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in the last episode of the 69 gaming pc

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saga we bought a dell optiplex for 27

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bucks on ebay stuck in a 30 graphics card and got playable frame rates in a

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variety of popular casual and esports games that is depending on your standard

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for playable but

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we didn't stop there it's dramatic right so

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for our second installment we're actually taking a combination of our own

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advice yeah and

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some from our community to bring that standard that playable standard up by

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upgrading our original system with a few more budget parts and hopefully turning

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it into an actually decent gaming pc

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so can we build it yes we can maybe uh i

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actually i don't know i'm not sure is that a bob the builder thing isn't it can we fix it the new be quiet! silent

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base offers great usability and utilizes

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noise dampening events to keep your pc quiet check it out on newegg at the link

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below

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so here's the deal using current gen parts the cheapest gaming pc that you

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could build today and that would actually be worth

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building is probably around 350 to 400

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bucks so in order to make our frankensteinish

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collection of parts worth the time investment and the inherent risks that

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come with buying used hardware we figure we've got to undercut that price by a

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pretty good margin while getting legitimately decent frame

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rates so our goal here is smooth 1080p

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gaming at medium or so settings so as a refresher here's our

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original system there are some things we can upgrade in here like the

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cardboard but there are some other things that we're going to be stuck with like the motherboard the cooler the case

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and the power supply once we start replacing those core components that

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usually means we're better off building something new but that also means that

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we're going to have to be stuck with the 255 watt power limit so the most obvious

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component to upgrade here given that our gtx 650

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poor thing broken fan had us stuck at 720p and low settings for the most part

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is the graphics card but there's been a lot of generations of

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graphics cards since the 600 series so

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which one should we go with newer ones are obviously going to get us better

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performance but they stand to potentially be

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bottlenecked and they obviously come with a higher price tag

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so to find the best bang for the buck we

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hooked up our gtx 750 ti

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a gtx 950 and a gtx 1050 ti and ran some

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tests there's some good news here for those of you who are allergic to jank by the way

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i mean we're not no clearly but some people are and that is that

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many of these newer gpus actually are so much more power

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efficient that we can get rid of that SATA to six pin pci express power

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adapter because they can draw all the power they need from the slot so no more

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of this weird cable nonsense yes like this one

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oh great oh oh shoot actually i'm sorry uh we're

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still gonna need that pci express riser okay yeah

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yeah charge your right click and then you're gonna get yeah

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you can't hold it forever yeah life's tough oh you're dead yep if you

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pressed either you would have lived all right

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okay so that's overwatch looks pretty good wow

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look at the CPU usage though 90

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yeah yeah get them

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um so yeah with rocket league we're getting around the same frame rate even

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though we've upgraded the GPU so it's actually still very impressive you

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know we're getting very playable frame rates here at 80 right now nice and smooth 1080. even as you went through a

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whole particle cloud it was at the 90 right there

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but uh we're not getting that much of an improvement yeah

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once again CPU activity pinned above 90 percent yep

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all the way this is uh

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pretty much all we need to know but why don't we open up one more game just for

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a good measure here okay so

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uh once again we are now running at 1080p what kind of details are we

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looking at here uh it's low everything low everything

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and really no improvement to speak of yeah

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still around like 40 something yeah this is this is

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noticeably choppy yeah we were at like i think we got a

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whoa bad guy was that packing good guy yeah i can't tell the difference in cs

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go when they don't have big red markers above their heads

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like in overwatch they do they have that in overwatch that's why i like it

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so in summary going with a 750 ti but leaving

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everything else the same gets overwatch more playable and then similar results

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in csgo and rocket league but this time at 1080p instead of 720p so it's an

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improvement but the the issue here is that our frame

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rates are still not great they're about the same they dip

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below comfortably playable exactly

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so time to upgrade all right let's do it

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did i leave you hanging there no i i just oh that time i did

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oh this guy's cheating he's definitely using net hacks

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what what is a net hack i don't even know the hacks are the strongest hacks

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there are hacks that interfere with the network connection oh nice did you see

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that kill even with a CPU even even with the

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system being CPU bound i'm trash in the competition

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okay you're only firing at the like the big guy yeah because that's all you can

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hit he's a big target 35 sds i gotta

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reload let me reload oh i just got my ultimate oh

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all right let's go on to the next game okay but you're just gonna play goalie

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i missed it i mean i shouldn't surprise me that much i knew we were CPU bound

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but i i thought maybe yeah and like nothing's happening on screen i'm just

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like walking around it's still like well okay now it's at 50 but a second ago was

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that like 40 yeah and you're dipped down under 40 32 there so in summary then

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even with our first GPU upgrade we saw

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limited to no improvement and then because of a fairly obvious significant

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CPU bottleneck here well we continued to have the same

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experience as we made our way up the GPU stack

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so the next upgrade is obviously going to be our CPU not only is our original

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one here from 2007 it's also a dual core

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which wasn't a problem for gaming then but it definitely is now so according to

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Intel's compatibility list the most powerful CPU for this chipset the Intel

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g41 express is the core ii quad qx 9650

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it actually runs at a similar clock speed but it's got twice as many cores

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and we happen to have one

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it's a good thing we did all the testing before i started filming geez

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thanks for being careful with that

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i got a screwdriver too let's do it together

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yes this is not one of those

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i'm sure there was a time once

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boy it's nice how easy these upgrades are to get at here

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this is like a hinge yeah

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great great what's not so great is the fact that

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there is more to CPU compatibility than Intel's guidelines i'm afraid it turns

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out dell never validated the qx 9650 on

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this motherboard which i guess kind of makes sense since who would put an

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extreme edition in a business tower that doesn't make any money

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maybe a crazy person would try that so we needed to find one of the

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processors on dell's compatibility list and our old friends at freegeek a

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non-profit electronics recycling outfit located here in vancouver came to the

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rescue they hooked us up with an Intel core 2

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quad 9550 it's a couple steps down from the qx 9650 and it has a slightly lower

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clock speed than even our e 7500 but it's still a quad core so we're hoping

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for a big improvement cs go

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whoa go whoa

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dang buttery smooth that is

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way smoother look at that

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and like and this is with the 750 ti this is the 750 ti and 30 more for a CPU

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quad-core CPU wow

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i mean i still can't kill anything but yeah you know so you're hovering around

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90 100 plus right now yeah

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going going up from 45 and far more importantly if you're

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playing something competitive is when there's a bunch of action on the

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screen we're not getting those same kinds of frame drops or dips or hitches

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like it's it's smooth when you pan around a corner

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there's no stutter you know it honestly it's blowing me away this is very

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playable yeah boom boom boom boom get him get him get

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him a head shot whoa he went flying

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yeah i fired i fire large let's

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you fire large bullets when i play csgo i like to fire a

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slightly larger bullet than everyone else i closed it like an idiot but we

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were sitting at only around 60 CPU usage were we so there you go just not running

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into a bottleneck just having a couple of extra cores available to it huh

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ended up increasing rfps what like 70

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i'm bad at math that's crazy but it went up a lot all right let's see you pull

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some noobs down 204 yeah you're in the menu smart guy let's go let's go

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this guy is really bad but you haven't killed him yet no but this is on his

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heart oh man

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now you've got reinforcements i missed the sleep dirt

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did you get them eliminated eliminated that's what i do to bad guys

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you guys killed each other though interestingly though

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that's our CPU utilization in overwatch so we were still running into a CPU

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bottleneck which means that even though we only upgraded our GPU one more tier

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we probably wouldn't get any further improvements out of an even better one

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because we had such a great um experience with cs go and overwatch we

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decided it's the cheapest gaming pc we might as well

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add the cheapest free game most popular free game how do

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you just like get rid of your stupid yeah this is this is what's so annoying

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you can't get rid of it you have to land oh that's about

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oh he got him dang

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i'm gonna take his stuff you mind you mind him to death i like this game

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portal yeah i mean it's true somewhat playable what are we running at here so

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this is a 1080p medium okay all right

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upgrading the CPU and the GPU got us

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excellent results in terms of price to performance so far

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our optiplex here was 30 bucks the quad core CPU was another 30 bucks

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and a 750 ti is about 60 bucks making

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this a 1080p 60fps gaming pc

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for 120 bucks and the crazy thing

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is we're still not done yet

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now we won't be improving gaming performance this time around but going from a hard

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drive to an SSD is certainly a quality

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of life improvement which is why we actually did it

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before we started running all of our benchmarks and like filming this video

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because otherwise we'd waste a lot of time waiting around for that hard drive

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so uh so pretty much anything will do you but we chucked in a Corsair force le

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and with Windows 10 installed it makes this old junker of a machine almost feel

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like a new pc almost

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so given that you can get a 120 gig SSD for about 30 bucks on amazon

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150 gaming pc boom

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got it not bad i mean like look at the responsiveness

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here like whether you're just kind of switching tabs like you guys saw me

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opening up photoshop there like let's launch a web browser like

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it doesn't feel like a decade old computer at all the

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only thing that's left is to deal with this measly four gigs of RAM

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but upgrading RAM on older systems like this

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one can be a little bit challenging and it

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can even be pretty confusing to even get started

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now according to the spec sheet for the dell optiplex 380 our system only

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supports four gigs of RAM two two Gigabyte dimms but since we have

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some ddr3 lying around we figured we just might as well throw in another four

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gig stick and see what happens come on riley don't screw it up again

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oh i love the sound of that click

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i'm not checking your work i'm just appreciating

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wait are we expecting this to work or not

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i'm not sure i've never done this before so oh wow

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it worked what was it supposed to

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um not sure uh really doing this for the

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first time so uh don't know about RAM

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is it all is it all detected properly uh i thought you prepared this video yeah

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it's uh it's all that look at look at that yeah eight gigs of ddr3 maybe oh it

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worked oh thank goodness okay i really can't tell did you think this was gonna

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work or not i'm not sure

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so there can be any number of restrictions on the kind of memory that

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you can run in these sorts of pre-built systems what speed the stakes run at whether

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they're single-sided or double-sided dimms and even just straight-up hardware

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locks so that they'll only work with certain brands or certain models

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and given that our RAM upgrade actually didn't have that much of an effect on

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gaming performance our take here is that if you have some 4

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gig ddr3 dimms lying around give it a shot but otherwise it might

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not be worth it especially since once you cross that 200 threshold or once you

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need to do more than just game like if you have to get actual work done

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it might be time to start thinking about spending a bit more to get something

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more modern with that said a bit of frustration on

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the RAM upgrade doesn't change that overall this was an incredibly

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successful experiment i mean we're not saying that we'd recommend that everyone

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you know tries this at home you know buying new pcs is dead yeah that would

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be the that would be the click the clickbait thumbnail but don't do

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clickbait but it does show that contrary to popular belief pc gaming isn't that

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expensive to get into provided that you're willing to do some bargain

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hunting which i am you hunted this that's why

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it's dead now it looks dead my computer it's like dismembered you know

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i can't recommend enough the mass drops sennheiser hd 6xx headphones these are

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based closely on one of sennheiser's

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all-time best pairs of headphones they're actually the ones i use at home

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and they're one of massdrop's all-time best sellers with over 40 000 of their

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members picking them up to date they have not changed the driver and sound

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structure compared to the hd650s meaning you get a nice balanced mid-range and

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natural sounding bass they've got a detachable six-foot cable though instead

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of a 10-foot cable based on community feedback and they've got three and a

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half millimeter and quarter inch jack compatibility for everyday use it comes

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included with sennheiser's long-term support and you can check out the link

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below in the video description so thanks for watching guys if you

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disliked this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get

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subscribed or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description

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also down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our

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community forum which you should totally join is that going to be our thumbnail

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yeah i think i'm thinking something like this are you editing are you editing our

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thumbnail on the machine wow yeah it's

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like thumbnail seption it's like it's it's good for work and play that's very

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stylized i know yeah what about this