This astonishing $850 gaming PC contains well over $1,200 worth of parts, including $400 of 32GB DDR5 alone — get a potent Steam Machine rival thanks to this budget Intel Arc desktop

The pricing troubles of the Steam Machine make it easy to think that budget gaming PCs are dead, but this incredible ABS gaming desktop I've just found might convince you otherwise. Right now at Walmart, you can grab this ABS Flux II Aqua with Intel Core i5 14400F, Intel Arc B580, 32GB of DDR5 RAM, and a 1TB SSD for just $849. That's a $150 saving on the $999 list price, for a PC with parts worth well over $1,200 in today's market.

● Check out this deal at Walmart

This PC features a Raptor Lake Refresh CPU worth $178, 32GB of Patriot DDR5 priced at $400, a $150 SSD, and a $309 GPU from Intel for unparalleled budget value. Fire those parts into PCPartPicker, and you'll see that, along with a motherboard, the cost is some $1,158 to build this rig yourself. And that's before you've added a CPU cooler, case, power supply, and Windows 11, all of which are included in this build.

Make no mistake, this is not a blistering gaming PC capable of 4K; there's no fancy X3D SKU or RTX 5080 inside. What you do get is a punchy budget CPU with a total of 10 cores, six performance and four efficiency, with 16 threads and boost clocks of up to 4.7 GHz. As you can see from our testing data, the 14400 can sustain 123 fps in our 1080p testing suite.

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CPU Benchmark Rankings — (Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

The Intel Arc B580 puts out respectable average benchmarks in our 1080p testing suite. Featuring 12GB of VRAM and 2560 cores, it's a great budget GPU capable of delivering an average of 80 fps in Assassin's Creed Mirage at 2560 x 1440 Ultra settings, better than the RTX 4060.

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GPU Benchmarks Hierarchy 2026 - 1080 Performance Results — (Image credit: Future)

If you're looking for couch gaming on a budget, this might be the perfect Steam Machine alternative. When you consider that it gets you 512GB of SSD storage and 16GB of DDR5 RAM for $1,049, this $850 package for 1TB and 32GB, plus the aforementioned CPU and GPU combo, is really excellent value. Purely on the value of the parts contained alone, this gaming PC is honestly an absolute steal.

If you're looking for more savings, check out our Best PC Hardware deals for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals, Hard Drive Deals, Gaming Monitor Deals, Graphics Card Deals, Gaming Chair, Best Wi-Fi Routers, Best Motherboard, or CPU Deals pages.

You can also join the Tom's Hardware deals Discord for up-to-the-minute hardware deals.

Stephen is Tom's Hardware's News Editor with almost a decade of industry experience covering technology, having worked at TechRadar, iMore, and even Apple over the years. He has covered the world of consumer tech from nearly every angle, including supply chain rumors, patents, and litigation, and more. When he's not at work, he loves reading about history and playing video games.

4 Comments Comment from the forums

I6K0E

This seems like a throwaway recommendation. Sure the parts might be worth the price, but it's weak to recommend a purchase with such terrible reviews on Walmart's own site (3.3 stars). The essence of the reviews are that the SSD is garbage and leads to frequent crashes and reboots.
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rluker5

I6K0E said:
This seems like a throwaway recommendation. Sure the parts might be worth the price, but it's weak to recommend a purchase with such terrible reviews on Walmart's own site (3.3 stars). The essence of the reviews are that the SSD is garbage and leads to frequent crashes and reboots.
Check the reviews for Aqua Flux 2 prebuilts on Newegg. Average well over 4 stars. I think Walmart's reviewing setup where few give reviews except those that have issues is the cause for the average of these 17 reviews being low.
Walmart isn't known to have tech savvy customers and one of the one star reviews appears to be from an issue based on the pc not automatically connecting to a network and knowing the password, or perhaps not having an updated driver. Also ethan posted his bad review twice.
I think the difference in reviews between Walmart and Newegg is more due to how few people review on Walmart and the less technical customer demographic and I think these different prebuilts from the same company with most of the same parts are of similar quality.

That being said it looks like a great deal for nowadays. SSD is a 5000MB/s gen 4, which is on the slow side for gen 4, but faster than gen 3, but also probably has not the greatest random so is OK, but not as good as we would have chosen before AI. Also ram is 6000c36 which makes me think Samsung ICs which I would have turned my nose up at pre AI, but is still a solid step above DDR4. And CPU is a 14400f on a B760 which probably won't let you undervolt to increase performance, but thermals will be no problem with a 120mm tower cooler, and the performance of 6p+4e should be as good as reviews show. And the B580 is much improved over the Alchemist generation and the 14400f in more than fast enough to keep from bottlenecking it, once again performing as reviews show.
The 14400 (DDR5) even averages higher FPS with a 5090 than a 9070 (rasterization at 1080p) with a 9800X3D per Tom's testing shown in this article. So the bottleneck will be the 1440p60 at high settings B580.
And case airflow should be plenty for these low power components. And the 650W PSU that they also use in their 5070 build should be capable of handling a GPU upgrade if one ever were to do that. Also motherboard is Asrock so you have that for the limited B760 bios options.

Pre-AI I would have thought this was an OK deal for a midrange prebuilt at best, but unfortunately times have changed and you can forget about even trying to build a better one yourself for the price unless you are reusing several older components.

Edit: The refurbished DDR4 version with the same CPU, GPU, SSD costs $100 more on Newegg right now, for comparison. https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16883360975C?Item=N82E16883360975C
Reply
I6K0E

rluker5 said:
Check the reviews for Aqua Flux 2 prebuilts on Newegg. Average well over 4 stars. I think Walmart's reviewing setup where few give reviews except those that have issues is the cause for the average of these 17 reviews being low.
Walmart isn't known to have tech savvy customers and one of the one star reviews appears to be from an issue based on the pc not automatically connecting to a network and knowing the password, or perhaps not having an updated driver. Also ethan posted his bad review twice.
I think the difference in reviews between Walmart and Newegg is more due to how few people review on Walmart and the less technical customer demographic and I think these different prebuilts from the same company with most of the same parts are of similar quality.

That being said it looks like a great deal for nowadays. SSD is a 5000MB/s gen 4, which is on the slow side for gen 4, but faster than gen 3, but also probably has not the greatest random so is OK, but not as good as we would have chosen before AI. Also ram is 6000c36 which makes me think Samsung ICs which I would have turned my nose up at pre AI, but is still a solid step above DDR4. And CPU is a 14400f on a B760 which probably won't let you undervolt to increase performance, but thermals will be no problem with a 120mm tower cooler, and the performance of 6p+4e should be as good as reviews show. And the B580 is much improved over the Alchemist generation and the 14400f in more than fast enough to keep from bottlenecking it, once again performing as reviews show.
The 14400 (DDR5) even averages higher FPS with a 5090 than a 9070 (rasterization at 1080p) with a 9800X3D per Tom's testing shown in this article. So the bottleneck will be the 1440p60 at high settings B580.
And case airflow should be plenty for these low power components. And the 650W PSU that they also use in their 5070 build should be capable of handling a GPU upgrade if one ever were to do that. Also motherboard is Asrock so you have that for the limited B760 bios options.

Pre-AI I would have thought this was an OK deal for a midrange prebuilt at best, but unfortunately times have changed and you can forget about even trying to build a better one yourself for the price unless you are reusing several older components.

Edit: The refurbished DDR4 version with the same CPU, GPU, SSD costs $100 more on Newegg right now, for comparison. https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16883360975C?Item=N82E16883360975C
I stand corrected.
Reply
beyondlogic

Admin said:
Save $150 on this gaming PC with Intel Core i5 14400F, Intel Arc B580, and 32GB of DDR5 RAM.

This astonishing $850 gaming PC contains well over $1,200 worth of parts, including $400 of 32GB DDR5 alone — get a potent Steam Machine rival than... : Read more
Just shows how bloated the pricing has gotten especially when you account for 32gb of ddr5 makes this pc look more like a rip off lol. It would have probly have been even less. At 650 it's a mess this market. Lol hate the wording of the title should say due to rip off pricing of 32gb ddr5 being 400.
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