AMD's 'Combat Crate Bundles' help gamers quickly build PCs

Thanks to the stupidity that is Bitcoin mining, graphics cards for gaming have become wildly over-expensive. AMD has come to the rescue with the Combat Crate Bundle, giving you the main components you need to build a decent PC. For $550 (at Amazon, Newegg and elsewhere), you get a Ryzen 5 1600 with cooler, MSI B350 Tomahawk motherboard and MSI Radeon RX 580 Armor OC graphics card. That's a bit cheaper than the sum of the parts at retail, especially considering the ridiculously over-inflated price of the card alone in the last few months.

You'll still need to buy RAM, a case with power supply, and storage, at a minimum, but you should be able to build a pretty nice gaming rig for well under $1,000. The Radeon RX 580 Armor performs about as well as NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1060, but it has two HDMI ports, making it particularly handy for VR.

AMD plans to offer a second bundle with the Ryzen 5 1700 processor soon, as well. It looks like it's trying to sell off its first-gen Ryzen CPUs now that the new, much-improved second-generation chips are going on sale. Most importantly for budget gamers, though, it gives them predictable pricing for a Radeon RX graphics card while, thanks to cryptocurrencies, the prices are still fluctuating wildly.