If you were planning on building a gaming PC but didn’t want to bear the expenses of AM5, we might’ve spotted an excellent starter kit for you. This is the Micro Center’s Ryzen 5 5600X3D and ASUS Prime B550-Plus AC HES bundle, which has a decent 5% price cut at Amazon right now. It will cost you only $303.99, and in return you’ll get excellent gaming performance even if you pair it with the best GPUs on the market.
That said, we also need to keep in mind the B550 chipset: while it is perfect for this processor, it doesn’t offer PCIe 5.0 connectivity or DDR5 support. However, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as it’ll help you save costs, and you can use DDR4 RAM for a lower price while still getting solid gaming performance and productivity. So, considering all of this, we would highly recommend that you check this offer out.
Prices and savings can change. Check the retailer for the current price.
What this starter kit has to offer
Ryzen 5 5600X3D
This processor has the same design and configuration as the Ryzen 5 5600X; however, the aspect that gives it an edge is the huge 96MB L3 cache. More game data and data from other sources can be housed very close to the CPU cores, meaning it takes very little time for the data to travel to the processor, and this eliminates bottlenecks and allows the system to deliver amazing perfomance. This processor can be seen sticking right behind the Ryzen 7 5800X3D in many reviews, and that makes sense given its position in the Ryzen 5000 hierarchy. That being said, it can easily keep up with high-end GPUs at 1080p, but we would recommend pairing it with a decent mid-range offering for the best value for money,
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Prices correct as of October 9th, 2026.
ASUS Prime B550-Plus AC HES
The ASUS Prime B550-Plus AC HES is a solid base for a Ryzen gaming build, with capable power delivery, cooling built into the board itself, room for plenty of storage, and a good spread of connections. DIGI+ VRM keeps voltage regulation digital and precise, so this will deliver steady power to the 5600X3D even under heavy loads. Heat from those power components gets pulled away by dedicated VRM heatsinks with thermal pads, and the chipset heatsink plus hybrid fan headers give you extra cooling headroom for long gaming sessions or workdays.
Memory is flexible too: four DDR4 DIMM slots take up to 128GB, with overclocked speeds reaching 4866MHz depending on your processor and kit. So a 16GB or 32GB gaming setup works fine, and you can add more later for multitasking or content creation. Two M.2 slots hold fast NVMe SSDs: one runs at PCIe 4. 0 x4, the second at PCIe 3.0 x4. Six SATA ports cover regular SSDs and hard drives, though keep in mind that using the second M.2 slot turns off two of them. On connectivity, you get Wi-Fi 5, Gigabit Ethernet, and rear USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A and Type-C ports at up to 10Gbps.
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Prices and savings can change. Check the retailer for the current price.
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