Even though AMD's Ryzen 5 2600 is a previous generation slice of silicon, if you're looking to assemble a budget PC, it's still one of the best CPUs for gaming. That was true before it dropped in price, and is true today, especially with the latest discount.
Over on Newegg, the Ryzen 5 2600 is selling for $119.99, which is what it has been going for the last several weeks. It's a good buy at that price, and a better one if you apply coupon code EMCDFDM34 at checkout. It knocks $10 off, bringing the price down to $109.99.
There is a lot of value for the money with this CPU. It is a 6-core/12-thread processor with a 3.4GHz base clock and 3.9GHz boost clock. It also has 16MB of L3 cache and a 65W TDP. In our experience, this chip can usually hit 4GHz on all cores (and maybe a bit more) if you're willing to overclock.
Despite being a budget CPU, you can build a respectable gaming PC around this chip. How respectable depends on how much you're willing to invest in the GPU. A top-tier graphics card may seem like an odd combination, but with a 2080 Ti, some of the the faster CPUs in gaming beat the 2600 by around 10-25 percent at 1080p ultra (depending on the chip). We recommend pairing this with a sensible midrange GPU—in doing so, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference, outside of running benchmarks.
