this PC is the same price as a PlayStation 5 and competes or in some
cases even wins in just about every game
we tested including some Sony first
party titles but how is that even possible I mean gaming consoles dominate
computers in price to Performance don't they well sometimes
it's no secret that Sony and Microsoft are willing to sell their Hardware at a
loss in order to lock walk you into their ecosystem of accessories
subscription services and software all of which are sold for a profit over time
then this chips away at your initial savings but even with that in mind I
totally get why people go for it when this thing launched $500 barely got you
a decent GPU let alone a complete gaming
box of course there's no denying the power of the Sony exclusive machine no
PC could ever hope to compete with that model
at least not for the first couple of years but technology marches ever onward
and with competition and the used Market heating up again it is finally possible
to match the price and performance and
budget of a PlayStation 5 with a gaming
PC and ours is going to be powered by SE Sonic who sponsored this video Even
though this is a secondhand power
supply that'll make sense later first we
have to answer some big questions if our
goal is to match the PlayStation 5's spec we need a ryzen 7 3700x with eight
Zen 2 cores and a 6600 XT rdna2 GPU but
guys we don't want to match it look at the title we want to beat it that means
making smart choices in the name of real world performance even if they might
come with some compromises like this one we've gone with the AMD ryzen 5
5600x and it's got two fewer cores than
the PlayStation 5 however it's Zen 3
architecture makes it the budget King when it comes to gaming right now and
it's only 65 Watts meaning that the stock heat sink that's included with it
should be fine to keep it cool that right there that's savings and it means
we don't need an OP power supply in order to drive this thing boom more
savings now it's worth noting that for a few bucks more you could jump up to a 57
or 5800 X but uh we are on a pretty
tight budget making our $500 Target even
more challenging is the fact that we wanted this to be a build that you could
replicate at home this isn't scrapyard Wars this is a guide so we targeted
prices that you will probably be able to find in about a week whether it's on
eBay or elsewhere if you're patient and have a little luck on your side there
are better deals to be had out there David found this PPP for just over
$70 just remember to follow our guidelines for Marketplace bargain
hunting if you want to avoid getting scammed we're going to have that video linked down below the nice thing about
going for AMD's am4 socket is that there are three whole generations of
motherboards that you get to pick from but we noticed a few things you're going
to want to watch out for first older generation boards turned out to cost
almost the same as the newer ones but
had a much higher risk of income compatibility with newer chips so make
sure you double check the manufacturer's website second for the difference in
price a series chipsets are a no no
you're going to want to go B series in order to retain important features and
get what is typically higher build quality even if it costs a few more
dollars so b550 and b450 ended up being
the sweet spot where we found multiple candidates for around $40 including our
ASRock b450m Pro 4 it's got four ddr4
dim slots for our 16 gigs of gskill trident Z 3600 megat transfer per second
RAM and it's even got respectable IO
including USB type-c now it's not all
roses b450 is limited to PCI Express gen
3 rather than Gen 4 that means that our
system could struggle to get maximum performance out of future gpus and even
today this is a compromise next to one of the ps5s most most advertised
features it's rock and fast SSD our 1
tby Samsung 970 Evo plus runs at only
about 35ths of the speed of the PlayStation 5's storage but it's a
reputable name brand drive and with most
PC games being optimized for SATA ssds
or even hard drives there will be next to no impact in our gaming performance
at least for now so smart compromise or
dumb cut let us know what you think in the comments below speaking of cuts we
ended up saving some of our money by using the kind of case that might have
some ragged edges on it but can be found for free or for just a few bucks on a
local Marketplace uh David this thing is huge
hell yeah definitely Advantage PS5 which
with debrand dark plates comfortably fits in an LTD backpack LTT Store.com
your mileage may vary here we got lucky is um and this was a pretty sick case
before the trauma but your goal is to pretty much find someone who's dumping
old office PCS or gaming skeletons like this for next to if not zero if you're
patient you can often find ones with some cooling fans already installed in
them to save a few more bucks the only big thing to watch out for is ATX
compatibility and clearance for any longer components a Dremel can often
solve compatibility issues but you might not have one on hand fortunately we
won't need any of that for our x650 gold power supply from today's sponsor seic
this particular unit came out almost 15
years ago but is still going strong and what's really cool is that even if you
are buying secondhand C Sonic stands
behind their products hard they actually have a transferable warranty meaning
that all you need to do is ask the seller for the original sales invoice
and you're covered for the entire original length not only that but they
recently upped their warranty on newer units from 10 years to 12 years absolute
Chads now let's talk GPU this one it's
going to be a little spicy but hey is the spice of life right we've gone
with the Intel Arc a77 I know I know
guys but compatibility has improved a
lot and it's got 16 gigs of gddr6 memory
all to itself instead of having to share with the CPU now people are starting to
catch on to this thing and by the time this video comes out prices may have
gone up a bit but we had an opportunity so we seized it also we kind of wanted
an excuse to see how far Intel has come for ourselves after a couple years of
driver updates it is worth acknowledging at this stage that we could have gone
with a 6700 XT or a 3060 TI at this
price
but
sorry let's game we're going to assume you have some kind of peripherals to use
so we didn't Factor those into our budget but otherwise what you're looking
at is an Apples to Apples comparison between our PS5 and our PS5
killer we hope these uh fans don't work
to kick things off we're going to be playing Doom maternal a game that runs at 120 FPS on the PlayStation 5 albeit
at a lower resolution scale so we've set our PC to run at 4K but 68% resolution
scale and I got to tell you this is not looking good not right dude this is
basically unplayable what kind of frame rate are you oh W I'm 120
baby something is wrong ah there's your
problem right there on the p side you might have to do a little bit of
configuration with the most important one being enabling above 4G decoding and
resizable bar support particularly Intel
Arc does not perform its best without rebar enabled oh yeah that is more like
it oh yeah 1% lows of0 115 FPS it is
amazing what a difference just making sure everything thing is configurated
properly can make dude was this really
500 bucks though yeah man Intel
Arc not so bad after all huh it's hard
to do an Apples to Apples comparison here because the image quality in the
settings menus are not necessarily directly comparable but what David and I
can do is we can skip this cut
scene and just oh I mean that's interesting my field of view is so much
wider than yours I can change that uh o
I don't have HDR on though oh let's turn that on okay my screen's not pretty but
what about my PlayStation pretty freaking nice do you
like my PlayStation I'm the wrong person as I like this case okay hold on we're
going to figure this out one sec I can't think of anything more Windows than
having HDR issues so a huge advantage of playing on
my PlayStation if I plug in an HDR display it's like hey let's calibrate
you're done I once had a computer that had such a bad HDR issue that it was
easier to reinstall Windows and figure out the issue I'd call you a liar but I
believe you 100% what I promise is true the next thing we discovered is that HDR
support on Intel Arc is a little bit spotty it turns out AMD and NVIDIA have
proprietary implementations for how the game calls for HDR to be enabled and
Intel well doesn't support them it uses the standard direct X implementation so
there's no denying that HDR is going to look better than SDR in any game that
supports it that really pops however now
that we've got rebar enabled performance is looking pretty darn good and I'd
say who's got the edge when it comes to image quality it's pretty close it's
really close look at this cluster of rocks the geometry and the detail and
the texture is looking I think the textures are a little bit better on this
but the geometry detail is about the same okay how's it feel though here we
go the fact that I'm using an HDR display right now and not getting an HDR
image is a bit of a downer but most people do not have HDR displays I'm
getting anywhere from 115 to 120 FPS I
don't have frame view open I should open that I had frame view open one of the
previous times before we were diagnosing the HDR thing and I'm getting 1% lows in
the neighborhood of around 110 115 FPS
it's really respectable here's something you've definitely got the edge in
loading times yeah but with that
said this is a lot of PC for the money
it's pretty impressive I would not be surprised if we managed to put together
something like this as a one-off you know we negotiated everyone into the
ground but the fact that we were able to find with pretty good consistency Parts
like this available for this price it's PC gaming back oh 100% is the render
scale at 100% yep so this is actually
better image quality than a PS5 cuz the PS5 will be 1800p upscale to 4K mhm and
we're hitting 60 is I
mean pretty respectable once again I couldn't help
noticing this game looks a lot better in HDR though yeah those colors look a lot
more vibrant this is freaking smooth one of
the big things that Intel has struggled with with Arc is while their average
frame rate might be good the 1% lows are
1% very low here I'm not getting that
kind of stutter this is a very very smooth experience and what does that
game run at in performance mode 60 60
yeah okay it's not a perfect 60 it'll drop from that frame rate once in a
while but it's a little more steady than this PC one but with vrr I think I would
choose that extra sharpness I was kind of surprised every time I tried
upscaling it lowered the performance so
uh let's go qu that's 1440p I
think yeah my 1% lows are still the same
given that I probably wouldn't bother but this is my first experience with
Intel xcss in quite a long time and it looks really good yeah does it look
better than FSR hard to say I'd have to look at up
side by side but it's I don't see anything obvious that's jumping off the
screen at me like oh yeah they're upscaling looks looks ugly even distant
text super sharp come on PC let's go oh
oh my gosh your your video did load first
oh see who makes it in game first what oh probably who ever
developed the bo oh wow okay that's not fair that's not
fair though that's true oh wow what happened device driver h a driver D I
literally installed it today oh all right 20 frames per second that's lower
than it was before I also set it to 4K native oh yeah don't do that okay but
HDR is working in this game hey there we
go I hope this is a 30fps game on
PlayStation oh no okay why is it crashing so much no
it's got this it's got this I believe I believe it has the power of PC the power
of PC compels you nice game for God of War it runs at
1440p on the PS5 so we're doing some
upscaling here but what we can't figure out is what the heck is going on with
HDR it's not in display it's not in graphics oh wait screen calibration
really you guys I think this might be
the first game that does look good new game yeah I read that the HDR on the PC
version of God of War supposed to look a little better in spite of this being a
generation older TV than this one it does I think it does actually look a
little better how's the details and everything
it's pretty similar I think it's a little less on PC oh this upscaling
looks a little better in the fine hairs of kratos's beard yep it's a little
softer there I got to be looking for it though at TV distance I wouldn't notice
they looks so similar other than that this one's a little more pop uh what's
your FPS 60 me too let's go okay go
yeah and go yeah this is so satisfying
and go yeah get it Gros and go crap no I
messed up the last most important
one we're going to have links by the way to everything that we use down below and
on that note if you're buying on eBay congratulations you've got great buyer
protection so make sure that you use it by testing everything that you buy
before the return window is up run some stress tests you know mem test for RAM
and CPU memory controller Prime 95 for CPU compute firmar for your GPU and for
extra credit push all the components at once which will help stress test your
power supply on a related note by the way marketplaces can have better pricing
because they don't charge the same seller fees but they don't have any
buyer protection and unless people happen to be Bros you are not get
getting your money back for faulty Hardware that means that you always want
to test the parts before buying them and if the seller is being weird about
showing you the parts working skip them
just save yourself that die roll there's plenty of fish in the sea also always
visually inspect the commonly damaged areas like the pins on a CPU or on a
motherboard there's no denying the results though David this is a little
less sharp but I also think I have a little bit more Headroom
it's hard to compare cuz this one's locked at 60 uh I'd be curious to see if
we unlocked it what kind of numbers we would hit but that's console baby you
get what you get this actually seems like a good time to bring up that uh we
uh casually didn't include a controller
whereas for that $500 price point or even lower if you don't bother with the
disc version of the PlayStation 5 you get one of the best controllers on the
market arguably one of the best controllers like ever am I going to get
another one that has HDR working looks like it you know what that's smoother
though that's I was about to say yeah I'm pretty sure you're in 30fps mode
here cuz that looks a little that looks a little sharper though yeah I can really see it in the
Stray hairs here oh yeah to be clear
this is very playable this is not bad
but this is definitely a little sharper let me see what I can do to fix that up
a bit over here in terms of settings I'm running pretty much at Ultra but what I
haven't maxed out is my render scale so I'm going to try rendering at 80% rather
than 70% of 4K The Last of Us is the
kind of game that 30 FPS is pretty acceptable to me are there any
crucifixes nearby cuz uh I think we're going to need one it's a cinematic game
as long as I'm over 24 I'm fine look ocara time 20 frames a second
greatest game of all time what can I say you've got the edge frage quality I
think these fine stray hairs are not
quite looking as good I also so wonder your set on ultra settings if maybe
there's like some Shadow things we could bring down in like some kind of
optimization that would help boost you back over the edge after some more
playing around we ended up needing 70% render scale in order to get 30 FPS
consistently and Last of Us Part One should be noted we could absolutely hit
higher frame rates if we were willing to compromise on visual Fidelity but that
wasn't the point of this exercise the point of this exercise was to get a an
as good or in some cases maybe even better experience with the same budget
and what did we spend overall we spent
$475 we got $25 of wiggle room right but
we also conjured peripherals we didn't
pay for a controller and realistically we don't have a warranty on pretty much
any of our parts we also had to put in the time to Source all this stuff and
put it together including the risk of running into broken Hardware
incompatibilities we had some games that because of our choice voice of an Intel
Arc GPU didn't run as well whether that's crashing or limited support for
HDR so full credit to Sony and Microsoft
for that matter this generation of consoles I would say has retained its
better value than a PC status for far longer than I anticipated and it may be
another year even two years before we
can beat them with a brand new machine but I also think that credit to David by
the way for The Adventurous we've shown
that it can be done today if you're
willing to get a little creative just like we're creatively telling you about
our sponsor actually we already did but whatever seic they deserve even more
shoutouts just for being kind of awesome this ancient power supply guys was a
champion running this Modern Hardware and the way that seic stands behind
their products with long transferable warranties is admirable check out their
new vertex lineup featuring cinetics performance certification quiet
efficient operation and a whopping 12year warranty at the link down below
and while you're down there if you like this video check out the one where we showed you exactly how to score a great
deal on your local Marketplace including some really good tips for how to avoid
scammers