just how much do you have to spend to build a good gaming pc three hundred
dollars six hundred dollars
two thousand dollars
it's hard to know whether it's worth it to spring for that higher tier component
without first-hand experience of how the
extra cost is going to affect your game play so what is it like to game at every
price point why don't you find out
sorry what i i did that
i i i built pcs at like every price point there's like six of them
like it over there there's lots of computers in here
bull okay then let's go check it out shall we
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Linus i'd like to introduce you to a few
friends of mine six to be exact
you ready yeah all right then
starting us off at dollars and five cents it's el cheapo
you don't have to break the bank to break into gaming
stepping it up to 622 dollars in six cents it's the athlete give the underdog
a chance and they just might hit the buzzer beater
coming in at 1028.29
it's the mid-ranger if this cowboy had a
horse its name would be price to performance
or seabiscuit strolling along at 1 513 and 43 cents
it's the gentleman you deserve a rig that will treat you right and this one
it's happy to oblige flying in at 2 505 dollars and six cents
it's the glow up started from the bottom
now we here that's the royal wii because we fancy
and redlining it's 6 806 dollars and 8 cents it's
overkill budgets
what are those
okay now a few caveats before we jump right in obviously these six builds
don't represent every price point that
could possibly exist but what i think they do is give you a pretty good idea
of the type of performance and overall experience that you can expect
if you set your budget around these prices so each build includes a tower
and a mouse keyboard and monitor because those are pretty important to the
overall gaming experience so when i was speccing out these builds i posted in
our forum for help and a ton of people gave me awesome feedback on components
so thank you so much for members
i love you i should also note that we did not overclock or do any tweaking on these
builds i wanted as much of an out of the box experience as possible
also final caveat uh 3rd gen ryzen
the rx 5700 series and the GeForce rtx
super series came out a couple of weeks after we prepared this video which is
awesome because those were exciting launches that mean better performance
for gamers but also kind of lame because it means our builds are already somewhat
out of date such as life though on the bleeding edge of technology the good news is that the
general performance category of these budgeted builds hasn't changed that much
so we'll still be able to track broad changes in the experience as we move
from one to the other so without further ado Linus
i present el chipo it's actually over there we got
we gotta go over to it
i love the uh paper mouse pad this is actually exactly what i used to use yeah
as a budget gamer well i wanted to stick with the theme so this is basically the
cheapest parts i could get on amazon while
still kind of making a pc that could run some games got it so this is running
on an AMD athlon 200 ge it's an apu two
cores four threads vega graphics right
no GPU uh this is basically
recommended as like an apu you could use to play you know like decent
you know mobas and stuff like league and dota 2 and stuff yeah it's running all
right i mean not great but it is running at 90fps
it's just i mean league's graphics don't look amazing at the best of times and this is
particularly not amazing yeah is that like a special oh i can't go behind that
line but this is the tutorial they're just gonna come in and like wreck me
you're gonna die dude okay what else you got uh so it's got a 120 gig SSD because
that is actually cheaper than buying like the most cheap hard drive wow it
finally happened because yeah flash storage is so freaking cheap
the case itself is a rosewill r2521m
with a power supply inside so that allowed us to save money uh
what what why are you giving me that face not in a way we generally recommend
saving money money no but it's a cheap it's the cheapest it's el cheapo
come on guys so the monitor is the acer sb220q
and it's actually pretty impressive for the price it's not bad at all this is
ips yeah 90 monitor yeah it looks great
75 hertz refresh rate wow 1080p with
freesync 4 millisecond response time yeah that's
fantastic so it's pretty amazing for the money i think the monitor stands out as
a fantastic choice for a budget rig and
compared to times in the past when the cheapest possible motherboard really had
no upgrade options at least this has some upgrade options
it's true you could throw in more RAM throw in a better CPU graphics card i
definitely want a better power supply if you do that but at least there's like at
least there's an upgrade path for it right keyboard and mouse
not exceptional amazon basics now i'd probably still
recommend used hardware over a brand new 200 tower fair enough but maybe that
won't be the case in our next price point speaking of which
let's go
wow even just like opening Windows and
launching applications on this one just the snappiness this is a much faster
machine thing's actually loading properly yeah
yeah well it's the athlete and so maybe that's why you love it so
much okay for the athlete basically everything has changed okay we've upped
the CPU power we have an actual GPU now so that's great oh i can feel the
difference 250 FPS compared to
60 and i'm at full 1080p the game looks great i'm glad you feel it Linus we've
doubled the RAM we've doubled the storage we have an actual discrete power
supply now so this is like an actual
we're approaching a gaming experience like this feels pretty darn good it even
looks better it's got dust filters on the fans uh the mouse is considerably
better like it's just more comfortable and even though this is still a cheap
keyboard right and the build quality is nothing special a logitech cheap
keyboard is still better than someone else's cheap keyboard from well my
experience here very true this monitor though we don't change the monitor same
monitor it holds up really well yeah it looks great and i was again i was
surprised that a monitor can be this cheap and you know we can use it in the
next highest build and it's just as good yeah yeah so this setup should get you
1080p uh you know depending on the game of
course rocket league runs pretty well regardless but uh for like modern games
1080p medium settings yeah it's very respectable
have you scored yet no
so you know it doesn't matter what the hardware is for some people they just
can't get it done so david on our staff has advised me
that these are pretty close to like kind of the recommended settings for rainbow
six siege so we're gonna see if we can handle it at 1080p let's do it so this is actually running
great we're looking at 130 160 frames
per second now there's not a lot of action going on right now there's a bad bad guy yeah kill him cool neat now he's
dead now one thing that we would change about this machine if we were to do it
again is that we'd go with a ryzen 3rd gen equivalent processor instead of the
one that we've got 3200 g but as you can see it's not like
the machine isn't running just fine i mean this is a pretty darn good
experience is this a bad guy no it's a mannequin dang it
you were killed by a mannequin now this one looks
a lot fancier it's the mid-ranger
yep it's a bit fancier we upgraded the CPU and the GPU
and the storage we got 480 gigabytes now
dang m.2 m.2 vme
dang and we've got a six core processor that's right
and led lighting
got a lot of ventilation in the front one thing i'm sort of on the fence about
is the monitor yeah like it's bigger it's bigger it's
24 inches instead of 22 so you're getting a bit of benefit there in terms
of like immersiveness yeah uh it's only 60 hertz instead of 75 hertz so that's
kind of a bummer feels a little more sturdy though yeah then there's two HDMI
in ports right so you've got your console on this side you've got your pc on that side you can quickly switch
between them so it's got more features right you're exchanging a little bit of
refresh rate for versatility got it um
but you know the other ones could work on this build as well sure the last
disadvantage of this monitor is that it uses a tn panel which means
worse viewing angles and worse color fidelity but improved pixel response
times the thing though is that this exercise is more about sort of the
performance and the experience and you could of course choose a different monitor should you see fit right
so once again there's a ryzen 3rd gen upgrade that could make a ton of sense
for us it's another 50 bucks to go third gen and we could yield as much as a 25
improvement in performance but even where we're sitting right now like this
is really darn good this is battlefield 5 running at the
high preset 1080p and we're getting you know
65 75 frames per second this is very
very playable we are beyond the refresh rate of our monitor here at least right
and this the the name of the game for this build is price to performance so if
you are looking to upgrade you have to kind of think about whether that extra
performance that you would get is worth the money you'd pay because this right
now is sitting sitting pretty in price of performance land
i think for most people it's fair to say this is about all you really need to get
a a very satisfactory gaming experience
you're going to get in trouble for saying that no i just care
yeah oh
bad guys so my i'm at ultra now right you're at ultra because that is how the
gentleman treats his date
how does it feel to be the gentleman's date today this is a noticeably better
gaming experience animations are smoother we're running at about 80 FPS
and we're at ultra so the game looks
pretty darn fancy and that high refresh rate monitor makes
a big difference this is a full hd 144
hertz monitor now and we have that because we've upgraded the GPU to rtx
2070. 500 bucks it's about a third of the
total budget we stuck with the same CPU
um so the same things apply as in the last one well as long as it's not a
bottleneck that's not necessarily a problem no
we stuck with the same same storage and the same RAM we've got actual gaming
peripherals now uh well i mean we had gaming peripherals
before but these are a little fancier because we're getting into treat yourself territory now now one thing we
haven't done yet is turn on
ray tracing i have never actually experienced ray
tracing firsthand is that shameful um
it's surprising all right well this is it this is ray
tracing our frame rate is definitely lower
there's more reflections on the gun i think ooh
only about 60 frames per second though and we had to drop the rest of the in-game details that's true
and that's got nothing to do with the monitor because again 144 hertz but the
cool thing with this setup the gentleman is that you can have
that versatility you can get a million frames per second with this uh
horsepower or you can pump the settings up a bit and if you want a bit more of a
cinematic experience the gentleman treats you right and the gentleman has
some other creature comforts as well this is where water cooling makes its first appearance and we've got a modular
power supply which just makes your build look a little bit cleaner and it's a
little bit easier to cable manage
so the glow up so we got a i7 9700k for
the CPU yep uh rtx 2080 for the GPU right getting up
near the top tier we're getting up there it's not super no but it's pretty good
it's the penultimate build
same storage same RAM uh we added a hard drive for to you know
extra storage fully modular 750 watt power supply dual
radiator water cooling more creature comforts on the
motherboard yep and this is hilarious i actually didn't notice it until you mentioned it
wireless wireless peripherals light speed from logitech i mean they feel
exactly the same it's wired so i just like didn't even think about it but
we're definitely in the territory now where you're where you're like these are the creature comforts that you can
afford when your budget is this high yeah um i mean a lot of what we're doing
doesn't really fundamentally change the gaming experience but the image looks a
lot sharper yeah it's kind of funny you know like in doing this video i kind of
found that like we're changing everything else but it really all
revolves around the monitor mostly and then you just have to you just have to
upgrade everything else to keep up that's true whether you're going higher refresh rate we'll now need to pump more
frames or whether you're going for a larger size well now you need more
resolution in order to keep it looking sharp right then you gotta upgrade so
you can pump out them frames exactly it's not much use getting a fancy
monitor and then buying an athlon 200 ge you know what i mean
so now there are some things because we're at this budget we have some room
to maneuver so we're making choices we're making choices limited by the
money we're spending life choices so this is a 1440p 165hz monitor right we
chose that instead of a 4k monitor even
though you could play 4k at playable frame rates right with this build
but i think that it's more it makes for a better experience overall
if you can get a 1440p high refresh rate monitor yeah instead of playing at 4k at
like okay frame rate and we were able to afford g-sync because that means that even
though we're not running at a super high frame rate right now we're only at about
60 frames per second 64 there the animations still feel relatively
smooth i need to go hide for a little bit especially when you shoot your teammate yeah i didn't mean to do that
he'll forgive me his widow will forgive me oh
now the other thing of course the i7 9700k
ryzen 3rd gen came out there's a lot of really good options there yeah but for
this budget uh and because we're focusing in on gaming only
you know that's what we got in there but obviously it would be a yeah if you're
doing anything else yeah going Ryzen third gen for the extra course would
make a ton of sense no brainer finally
a build that is entirely unnecessary over this
is amazing though is it this is absolutely fantastic i haven't actually
played it so this is shadow of the tomb raider at 4k
145 frames per second complete ultra
absolutely everything except motion blur because that's stupid and oh ow dang it
don't do that please there we go like everything maxed yeah
we've got we've got ray tracing on we've got high dynamic range on just
everything about it is freaking oh wow please don't you are kidding me oh i'm
dead oh that's too bad it doesn't make you a better gamer it just makes you
have more fun so yeah as i said complete balls to the wall i9 9900k
dual rtx 2080 tis
uh got a terabyte NVMe m.2 SSD and
another two terabyte uh SSD in there just for fun
this machine is nuts like there's no doubt in my mind it's unnecessary nobody
needs anything like this no you definitely don't in fact it's kind of
offensive to me that i even built it i can't figure out how to get up there i want to go walk around in the jungle it
looks so pretty how do i get up there yeah oh yeah you got to get up there there we go that is
some tomb raider looking right there that wow i actually
this is a real reaction i'm having right now i mean look how sharp it looks 4k
ray tracing actually not anti-aliasing on too
this is nuts okay i can understand how you would
spend this much you know we said that like really it's seven thousand dollars
i know it's seven grand but like we said it was completely unnecessary but like
now that i've experienced it i don't know you know maybe i should
sell my car
i mean we're basically sparing no expense here we've got a triple fan
radiator water cooled eight core hyper threaded processor 32 gigs of RAM this
is about as good a gaming experience as money can buy and it shows and it
definitely is overkill you don't need 32 gigs of RAM for
gaming i just killed a bug with an arrow good for you i have a fantastic shot
because of oops oh i just jumped oh i'm dead
whoopsie she's dead so the verdict here is pretty straightforward yes spending
more money does get you sharper image quality more eye candy
better peripherals you know no mouse cord drag and all that kind of stuff
but you can also get a decent gaming experience at basically any price point
as long as you set your expectations and choose your games yes appropriately
so like battlefield 5 ultra settings six
hundred dollar budget not likely
but if you set your sights a little lower cs
go overwatch narrative games or even
last generation or two generational aaa's right yeah why not i mean that's
one of the beautiful things about the pc is that the game library is quite
literally tens of thousands of games deep spanning multiple generations
chances are there's some game that can play on the hardware that you have and
that's pretty awesome now if you guys want to know firsthand what it's like to
game at these different price points one really cool thing is that we're actually
taking all of these rigs the whole things to ltx and there are still some
tickets left so uh at the time of filming try them out there and you can
game on everything from a 300 complete gaming setup all the way to a 7 000
complete setup and figure out what's right for your budget and your
preference i have a feeling some people are going to walk away
a little bit poorer from ltx having experienced this one particularly
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