I know what you're thinking it's only been 9 months since our last $500 budget
buildt but in that short time we've seen AMD and Intel launch new product
families and we've seen inflation take away about 3% of our buying power which
at a $500 budget works out to about $15
which is the difference between 8 and 16 gigs of RAM or between a 512 gig and a 1
TB SSD so we got a lot of questions to answer today like how far will $500 go
if we want the latest CPU Tech will we be able to afford a good GPU an okay GPU
a GPU can I afford a segue to our o I faked you out we're going to get right
into it today starting with the core I3 13100 F four hyperthreaded performance
cores and a boost clock of 4.5 GHz the core I3 1300f doesn't offer a lot of
bells and whistles it doesn't even have Onboard video but it does support
Intel's latest platform features like PCIe Gen 5 and ddr5 even if we won't be
using them and it's only $1100 making it
well the only option by comparison the
cheapest 7,000 series ryzen CPU is the 7600 for a whopping
$120 more to be clear it is much faster
six cores rather than four at up to 5.1 GHz but at this price AMD just isn't
viable for our system and what's really wild is even if we go back to their
older am4 platform we find that AMD has simply abandoned the budget-minded
customers that kept them alive during the bad years even with a ryzen
5600 we would need to make extra compromises to hit our $500 budget like
trying to find a free case or buying a used GPU but today is a no compromise
day I especially am not going to compromise on this segue to our sponsor
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I first got into this hobby there's not much left in the way of bad motherboard
Brands so really what it comes down to is finding something that has the
features and connectivity that you require we settled on the B 660m hdv
from ASRock it's got a total of six USB 35 GB ports including one type-c dual
m.2 SSD slots ample PCI e USB 2 and SATA
expansion and while it only has two ddr4
memory slots unlike the h610 chipset motherboards that come in a little bit
cheaper than this those slots support overclocking which means we're not
leaving any performance on the table I well not that that's necessarily
concerned given our RAM Choice uh we ended up with a single 8 gig stick of
patriot Viper Elite 2 and I know I know this is going to be a bit of a
controversial pick so please allow me to explain this lands firmly in the bang
for the buck speed range for this platform and while we could have gone
with 16 gigs of RAM or at least a dual
Channel 8 gig kit which would have netted us some additional performance
it's a slippery slope right guys I mean if we start with a budget but then we
keep saying what's $10 more suddenly we find
ourselves with a $600 build rather than a $500 build and $100 of debt to our
mean older sister it's far better to just drop a second stick in down the
road upgrade to dual Channel later when it can be found Dirt Cheap secondhand or
when cash flow is a little bit looser which while I tend to shy away from the
FW ended up being one of the big themes of this build let's talk about storage
for nearly the same price as this Intel
670posts
will take up 100 gigs on their own
there's no question that that's desirable but storage is one area where
I just don't like to screw around and the 67p is not only a known good
performer punching well above its PCIe gen 3 weight class it's also got an
excellent reputation for reliability I mean do you want to be gaming or do you
want to be waiting around for a warranty replacement that might never come and
besides once this is full and you want to boost your storage space down the
line those Dirt Cheap drives on new EG are still going to be there and you can
always throw them in knowing that you've got a rock solid
foundation though I'm not sure I can say the same about our case the DIY PC f2s
main selling point is available in
purple or orange it doesn't have entirely terrible Cable Management
thanks to this kind of popped out back panel here you can see when we pop off
the panel it's totally flat here no room
for anything but that's where your space is
as far as as I can tell it's to save the like 6% materials cost of making
everything else a little bit bigger to accommodate that extra width so you just
stamp it out of the side panel it's it's ingenious actually truthfully though
none of that is why we chose this we chose it only because it is literally
the cheapest matx case that we could find on PC par picker and I would never
buy this case not because I'm some kind of outof touch elitist but because I am
with to get down and dirty if Scavenging from a dumpster means saving $38 almost
10% of my total budget here I'll do it
and you should too the ATX standard hasn't been meaningfully changed in
almost 30 years which means unless you're buying a top of the line GPU
which you're not your modern system will probably fit in this or this or this or
this or this and on the subject of using what you've got let's talk about cooling
even as you start to upgrade the machine machine the CPU heat sink is one of the
last things that I would recommend you spend money on Intel stock cooler it
ain't much but it'll take you all the way up to a 13700 nonk so you might as
well use it now we just need to plug in our CPU fan header and while we're at it
let's do our case fans as well we've got the rear one and the front one header
here yes if you must have something bigger or especially quieter there are
plenty of options in the 15 to $40 price range we're going to have some of those
linked down below or you could just take my advice and spend that on an adorable
wag hoodie for your four-legged friend just $24.99 at LTT Store.com now we just
got to do a little bit of cable management here's our front USB 2 as
well as our HD audio so convenient these come in little bricks
easy peasy they only go in one way I
can't say the same for our front panel connectors but what I can say is everything is very helpfully labeled
reset right power switch last thing
we've got is our front USB 3 just be careful with this one these pins are
very fragile make sure you got it aligned before you click it in time for
power this is going to be yet another controversial Choice we've gone with the
enax Cyber Bron 500 watt it's
non-modular but it does at least have black cables so it'll look nice it's 80
plus bronze it's got dual 6 plus2 PCIe
connectors so it's good for pretty much any performance tiering down GPU but the
issue is that you can get a functioning power supply for as little as like 20
bucks the issue for us is that our options below this price point are
either from unknown brands or from thermaltake whose entry level lineup
doesn't have a great reputation and the thing is given the risk of collateral
damage when a power supply blows from my point of view you just can't afford not
to spend a bit more here didn't really script anything for cable management
here so I guess we're just going to wing it oh yeah 8 Pin
the eight pin has no cable management cutout so it's just going to go
here now this is going to come right
here cool not bad not
bad not great not great yeah yeah yeah
just everybody just relax for a second okay right goes there all right and now
it's pretty all right again I had a segue into this written but completely
off script now so I'm just going to open by saying it's amazing what 200 bucks
can buy again these days anything the
ASRock Challenger D Radeon RX 6600 has 8
gigs of vram a core clock of 1626 MHz
and a dual fan cooler that's not bad
considering that our only real criteria was how much money do we have left okay
I'll take that one at $200 you're pretty much looking at the GTX 1660 or the RX
6600 00 between those two the 6600 is
much newer and way more powerful see you
later NVIDIA not bad though right no it's fine
I mean it's not great but but not
bad power's in and everything's looking pretty good on this side um not as great
on this side we'll deal with that in a sec first I want to address some the other options for gpus if you're not
married to buying brand new at $200 there are some very interesting options
in the secondhand Market including 2080s 1080 TI 5700 XTS and 6600 XTS it's a lot
more performance but you do miss out on your
warranty oh boy oh I don't know if I
want you to roll on this uh too late I
press the
button wow that's something
just Y no yeah it's really good
case wow it's like it's like that video
of the bloated whale carcass where the guy like cuts it open it's like okay
let's fire it up I closed the panels bad gbi's it's
not going to work adding everything up after a small
mail in rebate I think it was like 10 bucks right we are just under our budget
at $498 we're going to have a link in the
description to our PC part picker list before you click on that though let's
see if it's worth buying this is freaking awesome sitting at 9% 6% CPU
usage with screen capture going we're using the GPU for encoding but does
still use a little bit of CPU let's fire up a game we're going to go hard going
straight to Halo infinite I think we can go to High preset ah restarted the game
to take effect no I'm not going to start the game fine whatever 1080p medium
preset still we're looking at 80 FPS for our 1% lows so if you're losing at that
point that's on you that's good they didn't even pick up my sniper these guys
suck definitely struggling a little bit sometimes the real world experience is
not quite on par with what the FPS numbers would suggest it's almost like
there's a little bit more input leg can't put my finger on it to of the game
no I'm busy wining I'm the top on my team what do you mean
that's what winning looks like you want me to capture the flag fine I'll Capture
the Flag I don't even care wait 10 seconds 10 seconds of what we're almost
out of time draw or oh we won we won what we won all right Doom Eternal
hey but notice how quiet it is not bad generic orange Jelly D fans
and even that poor Intel stock heat sink when it's barely doing any work very
quiet I think Ultra nightmare is probably a little aggressive for this
let's try High something something's attacking me look I don't have any audio
and this is running amazing okay I probably could be running Ultra
nightmare right now okay we're turning it up it's way way too good uh Ultra
nightmare is a little much that's not quite right oh crap yeah no this is
laggy let's try nightmare or let's try Ultra how about Ultra uh okay too easy
now we're getting 150 frames per second
there has got to be a middle ground here you know what I bet it was a CPU issue
even playing a single player game four cores these days very borderline I'm
hitting 80 plus sometimes 90% CPU usage
Doom maternal right in multiplayer games there's a little bit more for the CPU to
keep track of and that can be more of a challenge to be clear it was very
playable but it's not going to be necessarily optimal but I only have a
pistol now wait what was that oh that was was that warm up KN that's happening
right now oh I mean oh no you killed your team oh did I yeah yeah it is free
okay no no so I was supposed to do that so that was epic then yeah
whatever dang it oh come
on come on they're too good I can't hit
misel I'm coming at him from every side he's dominating
me yeah thank you for that David anyway
we're getting anywhere from 150 to 300 frames per second I'd say that's fairly
playable not that it helps me not suck close out the video no I'm killing this
guy how did that Miss David help me out here are these guys good or am I
terrible that was pretty
bad who would have thought that Intel would be not just a good budget gaming
option but the budget gaming option if we wanted to go AMD with this we'd have
to go all the way back to am4 maybe a ryzen 5600 on an a520 m board or
something like that the point is that's taking me into probably going to regret
this territory on the cheapness of the motherboard and it would still cost me a
bit more and if I wanted to spend a bit more this is still a great starting
point I could cheap out on my case and spend a little bit more I could get a
Core i5 13400 on the same platform or if
I didn't want to spend anything at all I could go for the segue to our sponsor
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