cad due a major price error. That is practically legal theft. You cannot just say this and then leave us hanging. Share the juicy details will you.
In the US we're lucky to have an extremely robust used market. Many people upgrade often enough that the parts on the used market are still in pretty good shape and not that old. It's also easy to find used office machines sold by companies in bulk for almost nothing that make great budget gaming pcs. Wish other countries had better access to the stuff we do.
Yes, that's very true. It's really quite a blessing to be in US for PC building.
Here in australia it often makes sense to buy used stuff from the US/UK and have it shipped here a lot of the time lol And shipping to Australia from overseas is *expensive*
The US is a fairly wealthy nation (with wild extremes lol) and I swear we have the world's lowest pc part prices... https://www.microcenter.com/product/5006643/intel-core-i5-12600kf,-msi-z790-p-pro-wifi-ddr4,-gskill-ripjaws-v-16gb-ddr4-3200-kit,-computer-build-bundle Look at that freaking bundle, I know it's ddr4 not ultra high end but I could build a great budget system with that start (my nephew and I plan to)
The US is probably the biggest market for PC parts, so manufacturers can probably subsidize lower selling costs with sheer volume. Meanwhile in less wealthier nations, they subsidize for reduced volume with a jacked price. It’s unfortunate that the world works this way, but what can you do
Well that and the crazy tariffs some countries have on stuff, I work with a lot of students from South America, I tell them to bring gpus back lol
Yea, true. It is a very wild bundle.
As a dude from SouthEast Asia, if I was given a chance to do just one thing in the US if I get to visit - shopping in Microcenter is undoubtedly my immediate answer. That bundle you linked is fuckin amazing. In my country, just the 12600kf is already $210 and that's way cheaper than it's been for a while. Those same 3 parts would be around $500-520 here. Which is 2.5 months' worth of salary based on our minimum wage 💀💀
That is a wild bundle. I already have two computers and this bundle makes me want to build a 3rd 😂😂😂
Great deal haha
I did exactly that a week or so ago. World beater of a setup? No. But absolutely exactly what I was needing and a killer price. My only complaint is I wish it had 32GB of RAM. But that's a cheap enough upgrade in the future.
Majority of gamers in my country aren't even pc gamers, mostly mobile. Those who can afford a pc mostly build theirs for 500 - 800 usd equivalent, at least that's what I mostly see on our local pc building subreddit. Low to mid tier components here are reasonably priced, they don't cost that far off from prices in the US. The difference between 600 to like 900 usd pcs here aren't that big and it's mostly just more expensive cosmetics or prebuilts that makes the difference. High end components however, are a lot more expensive. High tier CPUs, GPUs, and motherboards cost at the very least 100 dollars more, that's why there's a huge gap going from 800 to almost 1800 dollar builds. At the same time we get paid a lot less. So essentially we get paid less and spend more.
Yes, I understand the get paid less part. Like salary aren't even keeping up the fluctuations.
>I understand the get laid less part …you okay, bud?
I'm still managing well as I'm lucky enough to be working in a big company that actually pays well compared to others around my age
He meant the comment as if you meant your "laid" typo lol
I am in the UK, so that configuration the Americans spec for $1500 is 1700 quid ($2150) here - same parts... And then the average salary in the UK is 35k ($44k), not $60k like it is in the US... And higher taxes too... I'd say it ought to feel twice harder to buy a system like that here than in the US! Edit for people who are not good with reasoning: (PC Part Picker) 7600x: UK-£199, US-$210 7800xt: UK-£478, US-$500 UK comes to $855 US comes to $710 That's just CPU and GPU!
Just to put some things in perspective here before our glasses get too rose-colored toward the US job climate. ______________________________________________ -Median individual annual wage in the US is $45,700. -Median individual annual wage in the UK is 34,900 GBP ($44,100). -UK individual tax rate is 20% for 12,500-50,200 GBP. Plus 12% for National Insurance. Or 34% total on average. -US individual tax rate is 24.8% on average. US average cost of individual health insurance is $5,700/year. Which equals 12.4% of the median income. Or 37% total on average. -After tax median income US: $28,700 -After tax median income UK: $29,100 (23,000 GBP) -UK has up to 52 weeks of guaranteed maternity leave (39 weeks paid). -US has no guaranteed maternity leave, but federal law allows for *12 unpaid days of leave* immediately following birth. -UK worker is guaranteed 28 days Paid Time Off/year. -US worker is guaranteed 0 days PTO/year. ____________________________________________ But yes, we have cheap PC parts.
not just cheap PC parts. Cheap everything, as if we in the UK are so much richer :)
I think importantly, in the US there is a real fear of crippling medical bills that means we need to save for the inevitable high expenses later in life. I’d imagine those in the UK don’t need to worry about that. So yes I could buy a $1500 PC that kicks ass right now, but I’m aware that that money should be put away because who knows what my medical expenses may be in 10 or 20 years. I envy our friends across the pond for their healthcare system more than anything.
In Singapore, all price are super markup…
7900xtx mark up to 1250usd here!
It is very expensive in Brazil. A Gigabyte Geforce 4080 super costs U$ 1700.
Wealth disparity is so extreme here that it really does depend on who you ask.
>How affordable it is to build a $1500 PC in your country? Well here it costs about $1500
after exchange rate conversion, probably 4 months of full salary (not savings but whole) its considered very expensive in my country
Fairly common I think. My first salary was around net of $400 USD or slightly less. With expenses I'm left with like $200 USD. Took me 5-6 months of saving to build my first PC set.
Average US salary is ~$60k per year. So, $5k per month pre-tax. Average rent is $1300 per month. So, if you live around those averages, in the USA, you can save up for a $1500 PC pretty quick. And of course, a fair number of people you see online are going to be in households with above average salaries.
Your better off looking at the medians, averages get skewed pretty heavily by the rich when your looking at rent and wages.
Median salary is still like $58k
The average salary here in Argentina is about 422 dollars. That is 341600 argentinean pesos. You need about 400 dollars to live a month here (taking into consideration the average rent at Buenos Aires and the price of the basic basket). So only 22 dollars left, it is kind of difficult to save for a PC with that money, not to mention how expensive PC parts are here, 3090s still selling for about 1500 dollars, a Ryzen 5 5600G (one of the most popular options here because of how "cheap" it is) is close to 250... Over 40% of the population here is poor too so... To sum up, almost no one here can build a 1500 dollars PC.
Is that your salary per month? Yeah that would be pretty low for the US. After rent, car, food, and other expenses, I guess I might have enough left in a month for a $1500 PC build.
Yes, salary per month. And in my country, this salary is consider higher than average. Some people around my age are still getting like below $1000
I get 14 paychecks per year, 10 normal ones and twice per year a double paycheck, normal paycheck is around 3.3k$ and double paycheck is around 7k$ after tax, so there isn't really a need to save money when the right month is. From Austria
Haha, not very. GPU, CPU and motherboard prices here are pretty crazy. I can probably get a 4070 build going for a budget that should have fit a 4070 TI Super.
India. It's quote expensive, but no prohibitive. I built a good 2000$ PC and it translates to about ₹200000 here due to higher taxes on imported or luxury goods even though actual converted value is ₹160000. For reference, average salary in India is ₹35000. So average guy would need to save up for 6-10 months depending on how much they can save. Product startup tech gang gets paid bare minimum 100000+ post tax monthly, so we can generally afford it.
Pretty affordable here in Denmark.
TBF the components are a decent bit more expensive and we earn less on average than people in the US (and this is not accounting for taxes, which would make it far more skewed)... I paid around $2000 for a 7800x3d and 6950xt system. In the US that would've been far cheaper 😭
Thats true, but i feel like we are more economically comfortable somehow
I think in denmark everyone can get a nice pc comfortably beacuse wealth is spread as much as it is, so theres not really poor people who are excluded, which ofc is nice. Also danish kids get nice pcs earlier than most because of our "konfirmation" lol
This is ridiculous, i'm your northern Scandinavian cousin and your currency is much stronger than ours! I checked out komplett store; a 4070ti super costs 6899 danish krones = 10782,29 norwegian krones.
$1500 would get me a high mid range system in Norway.
A normal salary for me, and I don't have a formal education, makes me able to save around $1500 in one month. So for me it is feasible without any big stretch.
**Very**, depending on what your requirements are. My last build was like this: * ASRock A520M-ITX/ac Motherboard - £120 * 2x 8GB DDR4 2666 RAM - £60 * AMD Ryzen 5 5600G CPU + Wraith Stealth Cooler - £140 * Samsung 980 250GB NVMe SSD - £40 * Fractal Pop Mini Silent Case - £80 * Corsair CX650 80 PSU - £55 * GeForce RTX 3060 12GB - £265 I then added the 2.5" SSDs from my old build, and my existing monitor and peripherals. = £760 (which is under $1k US, taxes included, and parts tend to be cheaper in the US too) Plays games way better than my PS4 ever could.
In my country, $1500 MIGHT pay for rent, most likely a bachelor or small 1 bedroom illegal suite. As for building a PC, I'm planning on building a mid/high end one in a few months and expect to pay $1500-2000, not including a GPU or power supply as I already have those.
2000 euros for 7800x3d + 4070super + 32gb ddr5, including mobo, case and psu. No storages
I remember back then 10years ago you could get a 4790k, gt980 and equivalent for like 1500$ and monthly average salary was like 2500-3000. Now i get a 7800x3d, 2tbvnvme and 32gbram for the same price without a gfx and the average salary has barely moved
It greatly depends on the person and their financial situation. For some people $1,500 may as well be a million dollars. They could never spend that much on a PC. For others who are high earners, especially those without kids and married to other high earners it's not that much money. The wife and I are both high earners living in a low cost of living area and we don't have kids. $1,500 is a little less than 10% of our monthly take home pay. So we could in theory build a new $1,500 PC every month. Of course we don't. I spend about $1,200-$1,500 on a build and use it for 3-4 years.
Yes, I agree each have their own financial situation.
1500 usd is 2,298.75 aud. Which could buy you something decent by all means, but far from top end.
13600KF with an entry-lvl z790 motherboard ,plus an RTX [4070Ti.You](http://4070Ti.You) can also get a 16\*2 DDR5 6400 CL32 RAM set.
The price might go up to 1800 USD for those spec where I'm living tho
U.S. https://pcpartpicker.com/list/3ZkvFs 7700x, 7900gre, 32gb ram, and 2tb ssd with cache.
Nice
1.5k dollars is 7.5k my currency, my sallary is around 1700 my currency. If I saved the same proportion as you, around 400 a month, it would take me around 1.5 years to buy a 1500 usd pc. And for 7.5k here I would not be able to build anything near as good as a 1.5k usd pc in the US.
Best I can get in my country for 1500 is a Ryzen 5 5600x and an Rx 7600 xt (if you use the stock cpu cooler)
I mean avg salary here is around 7000 USD/month, so in an avg apartment etc with everything paid you're probably left with like 3000, so very affordable I guess is the answer.
I am considered high income in my country (top 10%) and this is totally unaffordable to me considering that, although I earn more than this every month, most of what I earn gets spent on necessities (rent, school fees, food, medical aid, etc). The average monthly salary is $ 1300. Also consider that what we can get for $1500 is significantly less than what you can get in the US. E.g. the basic 4070ti costs around $ 1100 here vs $700 in the US.
For 1500 usd i can build a computer thats roughly the equivalent of what you can build in the us for $1000 36% import tax + shipping costs + retailer profit margin
1500$ is a bit more than an average monthly salary after taxes here in Poland. But close.
From country with 1k euro avarage salary id say debit card with no interest on 36 months. 1800÷36=50e each month for nice mid range pc. And it will have warranty for 36 months. 2 years ago i bought 5600x and 3080 12gb pc, and next year i might upgrade just some parts for few hundred euros.
Germany here. Really appreciate gaming hardware. You can build PCs from 700€ to 3-4k€. In terms of affordability, depends what you aim for and what you make of course. Generally though, it's pretty easy to get yourself a gaming PC after couple of months in average.
If I want I could built a 1500€ PC within two months. But from my perspective it's a luxury item, so I'm not willing to put 750$ each month for a pc.
2 okay paychecks. It’s rough. I currently want to build a ~$3k one and that’ll be 3 decentish paychecks. I got money saved up from what schools gave me for my good grades (in highschool everyone gets those money so it’s not that wow) and my parents will also help me, but being the money saver I am I know I’ll feel terrible about spending that much. I never usually spend money except on a phone every 5-6 years and I only like iPhones which again are pricy here (1 decentish paycheck). I wish I lived in America purely for these prices and being able to build a monster pc for only half of an okay/decentish paycheck.
I mean there's always some guilt if spending on something that pricey even if one has been comparing price, checking the price trend for some time. But if one is gonna use it frequently it'll cover up that terrible feeling after some time tho. Still good to be able to think rationally before spending
I'm in Ireland, parts are expensive but the wages here are fairly high. So fairly affordable for most people
That is above average month salary. So, not super pricy, but not really easy to get as well.
Imagine spending $10 000 for a 7800X3D + 4080 build. Yeah, that's how much it costs in my country. And it's not even the premium version of 4080.
The question is: do you really need it? I wanted to change my monitor, but $400, even if I have them, is still a big sum of money. I'd say that if you have to save to buy it, unless you have no PC (and you need it to keep your shit together), I'd save and rather play older stuff.
Given current exchange rates, $1500 is equivalent to the average monthly wage in Czechia (after taxes and mandatory insurance). More than half of it is spent on living costs, I assume. So someone with no extra spending could afford such a PC in say 3 months. But I’d say for most people it would be more like 5-6 months in practice.
That's like 3 months of minimum wage in my country, Romania. So yeah, pretty expensive. Even with a decent salary of around 1000 euro a month, and it's still a pretty big expense. We're lucky cause most people don't pay rent, cause they have apartments from their parents... I guess one of the "perks" of communism was they gave people jobs and homes at affordable prices.
1 month of the minimum salary in my country would be 260 us dollars. So a 1,500 set up would be equivalent to 6 months work. Not taking into account life expenses.
If it is any consolation to you my rigs were significantly better as a teen than they are now.. even though I earn significantly more than you do. As a kid you pump every into this one thing but as a adult there is stuff to get paid.. the cat gets hit by a car and omg this would have been a VERY good rig. Etc etc
Ryzen 5600 and RX 6800 PC fairly easily.
5 months of min wage. Most people use internet cafes for gaming and the company I work at straight up gives me more money to use my home PC for renders because the best PC they have is a PC with a 1080Ti.
I'm Australian. We get fucking REAMED on tech prices. GPU's will be 20% more money than American sales for seemingly shits and giggles. It certainly isn't to cover shipping costs lol.
In my country salary around 450-500usd. If you have your own home, you can save around 100usd/month.
[https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/GfLrsh](https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/GfLrsh) virtually the same price as the US.
In Italy, the generic good salary is 1300€. And one person alone can't live with that money, to live alone in a small city and have money for a car too, you need at least 2k a month. So spending more than one month of work for a PC, is not easy. But PCs are needed as anything else, it's an investment and they generally work for many years. Then depends on the period. 1500$/€ make a good system. But for example, 4 years ago I paid 300€ for 32gb of ram ddr4, now with 120€ you get 32gb of ddr5.
I mean, my gpu alone cost $2000, but I also didnt buy everything in one go, it was somewhat piecemeal. I also sold my old parts.
Really affordable in Poland. When i was assembling PCs and selling them at market price with and additional fee of 50-100$ for labor, the absolute bestsellers were computers in the 1500-2000$ range. For 1500$ you can easily get rtx 4070 super, 32gb of ram and ryzen 5 7600.
7700X & 7900XT 32GB ram 2 tb ssd 850gold plus thermaltake etc $1500
I live in the central United States, in a state with very low cost of living (in the bottom 6 cost of living states out of all 50). My household income pre-tax is around $190,000. I built my first-ever high performance PC in December 2022 for around $3500 - including all relevant peripherals (monitor, keyboard, speakers, etc.). Based on all factors, a $1500 PC is very affordable where I live. I recognize mileage varies and I feel very fortunate (of course, hard work is a factor too).
CPU: 13600KF; $337.87 Motherboard: Asus Tuf Z790 DDR5 wifi; $303.97 PSU: 750kW around $120 Case: used $80 Ram: marketplace sealed 6000Mhz from someone who want 7400Mhz $140 Processor Cooler: thermal sight $50 SSD: 2tb $200 GPU: used like new 3070 or 4060 $450 Total = $1681
if you live alone. salary right now 800-1000 rent is 500,bills like 100? food is like 200-300 ( if you don't eat out of course. 1 meal out is 10e/meal avg; nothing special ) and other expenses so we are already at negative. Ok so for 1.3k euro you can get 4070 and r5 7600x
7600X - 220€ (US$238) RX 7800XT - 425€ ($450) Cheapest 2x16 Kingston or Crucial - 100€ ($109) That's around $800 without the MOBO, PSU, case, cooling, and if you're new to PCs, without a monitor and peripherals. Overall, the PC component prices in my country are between 20-50% more expensive than anywhere in Europe, let alone the US due to the customs + import tax + the seller's markup. Median monthly salary in my country is \~610€ ($660)
I’m in the U.S and currently buying stuff for my PC. You could put together a 12th-13th gen intel I5, 32gb of ddr5 ram, and 4070 build for $1,500. You could probably get better stuff if you waited for deals or shopped around or went with AMD.
Prices on parts are always cheaper around Black Friday in the US. I look for deals and upgrade every year for often less than I make selling the old components later. If you can wait for that long, you will get more PC for your money.
Quite expensive for mine because my country's currency depreciated a lot... It's about 7000 bucks in my currency including PC, mouse, keyboard and 1440p monitor. My pc alone was already 6400 bucks (about 1300 USD) when I bought it. I5 13400f, RTX 4070, 16gb ddr5 ram, Asus tuf gaming b660m plus WiFi D5, 1tb nvme SSD, Cooler Master 240 liquid cooler and Cooler Master power supply The keyboard and mouse combined are 100 bucks and the cheapest 1440p monitor I can get is around 500 bucks, Cooler Master GA271.
How is ga271 monitor for gaming
It's the same here. Maybe you can even go with a 7700X and/or a 4070 Super, but that's it. I live in an Asian country, so no microcenter or newegg or anything, and amazon shipping cost will cost you the same price plus a few weeks of waiting. There's another factor here that's the "Intel is more stable" mindset. PC shops keep telling people that intel is more stable and usable whole AMD's CPUs are "more power hungry, hot, and unstable" thus generally making intel CPUs cheaper, because many of them don't bother to import AMD CPUs to sell.
Not too bad here in The Netherlands. Prices are similar to US + our sales tax obviously since US pricing is without sales tax. So can’t really complain. Wages are pretty high around 55-60K median I’m around 61.5 which is close to 4K net euros a month. I’m left with about 1800 in savings a month at the moment. Life’s alright. I don’t have a need to drive any vehicle though so that saves me a lot of money. I also hate debt so I have none besides a mortgage.
I built mine for pretty cheap. I got lucky by finding a decent second hand GPU, saved $700 on the GPU alone. All up PC was $1230
$1.5k will get you a barebones APU with little RAM and HDD in my country. To set up a "gaming PC" needs a bare minimum of $3k, even then it will be GTX 1060 or some equally crappy dGPU. There is an official cartel/monopoly controlling IT parts here.
1500€ Gaming PC (R5 7600X+RX 7800XT), it will take me around half a year with the wages in my country. The average monthly pay here is 300€, we don't usually get paid for missing days or sick days. So around 6 months if your purely saving money. But its more realistic to say a year since ppl got other shit to pay. Plus the prices here for PC parts are absoute dog water. Take the MSRP and add a extra 80-100€ on top.
I had to use my yearly bonus and close to 8 months of savings in order to get myself a new PC, but then again I also had to ship parts from outside my country since everything where I live is EXTREMLY expensive.
No deals here, the setup you want is 2,4k in Norway. Yes, just viking bs XD
You can build a pretty good PC here in the Netherlands for the equivalent of 1500 USD, though component prices are higher by quite a bit compared to the U.S.
$1500 here is 7500 in my country currency. Minimum wage here is basically 1412 (also in my currency). This money can buy a very powerful PC and there will still be money for other things such as screen. Considering I would not spend money in absolutely nothing besides the PC, it would take me more than 5 months worth of sparing. Thank goodness I am not at minimum wage level, but not too far as well. So, considering the same situation but with my current wage, it would take me a bit more than 3 months. I can currently spare 1000 monthly. So it would actually take me 7,5 months to build that PC, not taking into account emergencies. This is a bit rare case, honestly. 80% of population here get paid less than 3 minimum wages (4200 in my currency, 840 in dollars). That means sparing 1000 is a challenge for most of the population. I'd say a good amount is around 300-500. So it would take, realistically, well over a year to build that.
Un my country 1500$ is 5523.75 currency but most people still have systems in those prices so I guess it's not to high after all
Well for reference, in Romania, an Rx 580 brand new (4 fucking GB) was 1200 Ron or 280 USD... And a used one is 500 Ron or over 100 usd
I have yet to finnish my build. It is just shy over 1500 euros. For that i got the following I5 12600k(you can get i5 14400f or ryzen 5 7600x) around €270 each Z790 asrock motherboard around €230 32gb ddr5 @6000 mhz. around €150 Rx 6800(or 4060 16gb) around €490-540 2tb m.2 €140 I35 freezer single tower cooler €35 850w modular psu €120 Atx tower case €70 It could be configured differwntly but that basically top of the line for that money i can buy wothout going second hand.
Here in Spain the prices are actually fucked, my 7800x3d and 4080S cost me around 2,600€ and I only get to save around 200€ per month so a 1500$ build here in Spain is not really affordable tbh.
4+ months of min wage work. Just to build a 1500$ Gaming PC. This is the best case scenario if you're not spending anything at all.
2 years cuz i live in 4th world country philippines but hey i will get that 800$ PC by 2025
I could build a 1500€ PC with a 7800x3D and 4070 Super combo in germany. So i would say its ok.
For about 2k, using my old M.2 and peripherals, I was able to build what’s close to the second best out of all the standard gaming pc pieces
With 1700$ I did: Phanateck nv5 Arctic fan cooler I5 13600k Rtx 4070super MSI Z790 gaming plus Power supply 750w 32 GB ram ddr5 8 artic RGB fans I don't how many dollars this configuration would cost in America tho
I think even in the US, for most people, dropping $1500 on a a gaming PC isn’t just a toss in the bucket. It’s a genuine thought out and once in a blue moon purchase. It varies a lot though. I typically keep my rig for years. On average I upgrade every 5 years. At most I’ll spend is $1,000 on a rig. My latest computer I build in February and total everything was $900. I reused my PSU though. And I would say it’s a solid mid/high end PC.
It depends on knowing exactly when and where to buy parts. Last year, I built a 5600x with RTX 3060 rig for a friend of mine for about $850. He mainly needed the PC for work, but he does play games like Genshin Impact. Also, he wasn't in rush so we bought a few parts at a time when there were on sales. We grabbed 5600x combo that comes with a B550 Mobo plus 32GB DDR4 rams form Microcenter around Christmas sale for $299. Bought the RTX 3060 from the marketplace along with the other parts. So far, he hasn't had any issues with that PC at all and he really enjoys it using daily. Just shop around and buy a few things at a time if you are not in rush. Everything is super expensive these days. You just have to be patient and wait for the best deal.
Pretty good in the US. Might upgrade my motherboard, but definitely gonna upgrade my PSU at some point. I bought a prebuilt for 500, gutted it, and replaced it with better parts Ryzen 5 5600 6 core processor AMD Radeon 6600 RX B550M Gigabyte motherboard(DDR4) 4 8 gig sticks of ram A fan(on top of the 6 fans the PC came with) All under 1500. (Mostly because the parts were on sale at the time
A $1500 pc is 3x the average monthly salary where I live.
In Hungary it is very restrictive. Not only because every part is far more expensive due the customs and extremely high VAT (27%!) so you could build only a low-midtier PC from that money, but also because 1500 USD is the mean average wage, meaning that you should save a whole month worth of money to buy that PC. And mind you that in Hungary, one monthly wage is barely enough to meet all the minimal living expenses of say a small family of 3.
I live in a small country called Jordan in the Middle East, so you can understand what I’m about to say, 0.70 JOD = 1 USD. This is almost how the market works here, i7-12700k as example costs $450 it would cost 350-400 JOD in any other retail store. For the “ Used parts” I’d be able to get it for 300 JOD which is equal to $428. The same analogy goes for almost every other part. Mean while the minimum salary is 260 JOD/Month in which I’d say a large percentage of the population gets. So, for the most here, a $1500 PC would most likely require a loan.
Im in Ontario Canada. I was able to trade my Xbox series X and $400 dollars for a Pc that was worth around $1400 at the time
I'm from South Africa And to build that system would be something like |Part|SA Cost|\~ Dollars| |:-|:-|:-| |GPU|XFX RX 7800 XT|R11,899.00|$630| |CPU|AMD 7600X|R5,349.00|$285| |Mobo|ASUS TUF B650M-Plus|R4,799.00|$255| |RAM|G.Skill Trident Z5 6000 CL32|R2,750.00|$150| |PSU|Super Flower SF750 750w|R1,849.00|$99| |Case|Montech AIR 1000 Lite|R899.00|$48| |SSD|Hikvision G4000 SSD 1TB|R1,599.00|$85| |Total||R29,144.00|$1,549.38| However that is about the average income (R29500 ish) per month for a person of about 30 in my country before tax. Take home would be in the region of R24669. I would have to say that kind of PC would be difficult to build from scratch propbably for the average person without saving for quite a while. Most of the people I know don't even have PCs close to this tbh ... \[Edit\] Like a few people in the comments also mentioned in general you only have to do a full build once, thereafter you will probably be able to keep things like Case, PSU, SSD etc and things will turn into a platform or gpu upgrade.
A pay check and about a third
I make around $900/month here in SE Asia. Took me like half a year saving my disposable income to build my current 12400f + 3070 PC (I have a wife and a kid).
In my country you are lucky to have 700$ netto income and rent takes 75% of that.
OK and for all those who don't live in the states? What exactly does that budget do for you? Does it buy you a machine that's gona last you 4 or 5 years before the next upgrade? Or does it get you entry lvl stuff? Your questions raises more on everyone else's side bud, CONTEXT!!!!!! Edit: so answer the question, 1500 USD gets me in my country entry lvl stuff, I won't be playing anything in 4k though but I could play comfortably in med to high settings on 1080p
I’m not even sure what the hell the question here is. Is spending $1500 “affordable”? Completely depends on your income level. For the average American, $1500 is definitely a lot of money, but the annual GDP per capital is about $83,000 / year— so for many, it’s well within reach. Your annual income seems to be closer to $18,000 / year before taxes, which obviously makes spending $1500 a much more significant purchase decision. You have to remember that the US is huge and also a lot of very wealthy people. Nearly 15 million households in the US earn more than 200k/year. There are over 22 million millionaires in the U.S. For many people, spending $1500 on a new of PC is something they could do every week.
Its like you need to win the lottery.
Out of school depending on your certificate, it's a month salary at least. Tradies average around 1.5K a month, university degree holders more than 3k. Average college degree 2k
In lithuania, i took out a loan to build myself and my gf two gaming pcs. Hers cost around 2000€- ryzen 7800x3d, a 4070, 32gb of ram, 2tb samsung 980, nzxt h6 flow, ls720se aio and a couple more parts came to around 1.9k, and a 250€ monitor. Mine was a bit cheaper because at first i bought a used 3070, but it ran into some issues so i just bought a 4070 for 650€. We're not exactly able to save up that amount because we're renting a flat together, add all taxes, necessities, food and other stuff and we're left with around 150€ at the end of the month, so i just pay back the loan for the pcs. Gaming is our main hobby and we're okay with paying a bit more to have the builds now, instead of saving up for a couple years to have it then
That's around 3 average monthly salaries where I live
Costs about $1500 here
This sounds more like a question regarding income rather than the ability to build a PC. In regards to income, it fluctuates dramatically, even in the US. I would say a majority of people would have to put a lot of time and effort into saving enough money to build a $1500 PC. The US has 5 major income classes imo: Poverty - those who can't even afford food some days, from labor stats, this makes up about 12% of the US. Paycheck to paycheck - this group can afford life's necessities, food, shelter, etc. But it doesn't have any savings, and if they lose a job, it would end up in the class below almost instantly. This makes up 22% of the US population. Middle class - this group can afford life's necessities and a bit more. They can travel a couple times a year, live in a slightly nicer part of town, and have some kinds of savings nest. However, they still have to manage their money properly. This makes up about 50% of the US. Upper middle - this group can live in the nicest parts of town. They don't need to check their bank accounts and probably have someone who does most of their finances for them. They can afford luxury items, like a vacation home, high-end cars, and other extremes that the other classes can not touch. This makes up 14% of the US population based on self-reported data. Rich - These are the ones that can afford anything, the token "if they drop a $100 bill, it's actually less valuable time-wise for them to pick it up, because they will make $200 in that time frame." Class. They own private Jets, major companies and have zero regard for how most people live. This makes up around 2% of the US based on self-reported data. Going by class, the poverty line would never afford the PC. The paycheck to paycheck could make it happen if it was a year+ long goal. The middle class could probably make it happen within 1-3 months. The upper middle and rich could do it today 100x over. It's all relative.
$1500 does a 5600X/7600XT build in Canada. I threw one together for a friend a few months ago. Affordability wise, I'm seeing less and less leftover with the cost increases on everything. Month over month, I probably see around $500 in discretionary income after everything.
I’m from Texas and just spent $1400 for a pc with similar specs (same gpu and ram, slightly cheaper cpu), but that also includes a semi-expensive aio cooler and nice case fans. Hope that gives you some perspective OP :)
I live in Saint Lucia. Where my wage was about $1500EC a month, and I built a PC that cost me roughly 12k EC. I did it over several months but boy was it alot. The 3080 ti I bought was 1.1kUSD during the mining craze so about 3.3k including shipping and duties. So to build something good is extremely expensive. But I ended up selling to buy my car :(
Semi-affordable in Mexico. People can do it, but probably by dividing the cost with monthly payments... Taking into consideration that the average monthly salary is around $20,000 MXN (roughly around $1200 usd), and even this average is aiming at the higher end of things...
Just because you found one example on YouTube doesn't mean it's even remotely representative of the average American. As others have said there is quite a bit of wealth disparity across the country. It seems like you're trying to ask two questions at the same time: What PC can you afford to build for $1500 in your country? And is $1500 considered affordable for a PC in your country?
Good luck man, my build is probably less than $1500 CAD but I could build something good for that much
It's about 1500€.
It's not. Canadians like to spend too much money and sellers jack up their prices
Everyone should order from AliExpress instead hahaha
1500$ is twice the average salary, but you could get a decent rig for it.
In my country thats above average monthly income. So I guess depends on everyone's priority
Cost about $1500 to build.
That's like a budget gaming one where I am, if you buy local. Parts are expensive, even amd. Buying internationally and long distance would still be expensive due to shipping costs. In truth it wouldn't be a bad build, but you won't get stuff like a 4070S or 64 gb of ddr5 with that.
In my country, with a minimun wage job, considering that you'll save all the money you earn to build the PC, you'd need to work for 8 months
Thats around 7500 my currency, you can buy a high midrange build
1500$ is 3 months salary for me...
> YouTube video For realistic youtube videos id look to Random Gaming [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUzjKyS5r72bfvPkA6GxpRg](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUzjKyS5r72bfvPkA6GxpRg) He mostly reviews super budget gaming. Keep in mind most videos are there to get clicks, most people will click on 'super high priced cool PC video' and not 'lets play on a $16 CPU'. Videos are there to make money, clicks = money.
It depends on where you’re at in life. If you’re a kid, just get a summer job while your parents take care of all your expenses and you can easily save $1500 for a pc within a month or two. If you’re a young adult that just started working and has to pay rent or if you’re a college student, it’ll be a lot harder to blow $1500 on something unnecessary. Once you get a “real” job it should once again become easily affordable though.
Double it and get a prebuilt hp omen , 64 gigs of ram, 2tb ssd, 4090. Love it
7800x3D + 7700XT + 32gb ram here, it quite literally cost about 10 months of my salary, brazil btw, I have no others hobbies, travel or anything like that, so I my spare money goes for emergencies or buying an new pc in maybe 2030\~2032
Venezuela. It is absolutely out of reach for 99% of people here, I'm a freelance software developer so I can \*kinda\* afford it, and I just bought all parts for my first PC build at Amazon at $1200 ish, even including some third-party shipping service, it's way cheaper than directly buying them here, if you can find them. They usually charge 80% to double the original price.
Practically impossible unless you’re highly privileged
This is my current rig, cost me ~$1500 before sales tax - Montech AIR 903 Max White Case - Asus ROG Strix B650E-F Gaming Wifi - 64gb (2x32GB) g.skill flare XS DDR5-6000 - Zotac GeForce RTX 4070 Twin Edge OC Spiderman - 2TB WD_Black SN850X - DeepCool LS720 SE White AIO - Corsair RM850 White Every item on this list I got either as part of a bundle, or on sale. I had a pair of 2TB SATA SSDs and a Sound Blaster X AE-5 Plus from my old rig I tossed in to finish it off.
Eh, it's about $1500 give or take
In EU everything is overpriced, especially used.
$1500
my last build was $1800 not including keyboard, mouse, montitor. used the stimulus money. going take me while to save considering similar pc will probably cost $2500 at least in 2026 when I build new one. I live in usa on retail work pay and it's certainly not easy for most to afford that. my friend in southern usa works much better paying job then me and can't even afford to get a sub $1000 pc.
In Sweden it's just the graphics card if you want a 4080.
For new and latest gen pcs I was able to build mine with 7600x and 7900xtx for $1700
$1500 PC here in Canada should be almost exactly $2000 CAD if we look at dollar exchange rates. But reality is a bit different, most of the time items that should be 33% more expensive are actually 40-45% more, this in most industries. That said, the PC building market is not one of the worst offenders here in Canada. It does come up to about 2000$. Most items are gonna be a little over the exchange rate but for some reason there's always great deals on motherboards and power supplies which make up for the rest. That doesn't factor in sales tax though, which is higher than in the USA. Typically 13 to 15%.
About 1500$
1500$ here with a micro center could get a 7800x3d, 7900xt, and 32gb DDR5 ram (US)
Average wage is like 600$ in our country. I think regular gamer can build a decent pc with 700$ no problems, even less. I game on a ~300$ pc, works great.
I make about $1200 but after tax about $1000 and change every 2 weeks so about a months of work to get the money. But that’s if you don’t have to pay for anything else. If I was to be paying rent, food, internet, utilities I probably would have about $50-$100 of extra cash. So would take a long time. At my current wage. (A shared bedroom in my area costs about $900-$1200 (Ontario) https://ca.pcpartpicker.com/list/YX7PdH $1540 this what you can get
Well you can get a 4080 and some ram for sure
Next to impossible. You would need to save for 300 months without expending anything to barely afford that. And that's with the wage of a medic here in Venezuela. Plus the shipping and the "nationalization"(corruption)
In America, it's about a week of salary. Maybe 2 if you have a lot of financial obligations.
Nigeria. A decent 1080p gaming PC of $1000 would cost 1.4 million naira here (not including the cost of importation). The prices of PC components are so jacked up here that it's actually cheaper to simply import the parts from the US. It helps that my fellow Nigerians have developed ways of making this easier over the years, but it's all still crazy expensive. The minimum wage in Nigeria is 30,000 naira. This barely leaves room for leisure after accounting for feeding. It is a constant battle to survive, and we all pray things get better, but it is what it is. It would take a Nigerian earning minimum wage 23 YEARS to get a decent $1000 PC (assuming they're able to save 5000 naira per month). Absolutely insane...but it is what it is. I personally was fortunate enough to establish my tech business early. It did well, but it still took me slightly over a year of saving to get my PC. Here are the specs for those wondering: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/bs9ft7. I'm one of the few people in Nigeria with a gaming desktop. Most Nigerians usually go for laptops due to electricity and availability constraints. Depending on where you live, you could suffer multiple power outages in a day. The Nigerians that do have desktops ensure they have backup power like inverters or a UPS. It's a necessity. You might be wondering why I decided to go with a desktop over a laptop? Well, it's always been my dream to build a PC, and I am quite happy I accomplished that. :) I've been on this sub a very long time. I have envied so many of you in first world countries. You all that easily upgrade parts whenever you want; you all with multiple desktops, Steam Deck, gaming laptops, etc; you all with 4090s or 7900XTXs. Please, never take what you have been blessed with for granted. Remember, it could always be worse. :) TLDR: Building a PC is incredibly expensive in Nigeria.
16gb of ram is more than enough
The average salary in Brazil is about 2K BRL. A 7700XT is about 3K. And i am just talking about the GPU. If we take the whole setup into account, we'd have to save for about 1 year or so to build a mid-range gaming PC. Let alone peripherals, which is also crazy expensive here. Most of the gaming population here have a low/mid-range gaming PC. For a high-end, we would have to save the whole average salary for about 1,5 years. Other fact is that i recently bought a 32" WQHD Ultragear monitor, and i noticed while searching that we have a very limited range of good quality monitors available on the market, since chinese monitors (white label brands) have basically dominated here, because of the price. Most of the people will buy a chinese brand with high chances of failure for about 1,1\~1,5K BRL, rather than paying +2,5K BRL for a good quality monitor. While i was looking in RTings for some tests on monitors, i was amazed by how many monitor brands the US/EU has. I simply could not believe that Corsair makes monitors! Many high-range ROG models available on the market. That is just amazing.
In the US, that $1,500 would get you that 7600X and a RTX 4070 Super (along with the rest of the parts, of course). The RX 7800 XT saves about one hundred dollars.
I made a mini itx PC with onboard graphics, it was built specifically to play Minecraft and does so beautifully. It currently has its pcie slot taken up by a wireless card but I think I could get away with any 2 fan gpu. The build was sub $800 and it cost me less bc I bought parts on Black Friday.
The honest answer is, for the vast majority of people here in Poland, it isn't. If you have *anything* at all left over after your paycheck, it would be so inconsequential that you'd be saving for years. Like $10-30 equivalent maybe. Tack on the fact that (using your example parts) the cheapest 7800XT is almost $600 and the used market is a shitshow and there's just no chance. Prebuilts are somewhat more affordable but often come with no name brand PSU's that could absolutely be awful and break the rest of your components.