Is the Budget PC Segment Dead?
Back in the day it always seemed like you could squeeze a decent deal out of PC parts and build yourself a budget friendly PC. Nowadays I keep hearing that the budget options are gone, but in my opinion, under the right conditions you can still build an amazing PC for much cheaper than you would think!
Things to Note
Inflation is always going to be a factor so prices cannot be compared directly, but the parts you can get your hands on right now are extremely capable, meaning that even something that is 3-4+ years old can get you gaming and doing work without any issues.
The used market is also insanely good for these kinds of builds since you can snatch deals for pennies from people that do not care about budgets and simply want to get the latest and greatest. If you are scared of used parts you should still be able to find deals on older parts in stores for much cheaper than current generation of tech.
You will also need to define what “budget” is because for some that is 300$ and for others it can be way more. A budget build is built correctly when it is using the correct parts for the tasks needed to be completed – a build that only needs CPU computational power might just use an APU to display to monitor and no dedicated GPU at all.
How I Would Go about Things
With everything above in mind, if I wanted to build a decent gaming/work PC I would instantly look at the not-so-dead AM4 platform because for some reason AMD is still releasing CPUs for it. The main reason for this is that you have so many options for CPU+RAM+Mobo combos that you can always find something that works.
Ryzen 2000-3000 CPUs are dirt cheap, and even Ryzen 5000 CPUs are starting to go down in price. Moreover, motherboards for AM4 are cheap as well since you can use a B450 released in 2018, update the BIOS and have it work with a 5800X3D (I did this for a while). If you find these parts used as well you can get an absolute steal on them.
Slap on some cheap 3200-3600MHz 16GB DDR4 and you have a solid setup. SSD storage has also become very cheap so you got most parts you need. For a PSU I would recommend not to cheap out that much and get a decent brand and decent rating (550W-650W Bronze rating, etc).
The expensive part comes with what GPU you want to put in your system. Do not be afraid to check for a couple of generations back and get the optimal deal for what your budget is.
For some reason at the time of my search, the AMD GPU counterparts were more expensive than the NVIDIA GPUs but that can always change so always grab what is best performance for your usage.
Put all of this in a cheap case and you can be looking at around 300-400$ worth of parts depending on the deals you get and what you find which will perform stellar at basic work and 1080P gaming.
TL;DR
If you know where to look and dedicate some time and research you can still find banging deals on older PC parts for a solid budget build. The trade-off here is that you need to spend some time and build it yourself, but the overall product is much, much better than anything pre-built in that price range (usually e-waste).