My Budget Gaming Rig That Still Delivers: GTX 1660 + i5-9400F in 2025
My GTX 1660 & Intel i5-9400F budget gaming rig proves you don't need expensive hardware in 2025. Real performance tests, gaming tips...
My Budget Gaming Rig That Still Delivers: GTX 1660 + i5-9400F in 2025
Building a gaming PC on a tight budget has always been about finding that sweet spot between price and performance, and my old rig with the GTX 1660 and Intel i5-9400F continues to prove that great gaming doesn't require the latest and most expensive hardware. Even in 2025, this combination delivers surprisingly solid performance across a wide range of titles, from indie darlings like Hades to demanding modern games like Cronos: The New Dawn. The Heart of My Setup: Core Specifications My budget gaming PC centers around the Intel Core i5-9400F, a six-core processor that launched as part of Intel's 9th generation Coffee Lake series. This CPU features 6 cores and 6 threads, with a base clock of 2.9 GHz that can turbo boost up to 4.1 GHz. While it lacks integrated graphics and hyper-threading, these omissions helped keep the price accessible when I built this system. The graphics powerhouse of my setup is the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660, featuring 6GB of GDDR5 VRAM and 1408 CUDA cores …