this case is unbelievable the holes they're not tapped there's no
threads there's no way to screw into them
compared to last generation the current crop of consoles from sony and microsoft
boast pretty good performance for anywhere from 300 to 500
but everyone knows the pc is king right
to prove it we set out to build a gaming
pc for 500 bucks that can beat the xbox
series x and put those console peasants in their place but Linus you might say
that's illegal well so is this segue to my sponsor are
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spoiler alert this build did not go as planned building a competent gaming rig
for 500 that's a piece of cake building one that
can match the up to 4k 120 hertz performance of the series x
that is no small task and by the end of this video you are going to see why
because remember guys unless you can also work a controller
into the price you didn't match it so
here is what we came up with
in spite of being remanufactured that is to say that this motherboard is brand
new but the chipset on it is secondhand
and salvaged from another motherboard this x99 board looks at least on paper
like an absolutely outstanding value it
was one of the cheapest that we could find at just 62 dollars from aliexpress
which is amazing considering that we get NVMe support with an m.2 slot for
storage and another slot for wi-fi and
compatibility with older Intel xeon cpus
that can be found super affordably on the used market and that's exactly what
we paired it with meet the xeon e5 2667
v3 these puppies are coming to the point in
their life cycle where data center admins are phasing them out in favor of
newer more power efficient chips so there's an abundance of these on ebay
which means supply and demand baby you can get them for as little as 69
nice now it may not be the fastest anymore having
been originally released in late 2014 but eight cores with a base clock of 3.2
gigahertz boosting up to 3.6 is nothing to scoff at either
as long as you get the right thing in the mail unfortunately we didn't upon arrival we
found that the seller sent us a v4 chip instead of a v3
good news right well not so much
the small bump to the cache size and the more advanced manufacturing process
would have both been welcome upgrades and as far as we could tell from the
motherboard listing it should have been fine but
should is at the very top of my list of famous
last words while the listing claimed compatibility despite the best efforts
of me colin and Anthony we could not get
this combo to boot and after proving that both the chip and
the motherboard worked separate from each other and chasing down any hope of
a BIOS update we were left with no option but to replace one half of this
obviously incompatible pair
so our second motherboard from aliexpress
even had a hacky BIOS that unlocked overclocking just one problem
it also didn't work that's the wrong box well
at that point we couldn't just keep kicking the proverbial can down the road
so to move along we grabbed a compatible CPU from our warehouse that is
close-ish in performance this is an Intel core i7
6900k and i know i know it's a better chip than the e5 and it
comes at a higher price tag around 130
we'll just have to keep that in mind when we draw our conclusions
sticking to our budget as best we could we shoved in a single 16 gig dim of
samsung ddr4 2133 ecc RAM which at 32 on
ebay is darn near as much memory as we could cram into this thing for the price
that brings us to 235 dollars with the
substitute CPU on board that is half of our budget and we haven't even gotten to
the graphics card yet we ended up snagging this used Gigabyte
GeForce gtx 1070 on ebay for 200
a hefty chunk of the budget not to mention that it looks like it was either
run in a mining operation or extremely poor air quality in their house which
left us with 64. for the case
storage power supply and uh a game controller
the cheapest case we could find was this rosewill fbmx1 for 29.99
now we could have done a cardboard box build and with the build quality of this
thing maybe we should have this case is unbelievable
the holes they're not tapped there's no threads
there's no way to screw into them but
this motherboard honestly from my point of view is kind of a fire hazard so
we stuck with the uh metal case we grabbed this chintzy air cooler for
28 bucks i don't have a ton of hope for this thing but
we'll see i guess and an adata
su-365 SSD it's only 240 gigs but that's
all we could afford at 43 finally we went with an evga non-modular
400 watt power supply so that power rating is cutting it pretty
close here but as i've said before and i'll say again
you're better off with a decent quality power supply at a lower wattage rating
than one that's rated for a thousand watts but it's 20 bucks because that
one's gonna blow up that set us back forty dollars
leading us into our controller yes my friends
this ebay special xbox 360 controller
rip off can be yours for just 18.50
personally i like the color even if the
quality of the switches isn't quite up to the original
that leaves us with
uh excuse me negative money kind of though
the build we intended to create comes in at 507.57
which if we could find a heat sink and or a case in a scrap heap would sneak in
at under 500 as for what i actually have in front of
me it's more like 580
but hey that is a minor price to pay to be the
proud owner of this piece of fine pc
master race gaming machinery so it's
time to game head to head against the xbox series x and see how we did
i told colin i was like i trust you i
believe you really but are you sure this memory and CPU is going to work together
core i7 6900k this is a 16 gig stick of ecc RAM core
i7s are not supposed to have a memory controller on them that is capable of
addressing registered memory that's registered ecc let it be known i just
proved Linus wrong this is actually a surprisingly
robust BIOS like it's kind of got everything you would want in here
i can't remember if this is if this is the one i updated i think this might be
the one that i updated from like a weird russian github
uh task manager thinks this motherboard has 16 memory slots
four was actually the correct number minor details
i mean all the CPU cores are showing up and everything though there you go eight cores with hyper threading immediately
our hardware begins to show its age while we can run at 4k 60 hertz this tv
and actually the xbox series x for that matter are both capable of 4k
120 hertz so that is a bit of a compromise not that
i'm too concerned about a what is it a 1070 yeah being able to run
at 4k 120 hertz really anyway should we start with something lighter
yeah rocket league let's do it give it a fighting chance
hey what what are you being are you being all defeatist right now that's my
job i'm giving you a fighting chance it's a pc
it's a pc master race it's a 1070.
this this joystick is not good
just like doesn't register look at that
there he goes all right sure
um and i'm done bud
wow rip okay well the good news is i'm
getting 130 frames per second and it looks great uh i don't know how to play
this game i am getting absolutely destroyed by
bots right now whatever the game's running great let's
flip over to the xbox you know what
i think it is fair to say that it actually does look marginally
better on the pc
i have a feeling this one's going to be rough do maternal at 4k
runs pretty nice on the xbox series x
we're running at 62 FPS at 4k at 4k
ultra that's not terrible it's not a bad gaming experience well not at all well
that was like in a menu let's let's see when you get something well yeah yeah
yeah it's in the menu yeah it's a photo
okay to be clear guys we are aware of the deeper blacks on the xbox we think
it has to do with the capture card pass through not detecting full versus
limited range properly so we're not holding that against either of them
our SSD is not as fast colin
not even close not to mention that it's a quarter of the capacity
this controller feels so cheap and crappy
by comparison it weighs like nothing oh not to mention
that it's wired
look okay we acknowledge there are a handful of
ways that our system is not as perfect
the game's running really well though
62 FPS we're like pretty much locked 60
FPS like it's almost like the game developer
targeted gtx 1070 4k 60. like it's it's
locked in and not v-sync it's just at like
anywhere from 59 to 65.
all right i do think the detail looks a little higher on the xbox here's our
hallway can you stop being so biased i'm not being for one second colin
objective can you stop being an xbot
oh it's really hard to tell because this has got the
proper contrast i'd say in terms of texture quality it's darn close but we
can have a look at level of detail on things like the gun and our little robot
friend here i'd say that's real similar
i mean if i can't tell flipping back and forth between them like this
i think it's fair to call it a wash now in terms of frame rate
obviously we don't have an FPS counter on the xbox version well on the pc we do
but having played a number of games in my day
i can tell you guys this is a pretty darn locked 60 FPS now when the action
gets a little bit more intense we can see if it holds it but i mean
i've played around with the maternal enough that i already know the answer to
that it's going to hold it just fine this gaming experience
is not markedly different so far
i was expecting i don't know what i was expecting i was not expecting
the 1070 to hold up quite so well
game looks good it's running smooth i am blown away
by how similar these ended up being in terms of
performance of course neither rocket league nor do maternal got xbox series specific
optimizations whereas forza horizon 4
looks flipping amazing on the new gen x boxes
xbox i xboxes even sitting this close to it
it's just like man this is a good-looking game
is that a lego car did you was it lego
i don't know it is it's made of lego
i didn't imagine it were you messing with me
did you know it was lego the whole time i couldn't tell
that tearing though yeah it's pretty terry
i mean we're holding 55 yeah i think that's why i'm getting so
much tearing though all right we're not able to do ultra quality oh well we
could turn on bennett wait what
okay hey xbox gets dynamic rendering update
did it have dynamic end optimization i would assuming that's what
the whole design for xbox thing is let's see okay
so now we're at a locked 60 and that tearing issue is mostly gone
oh still some ugly tearing
yeah yeah okay okay hold on though hold on there's
a video g-sync over HDMI
i think you would have to have one of the new cards with HDMI variable
refresh rate okay
point xbox yeah a little bit
okay why don't we try turning v-sync on you
okay yeah it's definitely a little more jello-y on the inputs that's what
happens when you have v-sync on
but now that it's running
smoothly ah image quality
maybe a touch more aliasing in the road lines
but it looks darn good don't it that actually went way better than i
expected that cocky tone at the beginning of the video i was just
messing with you guys i thought this was going to be an absolute bloodbath but
colin and actually with some help from Anthony those two put together a pretty
darn compelling system like it kept up way better than i expected and
it's a pc right so you can still browse the web edit video or run emulators
without rebooting into a funky developer mode and all that good stuff
with that said it would be
irresponsible of me to declare this some kind of pc master race victory
a we cheated on the price b we made all kinds of compromises to
the config like the single channel memory the uh oh a quarter the amount of
storage the lack of a blu-ray drive
didn't mention that before the crummy controller and the numerous other
compromises we don't have any meaningful warranty whatsoever we ended up spending
a fortune on shipping not just the items coming to us in the first place but also
returning things that ultimately weren't compatible and of course the complete
lack of any modern features like HDMI 2.1 and ray tracing support so
no it wasn't a victory but damn it it was my lack of victory and we
definitely had some fun seeing just how
much performance we could scrape out of a 500 budget and it turns out it's more
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enjoyed this video you may enjoy our previous console killer machine where we
uh we loaded it up with the entire catalog of good old games games
pretty freaking sick