RAM prices are wild, SSDs are annoying, and GPUs are still the main character—so in this video I had my two ZTT “experts,” Nic and Aidan, go head-to-head again to show the two best ways to build a $1,000 gaming PC right now. I judged their builds on aesthetics first (up to 4 points), then we ran a full benchmark showdown across five games—Cyberpunk with ray tracing, Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Black Myth Wukong, Doom: The Dark Ages, and Ano 117—plus a bonus “Ramageddon” test where I vibe-coded a program to open Chrome tabs until the PC taps out. Aidan went for a straight-up used-deal monster: Ryzen 7 5800X, 32GB DDR4 3600 CL16, and an absolutely ridiculous RX 7900 XT he snagged for $450 on Facebook Marketplace (yes, the roadkill tire incident happened). Nic went AM5 with a Ryzen 7 7700 and 32GB DDR5 5200, plus an RTX 4070 Super inside an NZXT H1 (with the V2 upgrade kit), aiming to claw back points in CPU-heavy and ray tracing tests. The takeaway is simple: at $1,000, you can either hunt used and max raw raster performance, or go newer-platform AM5 + Nvidia for ray tracing and a more “modern” base—just don’t expect shortages to play nice.