This is the floor of the desktop market, and being straight about it saves disappointment. A machine at this cap is an entry tower: a modern low-power processor, a modest amount of memory, one solid-state drive and, in most cases, the graphics built into the processor rather than a separate card. It plays esports titles at 1080p on reduced settings and handles browsing, schoolwork and video without complaint.

What decides whether such a machine feels usable or frustrating is rarely the processor model. It is the memory configuration, the drive type, and whether the settings were ever tuned. Those three things are covered below, along with a plain list of what this level will not do, so you can judge whether to buy now or wait until the budget stretches further.