This is the $69 gaming PC, and it's
great, except for one small problem. It keeps turning all of my favorite new AAA
games into what I call slideshow simulator, which got me wondering, what
would happen if we added just a little bit more budget? Could we play any game
on the market with legitimately good performance? to find out. I personally
signed a big, beautiful budget increase
of $200, allowing us to upgrade our hot
dog to a hot dam. I'm talking games like
Doom: The Dark Ages, Dragon's Dogma 2, and Cyberpunk at 1080p 60fps. And I
picked up another set of parts to show that if we start our $269 build from
scratch, we can do even better. Wow, this is actually much higherend than I
expected. Is this a 2080 Super? I know. Can you
believe that? That's almost as unbelievable as this 360 pop shreddy
grind. Segue to our sponsor,
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All things considered, our latest $69 gaming PC is a fantastic little machine,
but it was built with compromise at its core. Like these dangerously rough
cutouts, ow, these two precarious power supplies,
not to mention the low power CPU that was meant more for crunching
spreadsheets than games. That's a good place for us to start by
asking what is the best CPU that we can put into this motherboard without
swapping any of our other components. And the answer is the Core i7 3770K.
But when we found this Core i5 3570 nonK
for just 5 Canadian, that was a deal we
couldn't refuse, even if it does mean we'll lose a few FPS versus its big
brother. Now, if you're looking at that deal thinking, "Oh, is this another
David build where he just flexes his deal hunting skills on us mere mortals?"
The answer is no. For budgeting purposes, I made him use prices that
were actually readily available across a combination of marketplace and eBay. So,
this CPU counts against him for $15.
But even so, we have lots of budget left for other upgrades like this 4x4 gig kit
of memory from Corsair for about $10. We're not only doubling our capacity
here, but it's faster than our old mini greenies, too. At least in theory. I do
have some doubts about this HP motherboard actually supporting this stuff at full speed. Next, we're going
to improve our storage situation with an upgrade to a Hitachi 1 TB hard drive for
$10. What are all the great things I can say about this drive? Well, it has 1 TB
of storage, which is enough that we won't need to constantly redownload our
games, and it saves us the $30 to $40
that we would spend on a larger SSD. With all of those positives out of the
way, let me make this clear. For anything but a game drive, I don't
really recommend random old used hard drives. But for an application like
this, where reliability doesn't matter, it's totally valid.
Now, for obvious reasons, we played around with the idea of replacing the
case from our original $69 PC, but we
realized that that would have cascading consequences. For one thing, our
motherboard might not fit in the new chassis, and for another, we would need
a new power supply that is actually enough for the entire system because uh
we'd have nowhere to mount our second power supply. So instead, we opted to go
allin and invest our remaining budget in our GPU. With about $166 left, our
options are somewhat limited. But if we
sell the old RX570 for the price we
originally paid, which shouldn't be a challenge, we got a great deal. All of a
sudden, we have over $200 to play with.
With that kind of doach in our pocket, it was tempting then to go for the
legendary GTX 1080 Ti, which can be had
for less than 150 bucks these days. But
we're starting to see games that require feature support that that card simply
doesn't have, which pushes us to newer cards that have hardware raid tracing
support, like an AMD 6700 or a GeForce
2070 Super. Now, it is worth noting if you get really lucky, you might be able
to get something better. We found a handful of 2080s and even 2080 supers
for just around $200. And looking at the sold listings on eBay, that's not an
unrealistic target if you're willing to play the game in order to play games.
But that was a little bit outside of the
easy to obtain range that I had for David. So, we're going to go with the
2070 Super for our build. Sorry, David.
This is a little tricky. So, while we're getting everything aligned,
let's talk about the importance of casting a wide net for parts that fit
your budget and then pulling the trigger when you see the right deal. You've got
to have some idea what you're aiming for. Set up your keyword notifications,
then pounce. And if you're not sure where to start on what kind of hardware
is going to work for you, we really like the Tom's Hardware CPU and GPU hierarchy
charts. Oh, and another really good resource is those super helpful
head-to-head benchmark videos that you can find on YouTube. Shout out to the
creators of those. All right.
Yay. Let's fire it up. Is what I would say if
it wasn't for the big question we need to answer. Would we have just been
better off building a $269 gaming PC in
the first place rather than building a $69 gaming PC and upgrading it? Short
answer, maybe. Our higher initial budget
makes it easier for us to target someone's old custom PC rather than
being stuck with a dusty workstation. Ideally, then we can find something with
a newer CPU. In general, it's worth
noting that you're still better off trying to buy things in a bundle versus
individual parts. You'll save on delivery time and cost. And ideally,
you'll be able to test the bundle together before you actually hand over
the cash, like you've seen us do during Scrapyard Wars. For stability testing,
we like using stress tests like OCCT and
Firmark. And for monitoring temperatures, hardware info is a great
choice. With that said, when I'm buying budget parts in particular, I'm usually
okay with the seller just sending me a video of them running a stress test as
long as they have a decent rating. But I leave that up to your judgment. We
picked up a few different bundles, each with their own strengths and weaknesses,
but the one we liked best was built around one of our favorite target CPUs
for builds like this, the Intel Core i58400.
This chip could trade blows with the previous generation's flagship thanks to
its six cores that boost to up to 4 GHz. And because it was so popular, there are
tons of people trying to get rid of them, meaning that deals on these chips
are plentiful. This H310 motherboard that it came with offers us a decent
upgrade path. And the whole platform is new enough that it shouldn't have any
significant obstacles to running Windows 11. Included with our bundle for $100,
we got 16 gigs of Team Group RAM at 2666 mega transfers per second, a decent
midsized case, and an optical drive. But
none of that is enough to test out these parts to make sure we didn't get scammed. So, we also picked up this CIC
X650 W power supply for around $30. Now,
buying a used power supply is a roll of the dice on the best of days, especially
a modular one. Make sure you get all the cables. They are not interchangeable.
So, if you must buy a used power supply, you might want to look to eBay. Between
a visible seller rating, not to mention more robust fire protection, the online
auction house might be our preferred source for used power supplies. Let's
get this one installed.
Next up, we need some decent storage. We actually got offered a free 128 gig SSD
when we picked up our core system. Just goes to show you it's always worth being
a good polite buyer because occasionally you might get some freebies thrown in.
But that's just gravy because our motherboard is new enough that we can
aim for an NVMe SSD instead, like this 500 gig Kingston NV2 that we got for
just under $20. Now, to be clear, if
you're in a hurry, you might have to settle for a SATA drive for this budget.
But deals like this one are definitely out there. And man, I got to say, this
computer is a lot more modern than I expected so far. Let's stress test it.
OCCT is a great tool for stress testing computers. And they've even got these
helpful little tool tips throughout the UI that will help you configure it to
stress the correct components for what you're trying to validate. Shout out to
their team, by the way. They're working on a new LT themed skin, so uh stay
tuned for that. It's coming whenever it comes. Look at her go. It's also not a
bad idea to run Crystal Disc Info to check out the power on hours and see if
there are any smart errors on your SSD. Assuming nothing's defective, we should
be able to run stress tests like this indefinitely. It's not like we're
overclocking or anything. On that subject, choosing parts that can
overclock is not a bad choice for stretching out the life of budget parts.
But the flip side is that if it doesn't support overclocking, it means it's
never been overclocked. So, you know that it hasn't been pushed to its
limits. Hey, we passed. Now that we
trust our core system, then it's time to plan our next move. We could move up in
the RAM world, but it's going to be hard to find a noticeable bump in performance
for a low price. So, I think we're going to skip that. We already have a pretty
good case and a functioning cooler. I mean, I wouldn't blame you for upgrading
that, but personally, I wouldn't bother until I've sorted out everything else.
This time around, because we were trying to build a system that would provide a
more balanced experience, not to mention an easier upgrade path, we actually have
a little less money to invest in our GPU, which means we're probably going to
end up with a 2060 or a 2060 Super for
around $160. Oh, even at that price, it kind of
breaks our budget, putting us around $300. But David pointed out that he was
able to find these cards for more like $125 to $130
with a little bit of patience. And if you're able to be really patient, we
even saw a couple of 2070 class cards in
this range. So, uh, happy hunting.
Something something transparent screwdriver. ltstore.com. Let's go. Look
at this thing. Gosh, I've been waiting so long for this day. Look at it go.
It's like an LT screwdriver but clearer.
Question now is which of our systems gives us a better overall gaming
experience. Right out of the gate, yours is really loud. Yes. Kind of unpleasant.
Also, the shader caching on his took at
least half an hour. At least. That was brutal.
Yeah, you're you're uh doing a little bit better. your mins are higher than my
average. It goes to show you the most
powerful GPU is not always the correct answer. I wasn't expecting such a huge
disparity. Mhm. Then again, I mean, that's what a third gen and this is an
eighth gen. It's a huge huge difference. That's a big difference in CPU
performance. Still, this is not an especially pretty
game. No, but there's no denying it's demanding and it's running way better on
the from the ground up $269 gaming PC.
That being said, this computer is still mostly playable. Like you're not having
a great time and you're having frame drops to sub 10 once in a while, but you
could get through this game probably. Yeah. So, if our goal was to build a PC
that can run any modern game, Dragon's Dogment 2 isn't going to stop us. Let's
try the next one. I'm really feeling my hard drive right now. You just finished
a game, reloaded into a game, and are playing before I even loaded my first
one. Yeah, it's pretty brutal, dude. Disconnected. No. Oh, we're on Hey,
we're on the same game. No way. Yeah, but uh Oh, nice. Okay, let's go.
Oh, it's you. Hey. Dang it. I wouldn't
have won. This is not great. I'm above 60 on my 1% lows, but it feels quite
choppy. How is yours feeling? Uh, mine feels great. Why wasn't that? I have no
excuses.
Oh boy. Oh, I I I screen peaked. I was waiting for you to pop around that corner. You piece of crap. But I didn't
get Oh no. How dare you? Got him. Ah,
mother lover. I got to say my minimums
are 84, but it doesn't feel quite that smooth actually. Really? Oh, got him.
Oh, you did get me. It's over. You're the better You're the better CS player.
Here, try this.
Oh my god, that's so much better. Yeah, yours is definitely worse, but it's not
as worseer as uh it should be. I think
if we fandangled the settings a bit, we would get a better experience on both of
them. We just wanted sort of to set a benchmark. You can absolutely play
esports games on either of them. 100%. But that's a way better experience
because we have a way better CPU. All right, what else we got? How you doing
over there? It would be so nice for the menu to load.
Oh, never mind. Oh, yeah. This is what happens. Stop. Oh.
Oh, that's rough. So, if our goal is to
be able to play any AAA game, we're basically stuck with the groundup build
where we choose a more modern platform. And you could choose a more modern
office PC. But from my experience, the more recent stuff is still kind of
deployed slash still has an obvious value. So, you're not able to get as
good a deal on it as you are compared to the really obsolete office PCs. This is
the office PC I found that's similar to that one. It's got an $8500 in it and it
was about $110. Okay, so pretty good value and we could
have like modified it, made it work, but it's also really similar in price to the
custom one we got. Yeah, way better. So, it doesn't set itself apart in terms of
value and we're stuck with this proprietary power supply and really
limiting case. So, when you're looking at new enough stuff, it probably does
make more sense to go for a custom PC 100%. Um, yep. Okay. She's demanding. We
might need a little bit of DLSS helper. Uh, medium was also probably Oh, yeah.
Let's do low error. Maybe some DLSS. Okay. Yeah. fast-paced game like this,
you are not going to want to play at dips down to 15 FPS. Let's try just low
first or do you want to have DLSS on? Let's try low first cuz 1% lows are
pretty damn low. Yeah, this is not great. DLSS. I could play the game
though. Yeah, it looks like it doesn't feel as choppy as it the frame times are
saying. What is it about ID and just being able to make games that look
incredible and run pretty damn incredible? Yeah. Do it just for me. Can
you try DLSS? Oh, absolutely. I think with quality, that's all we're going to
need. That is a playable experience.
Very looks a little softer obviously, but
very playable. Not just a little. And say what you want about DLSS and fake
frames and all that. I would rather play like this than like
I was before at native. Oh, 100%. It's pretty incredible what you can get for
269 bucks though, I got to say. Unbelievable.
This is freaking awesome. Say what you will about the state of the new PC
market. It is a great time to build a sub $500 PC if you're willing to use
used parts. There are solid deals out there both on mostly built computers
that have not that old platforms and on
three generation old cards that, as you can see, still hold up pretty darn well.
As far as narrowing down your choices, personally, I would avoid pre-rtx NVIDIA
and pre 5000 series AMD if you're interested in running modern games since
we're expecting to see more and more titles that require an up-to-date
feature set. Most Intel cards should be fine, but we've noticed that it's hard
to find them at a good price. And that could be a combination of the lack of
widespread adoption and also the fact that ARC is riding a new wave of
popularity. Um, maybe it's a bit of both. But you know what else is riding a
new wave of popularity? These segways.
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budget builds, you should definitely check out how we built the $69 gaming PC
that we started with in this video. It was quite the hands-on