Building a budget gaming/mining PC under $175

Goal: To build a bare bone budget gaming PC under $200. At the end, I put one together for under $175. 

Here is how:

So while I wanted to try out mining, I did not want to put together a rig like setup. Firstly, it doesn't look tidy - the skeletal look of a rig, and I think a bit unsafe if you plan to share the space with your miner! Secondly, I wanted to ensure I get some utilitarian value as well. So for me, practical choice was to get a big gaming PC tower case, and put the whole thing inside the case - for now, this case sits next to my home office desk. I now use this machine as my home PC! As many have suggested, this nice site for PC building is good starting point to get all the components necessary, if not for buying the actual components, then atleast so you can ensure all the parts will fit together and work well!

I needed:

• The cheapest motherboard, RAM and Hard drive
• A good CPU that should be able to double up as my recreation budget gaming PC 
• A Power supply good enough to power my single GPU and the motherboard

While most of the google links suggest using Celeron G3930, I decided to spend $15 more and get a Pentium G4560. This new processor has 2 physical and 4 virtual cores. So just for $15 more, I got a CPU almost as powerful as my intel core i5 7th Generation laptop! 

For the motherboard - I choose the cheapest - Gigabyte H110M-A - open box - available for only $27 in microcenter!

The flip side of this motherboard was that it only accepted a DDR4 RAM - so got one from Amazon for under $40.

Power supply, since mining would require continuous running, better to get at least a 80 Plus Bronze rated PSU. I got mine for $49 with a $25 rebate - a Seasonic 520W - at microcenter!

With Wifi routers, you almost forget to get a Wifi dongle - I got a cheap Tenda 311M for $7 - at microcenter!

Lastly, for the PC case, it seemed unreasonable to spend $40 for a new PC case, although after getting mine, I realized the gaming PC cases are huge and heavy metal and sturdy. I got mine for $15 off Craigslist!

So total bill of materials:

1. Motherboard - Gigabyte H110M-A - $27
2. RAM - Patriot DDR4 4GB - $40
3. CPU - Pentium G4560 - $49
4. Hard disk - WD 250GB 7.2K RPM @microcenter - $10 (refurbished)
5. PSU - 520W 80 Plus Bronze - $25 (after rebate)
6. Wifi Dongle - Tenda dongle - $7
7. Case - Facebook marketplace - $15

Total Cost - $173