Introduction

At the start of the month we built a PC on a $599ish US budget and showed you the kind of performance it could offer in our $599 Gaming PC Built and Tested article. It all started when the NVIDIA GTX 550 Ti press kit said that the GTX 550 Ti was the perfect card for a $599 gaming PC.

After the article went live, though, one of our fellow readers and TweakTown Facebook followers said we should do it again, but this time based on an AMD system. We thought that was a great idea and we spoke to both AMD and ASUS about getting some parts together to see within the same budget, what could they offer?

What we wanted to do was keep as many items as we could identical between the systems and only change the main core components from an Intel / NVIDIA setup to an AMD one. So what that meant was we wanted to keep the Corsair CX500 PSU, Western Digital 1TB HDD, Kingston HyperX Grey 4GB kit and Corsair A70 cooler.

What we wanted to replace was the ASUS P8P67 Pro Motherboard, Intel Core i3 2100 CPU and ASUS GTX 550 Ti DirectCU II which was what ultimately started all this. So with those three items out, what did we get instead? Well, that's exactly what we're about to find out.