New PC

[tacoccatjj]

Budget (including currency): 500 USD

Country: USA

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Microsoft Flight Simulator

What should I get?

 

[Ykcud]

Are you willing to buy used parts from eBay? Also $500 is a REALLY tight budget. It would be tricky to get a gaming PC in general for that amount, let alone one that can play Flight Simulator.

[RONOTHAN##]

16 minutes ago, tacoccatjj said:

What should I get?

A higher budget if you want to play flight sim

 

If you really want a $500 computer, your best bet is to upgrade a used Optiplex. See if you can get a 4th gen or newer i7 prebuilt that takes a standard PSU (4th gen Optiplexes did, not sure about newer ones), add in 16GB of RAM, an SSD, a half decent PSU, and a GTX 1060. That should end up costing about $500, depending on how good a deal you got on the prebuilt. Just remember to get one of the full width towers so you can put in the GPU. The thinner ones can have GPUs if you do a half height card, but the half height GPUs that can game are usually at a price premium.