Ah, the mantra of the PC master race.
Build your own PC, they say.
It's cheaper than a pre-built, they say.
But just how cheaply can you build a completely new system?
And what compromises would you make if you were to do so?
To find out, we purchased this bag of potatoes.
Oh, and also we built this PC.
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Okay, so the exact spec of the cheapest PC you can build
seems to vary a bit depending on the day that you're shopping for it.
And also just how ghetto fabulous you want to get.
But long story short, we ended up with something,
well, let's say usable.
For $151.99.
And to clarify the usable bit there,
we actually had managed to find a full system
with this single-core Intel Celeron 440
that would have been $1.51 cheaper,
but unfortunately, the Acer motherboard it was attached to
was a lot funkier than we at first thought.
And using it would have required some heavy case modification.
So we settled for this slightly more expensive combo.
A quad-core AMD A8 3870 and this ECS motherboard.
Now, even with the right standoffs,
assembly of this thing was nothing short of heroic.
We dodged, we spun, we rolled away from the sharp,
spiky insides of the Xion case that we picked up for 23 bucks.
I swear, around every
corner, there must have been a sharp piece of metal
just waiting for a finger to run across it.
Finally, though, still alive, but not entirely unscathed,
we fired our rig up and installed Windows 10.
And with it all assembled now,
had a chance to look at what it was that we'd created.
At which time, we promptly wished we hadn't.
Because the build quality of this thing is atrocious.
If this were the subject of an LTT review,
this would have been the first time we'd done this.
So we had to do it again.
But as they continue our review,
it would probably go a little something like this.
All the materials of this product feel super cheap
because they are.
And the whole system is lighter than
some of the laptops we've reviewed recently.
At least I'll give them credit for this.
The outside of the case is mostly free of sharp edges,
but I still wouldn't recommend performing the ol'
reach around to plug something in in the dark
if you don't want to get bit by this here wild cat.
Arr!
Overall though in fairness the look of the case isn't that bad and it's not like it wouldn't be functional if you are on a
tight budget
Though the inclusion of a rear case fan for exhaust would have been a nice touch with that said
Arguably our 400 watt power supply does seem to take care of that job for the most part
probably because the Coolmax i400 runs its fan at full speed as
Often as you should be using a condom at a brothel, so that is
100% of the time in all seriousness though even at idle this system is
Uncomfortably loud due to that fan and at full load once the CPU fan joins the chorus
You'll actually probably be wishing for some ear muffs
The silver lining here at least is that with all that noise you do get some half decent thermals with both the CPU and
GPU
Leveling off at around 64 degrees
Spec wise though ha well you can forget about your favorite triple-a games because this thing
Barely scrapes by the minimum specs for Windows 10
I mean the CPU is actually half decent for 38 bucks
It's four cores at three gigahertz feel like they're being held back somewhat by the rest of the system so for productivity
This box works reasonably well
Well once all the extra visuals are disabled
Surfing the internet was serviceable and even full HD YouTube playback was nice and smooth at least until we ran out of RAM and
Since there's only two gigs of the stuff well you can expect to be hitting the page file every so often
just kidding always and
Oh man
Once you have to access the hard drive any resemblance of haste goes away
at only
5400 RPM the
160 gigabytes of storage is
Molasses slow like type in a search for one of the four blu-ray movies that you could fit on it
Then go make a cup of tea while you wait for the results
But come on who cares about hard drive performance. Let's answer the burning question on all of your minds can it
game I mean
The system does have dedicated graphics, so it should be able to write
Huh the dedicated I think in different graphics would probably be a better term since our GeForce
8440 GS doesn't give too cold shits about your framerate
coming in at
$19 it sports 256 megs of DDR to memory and with a
with a Dinosauric 460 megahertz core clock,
its 3DMark score is 36 times lower
than that of the lowly GTX 750 Ti.
That's right, not a GTX 1080 Ti,
but the 750 Ti, a card that costs only five times as much.
So, needless to say, in our tests,
we're going for playable rather than pretty.
Half-Life 2, then, at 720p, medium to lowish details,
actually not the worst gaming experience I've ever had,
though that's more of an endorsement
of Valve's excellent storytelling than this gaming PC.
And as for anything newer than 2010,
well, you can forget about that.
Even CSGO at 720p with the lowest settings
yields an absolutely unplayable 10 frames per second.
But wait, Crysis was released before 2010.
Can it, can it run Crysis?
Yes, yes it can.
At 800 by 600 and the lowest settings.
And it's actually somewhat playable, which is cool.
But we also wanted to bench our system
in such a way that you can compare it at home.
So we booted up 3DMark,
where only the Ice Storm benchmark for mobile devices
was able to run since everything else required
either a higher level of DirectX support or more VRAM.
Funny story, our GeForce 8440GS managed a score of 4,989,
which actually kind of sounded like a big number
until it got absolutely butt-wrecked.
By the 24,320 score recorded by the AMD integrated GPU
built in to our processor.
So I guess then that spending that $19
on some Mountain Dew and Doritos
would have had a bigger impact on the gaming experience.
So then with the GeForce 8440 ripped out,
actually the whole system got more usable in general.
We managed almost 60 FPS in CSGO at 720p low,
and GTA V, well, hey, it got the game to launch.
Which at this point, we consider a win,
even if it did only manage frame rates in the 20s,
among other issues.
So bottom line, would we recommend this system?
Absolutely not.
I mean, to be clear,
there's still a lot of fun to be had with it.
I mean, older titles like Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4,
worked awesome.
But this is a lesson in smart spending.
Even if you're on a super tight budget,
the cheapest thing on the market
is almost never a good value.
So our previous guidance still stands.
Below a certain price point,
you really are actually better off with a pre-built
or going further down, used hardware.
No matter how many crack pipes you might find in it,
is pretty much the way to go.
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So thanks for watching you guys.
I hope you enjoyed this video.
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