in the last episode of the 69 gaming pc
saga we bought a dell optiplex for 27
bucks on ebay stuck in a 30 graphics card and got playable frame rates in a
variety of popular casual and esports games that is depending on your standard
for playable but
we didn't stop there it's dramatic right so
for our second installment we're actually taking a combination of our own
advice yeah and
some from our community to bring that standard that playable standard up by
upgrading our original system with a few more budget parts and hopefully turning
it into an actually decent gaming pc
so can we build it yes we can maybe uh i
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
base offers great usability and utilizes
noise dampening events to keep your pc quiet check it out on newegg at the link
below
so here's the deal using current gen parts the cheapest gaming pc that you
could build today and that would actually be worth
building is probably around 350 to 400
bucks so in order to make our frankensteinish
collection of parts worth the time investment and the inherent risks that
come with buying used hardware we figure we've got to undercut that price by a
pretty good margin while getting legitimately decent frame
rates so our goal here is smooth 1080p
gaming at medium or so settings so as a refresher here's our
original system there are some things we can upgrade in here like the
cardboard but there are some other things that we're going to be stuck with like the motherboard the cooler the case
and the power supply once we start replacing those core components that
usually means we're better off building something new but that also means that
we're going to have to be stuck with the 255 watt power limit so the most obvious
component to upgrade here given that our gtx 650
poor thing broken fan had us stuck at 720p and low settings for the most part
is the graphics card but there's been a lot of generations of
graphics cards since the 600 series so
which one should we go with newer ones are obviously going to get us better
performance but they stand to potentially be
bottlenecked and they obviously come with a higher price tag
so to find the best bang for the buck we
hooked up our gtx 750 ti
a gtx 950 and a gtx 1050 ti and ran some
tests there's some good news here for those of you who are allergic to jank by the way
i mean we're not no clearly but some people are and that is that
many of these newer gpus actually are so much more power
efficient that we can get rid of that SATA to six pin pci express power
adapter because they can draw all the power they need from the slot so no more
of this weird cable nonsense yes like this one
oh great oh oh shoot actually i'm sorry uh we're
still gonna need that pci express riser okay yeah
yeah charge your right click and then you're gonna get yeah
you can't hold it forever yeah life's tough oh you're dead yep if you
pressed either you would have lived all right
okay so that's overwatch looks pretty good wow
look at the CPU usage though 90
yeah yeah get them
um so yeah with rocket league we're getting around the same frame rate even
though we've upgraded the GPU so it's actually still very impressive you
know we're getting very playable frame rates here at 80 right now nice and smooth 1080. even as you went through a
whole particle cloud it was at the 90 right there
but uh we're not getting that much of an improvement yeah
once again CPU activity pinned above 90 percent yep
all the way this is uh
pretty much all we need to know but why don't we open up one more game just for
a good measure here okay so
uh once again we are now running at 1080p what kind of details are we
looking at here uh it's low everything low everything
and really no improvement to speak of yeah
still around like 40 something yeah this is this is
noticeably choppy yeah we were at like i think we got a
whoa bad guy was that packing good guy yeah i can't tell the difference in cs
go when they don't have big red markers above their heads
like in overwatch they do they have that in overwatch that's why i like it
so in summary going with a 750 ti but leaving
everything else the same gets overwatch more playable and then similar results
in csgo and rocket league but this time at 1080p instead of 720p so it's an
improvement but the the issue here is that our frame
rates are still not great they're about the same they dip
below comfortably playable exactly
so time to upgrade all right let's do it
did i leave you hanging there no i i just oh that time i did
oh this guy's cheating he's definitely using net hacks
what what is a net hack i don't even know the hacks are the strongest hacks
there are hacks that interfere with the network connection oh nice did you see
that kill even with a CPU even even with the
system being CPU bound i'm trash in the competition
okay you're only firing at the like the big guy yeah because that's all you can
hit he's a big target 35 sds i gotta
reload let me reload oh i just got my ultimate oh
all right let's go on to the next game okay but you're just gonna play goalie
i missed it i mean i shouldn't surprise me that much i knew we were CPU bound
but i i thought maybe yeah and like nothing's happening on screen i'm just
like walking around it's still like well okay now it's at 50 but a second ago was
that like 40 yeah and you're dipped down under 40 32 there so in summary then
even with our first GPU upgrade we saw
limited to no improvement and then because of a fairly obvious significant
CPU bottleneck here well we continued to have the same
experience as we made our way up the GPU stack
so the next upgrade is obviously going to be our CPU not only is our original
one here from 2007 it's also a dual core
which wasn't a problem for gaming then but it definitely is now so according to
Intel's compatibility list the most powerful CPU for this chipset the Intel
g41 express is the core ii quad qx 9650
it actually runs at a similar clock speed but it's got twice as many cores
and we happen to have one
it's a good thing we did all the testing before i started filming geez
thanks for being careful with that
i got a screwdriver too let's do it together
yes this is not one of those
i'm sure there was a time once
boy it's nice how easy these upgrades are to get at here
this is like a hinge yeah
great great what's not so great is the fact that
there is more to CPU compatibility than Intel's guidelines i'm afraid it turns
out dell never validated the qx 9650 on
this motherboard which i guess kind of makes sense since who would put an
extreme edition in a business tower that doesn't make any money
maybe a crazy person would try that so we needed to find one of the
processors on dell's compatibility list and our old friends at freegeek a
non-profit electronics recycling outfit located here in vancouver came to the
rescue they hooked us up with an Intel core 2
quad 9550 it's a couple steps down from the qx 9650 and it has a slightly lower
clock speed than even our e 7500 but it's still a quad core so we're hoping
for a big improvement cs go
whoa go whoa
dang buttery smooth that is
way smoother look at that
and like and this is with the 750 ti this is the 750 ti and 30 more for a CPU
quad-core CPU wow
i mean i still can't kill anything but yeah you know so you're hovering around
90 100 plus right now yeah
going going up from 45 and far more importantly if you're
playing something competitive is when there's a bunch of action on the
screen we're not getting those same kinds of frame drops or dips or hitches
like it's it's smooth when you pan around a corner
there's no stutter you know it honestly it's blowing me away this is very
playable yeah boom boom boom boom get him get him get
him a head shot whoa he went flying
yeah i fired i fire large let's
you fire large bullets when i play csgo i like to fire a
slightly larger bullet than everyone else i closed it like an idiot but we
were sitting at only around 60 CPU usage were we so there you go just not running
into a bottleneck just having a couple of extra cores available to it huh
ended up increasing rfps what like 70
i'm bad at math that's crazy but it went up a lot all right let's see you pull
some noobs down 204 yeah you're in the menu smart guy let's go let's go
this guy is really bad but you haven't killed him yet no but this is on his
heart oh man
now you've got reinforcements i missed the sleep dirt
did you get them eliminated eliminated that's what i do to bad guys
you guys killed each other though interestingly though
that's our CPU utilization in overwatch so we were still running into a CPU
bottleneck which means that even though we only upgraded our GPU one more tier
we probably wouldn't get any further improvements out of an even better one
because we had such a great um experience with cs go and overwatch we
decided it's the cheapest gaming pc we might as well
add the cheapest free game most popular free game how do
you just like get rid of your stupid yeah this is this is what's so annoying
you can't get rid of it you have to land oh that's about
oh he got him dang
i'm gonna take his stuff you mind you mind him to death i like this game
portal yeah i mean it's true somewhat playable what are we running at here so
this is a 1080p medium okay all right
upgrading the CPU and the GPU got us
excellent results in terms of price to performance so far
our optiplex here was 30 bucks the quad core CPU was another 30 bucks
and a 750 ti is about 60 bucks making
this a 1080p 60fps gaming pc
for 120 bucks and the crazy thing
is we're still not done yet
now we won't be improving gaming performance this time around but going from a hard
drive to an SSD is certainly a quality
of life improvement which is why we actually did it
before we started running all of our benchmarks and like filming this video
because otherwise we'd waste a lot of time waiting around for that hard drive
so uh so pretty much anything will do you but we chucked in a Corsair force le
and with Windows 10 installed it makes this old junker of a machine almost feel
like a new pc almost
so given that you can get a 120 gig SSD for about 30 bucks on amazon
150 gaming pc boom
got it not bad i mean like look at the responsiveness
here like whether you're just kind of switching tabs like you guys saw me
opening up photoshop there like let's launch a web browser like
it doesn't feel like a decade old computer at all the
only thing that's left is to deal with this measly four gigs of RAM
but upgrading RAM on older systems like this
one can be a little bit challenging and it
can even be pretty confusing to even get started
now according to the spec sheet for the dell optiplex 380 our system only
supports four gigs of RAM two two Gigabyte dimms but since we have
some ddr3 lying around we figured we just might as well throw in another four
gig stick and see what happens come on riley don't screw it up again
oh i love the sound of that click
i'm not checking your work i'm just appreciating
wait are we expecting this to work or not
i'm not sure i've never done this before so oh wow
it worked what was it supposed to
um not sure uh really doing this for the
first time so uh don't know about RAM
is it all is it all detected properly uh i thought you prepared this video yeah
it's uh it's all that look at look at that yeah eight gigs of ddr3 maybe oh it
worked oh thank goodness okay i really can't tell did you think this was gonna
work or not i'm not sure
so there can be any number of restrictions on the kind of memory that
you can run in these sorts of pre-built systems what speed the stakes run at whether
they're single-sided or double-sided dimms and even just straight-up hardware
locks so that they'll only work with certain brands or certain models
and given that our RAM upgrade actually didn't have that much of an effect on
gaming performance our take here is that if you have some 4
gig ddr3 dimms lying around give it a shot but otherwise it might
not be worth it especially since once you cross that 200 threshold or once you
need to do more than just game like if you have to get actual work done
it might be time to start thinking about spending a bit more to get something
more modern with that said a bit of frustration on
the RAM upgrade doesn't change that overall this was an incredibly
successful experiment i mean we're not saying that we'd recommend that everyone
you know tries this at home you know buying new pcs is dead yeah that would
be the that would be the click the clickbait thumbnail but don't do
clickbait but it does show that contrary to popular belief pc gaming isn't that
expensive to get into provided that you're willing to do some bargain
hunting which i am you hunted this that's why
it's dead now it looks dead my computer it's like dismembered you know
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below in the video description so thanks for watching guys if you
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yeah i think i'm thinking something like this are you editing are you editing our
thumbnail on the machine wow yeah it's
like thumbnail seption it's like it's it's good for work and play that's very
stylized i know yeah what about this