thanks to Capital One shopping for sponsoring a portion of this video we
just built a 69 gaming PC that is so
blazing fast that it can play everything from CS go to Elden ring sort of all it
took was an eBay workstation with a funny name and a lucky GPU score from
our friend dude guy Everyman on Craigslist but what if we could give this budget
Beauty another boost what new Feats of
potency could it reach for a hundred and sixty nine dollars 269 or even four
hundred twenty dollars spoiler alert it's gonna get really fast and you're
gonna get really surprised what isn't going to surprise you is our sponsor
Capital One Shopping thanks Capital One shopping for sponsoring this portion of
the video Capital One shopping is a free browser extension designed to help you
save money by instantly applying coupon codes to get you a better price learn
more about Capital One shopping later on in the video thanks to Capital One
shopping for sponsoring that portion of the video what makes a gaming PC a
gaming PC well it's the GPU obviously
right and I mean sure our 30 GTX 760
here will not be outdone in the bang for the buck department and yes it can
technically play just about any game even tiny teenage wonderlands but if we
want to do better than 720 NEP at the lowest possible settings this guy is
going to be the first to go once our lawnmower business starts paying
dividends let's look at our contenders then at minimum we want four gigs of
frame buffer memory or vram and we've got a hundred dollars to spend before we
hit our next price tier that gives us options like the 1660 1650 super 1060
and 970. we ended up going with a GTX
1060. simply because back when we
prepared this video RX 580 prices hadn't yet been annihilated by the ethereum
merge so I guess I wasted a hundred bucks on this thing and I'm gonna go
grab a Radeon RX 580 from the shelf and you should too
we went with this dual OC model from ASUS but realistically you could go with
just about any RX 580 as long as it's
not one like this where it's got both an eight pin and a six pin power connector
because our power supply only has a
single extra Molex and while it does have extra satas and you can get
adapters like this to use a card like this one
I would not recommend this
for minimal risk of fire then stick with the Dual six pin to eight pin adapter
and a single 8-pin RX 580 or failing
that you could go with a 570 a 480 or
470 or even a 1060 like we had specked
out initially tool-less installation
that's it let's play some games this my friends is why we wanted four
gigs of frame buffer we're at 1080p High which can do maternal is basically like
medium well we gaming ladies and gentlemen I mean okay it's not pinned at
60fps but this is absolutely playable
any dying that you see Happening Here is because of my lack of skill not because
the game is not running well enough okay let's go again where's the bad guys at
I'm only on the first level it doesn't this is definitely
definitely playable and it doesn't even look it's not like
oh yeah we turn in the details way down it looks like absolute hot garbage this
looks fine I think this is really impressive but don't take my word for it
look at these performance graphs I mean yeah we're spending nearly three times
as much on the machine compared to where we started but there are also cases
where we're getting nearly three times the performance that is great value for
the dollar we are not done no no no I
mean what is the point of rocking a brand new to us GPU if it's going to get
bottlenecked by our weak CPU the bad news is the locked down BIOS on our z420
workstation does not support the next
generation of Intel Xeon chips codename ivybridge the good news though is that
many other boards from that era did support such upgrades so cast off Sandy
Bridge chips even really high-end ones are cheap and plentiful the most
powerful CPU supported by our mother board then is the E5
2687w in single threaded tasks it might
not be much more powerful than our existing E5 1620 but it has double the
number of cores double the number of threads and costs a mere 30 on eBay with
many of the listings even covering shipping within the continental US score
or unfortunately this CPU runs hot enough
that HP figured it needed an all-in-one liquid cooler instead of
this thing so I guess we'll need to upgrade that too not to an AIO though
we've talked a fair bit about how water coolers are not always better than air
coolers and this wimpy thing is a prime
example meanwhile The Cooler Master hyper 212 Evo supports LGA 2011 and can
be had for the very attractive price of about 20 Canadian pesos so at about 15
real dollars to the cost of our CPU another five to ten for some thermal
paste and I'm expecting a pretty nice uplift for 50 here what is up with this
this is a five pin band connector oh man
I love hddt I love hddt cooler installs
take our fan pop that on there and now we just gotta plug
ah this is a four pin Fan industry
standard remember on the motherboard we had that five pin fan header well a
quick Google search later you find a post from user silent BOGO on the tech
PowerUp forums who tells us that the motherboard header is actually a four
pin fan header but just with two ground connectors one on either side of the
active pins so our workaround is to take a four pin
fan splitter and use that to make it work conveniently you can find these in
two packs on Amazon for about five bucks here's a little Tech tip for you we're
just gonna pop these pins out then we take our connectors in the exact same
order and we're going to put them in on this side
all right now we can take our standard
fan plug it into here standard four pin
connector and we've ripped off our proprietary five pin connector and we
can plug that into the board yay
really what really you guys now you
don't tell me what cooling I need the bad news is that this is not the only
ridiculous error that could have you pressing F1 every time you want to boot
your computer the good news is that every single one of these errors has a
solution that is both inexpensive and can be executed with standard household
tools but to show you how many things can cause these sorts of problems let's
go ahead and shut the system back off and unplug some stuff
let's unplug the RAM fan front USB let's
take out this one sure and whoops all right let's fire it back
up to be clear it's kind of a cool feature
actually it's just not the most convenient for you know performing janky
upgrades so let's get everything restored to
factory the one we can't put back though is this one which presumably is using
that fifth pin to sense whether you have a water cooler or not the really
frustrating part of this is that if we adopted for the slightly less powerful
E5 2690 we probably could have avoided
this problem altogether the 2690 is nearly identical to our W workstation
chip in every way it's even the same price on eBay but its base clock is 200
megahertz slower and therefore its TDP is only 120 watts instead of the 150
watt monster that we're rocking now thankfully silent vogo chronicled their
Journey performing a case transplant on a similar z620 workstation and we were
able to adapt some of their findings to help defeat the evil Lord HP BIOS let's
walk through it but first let's walk through today's sponsor Capital One
Shopping thanks Capital One shopping for sponsoring this portion of the video
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sponsoring that portion of the video let's walk through it silent pogo's post
mentioned that pin one on the CPU fan might have been the sensor for a second
fan and looking at photos of the official water cooler it certainly
appears that that cable goes somewhere instead of just looping back to ground
like it does on the stock cooler want to know why because in an air cooled
configuration the system is only expecting one fan so that extra pin well
that goes to ground no problem but in a water cooled configuration it's
expecting two fans so for that reason we
actually need to jump that fifth pin to the tack pin which is in the middle
we've already done the work I'll turn up the workers sort of mediocreatly done
should probably be soldered but this is good enough for us to show you guys that
it will work the one thing to be really careful of guys while you're jumping
pins between each other on a fan connector is please don't connect your
ground to your 12 volt that could start a fire yes yes ignore this extra black
lead that's hanging off of here that was from one of the early experiments when
we were still trying to figure this out oh my goodness still trying to figure this out ready
and with the CPU actually upgraded this time
here it comes front chassis fan not detected
oh crap the good news is there's a quick and
easy solution to this unfortunately it
costs 40 dollars why do they even need a special bracket
for the fan just put just put mounting holes like everyone else so we're not
going to buy that what we are going to do is we're going to buy a two pack of
those fan Splitters we showed you guys before which fortunately costs the same
for some reason and we're going to make ourselves another little fix by
salvaging some fan connector pins from our work earlier shorting pins three and
four like this which obviously will protect by putting something over top of
them and then shaving off this guide
here with a pair of blush Cutters we are able to put without installing another
fan which we don't have the bracket for
this one here which should allow us once and for all
to boot the freaking thing up no F1
here it is the big moment
nice
okay all I need to do is close up the
are you kidding me thing looks like a
bloody Tesla it's the heat pipe from the cooler causing the problem thankfully
though there's a quick and easy solution
speed holes off camera we just put a little bit of
like goop like paint or something on the top of the heat pipes then put it on so
that it would Mark the spots and then we just
parfait less parfait not crap
should have put some masking tape on you know what no let's see if we
these are not even close dude but wait wait why did I even close this up we're
not even done with this stage of the upgrade yet ow currently our system has two sticks
of memory in it which means that we're not making proper use of our Xeon
processors quad Channel memory controller one way to fix this would be
to try to match the RAM that's in there with two more sticks but there can be a
little bit of trial and error especially on workstation and server boards which
tend to be a little bit pickier so we took the easy path and grabbed four
matching sticks of ECC DDR3 for about 30 bucks that is
less than a dollar per Gigabyte
oh whoa nice party trick but wait
there's more depending how much you spent on your RAM upgrade your budget
for this could vary but you should have anywhere between 15 and 30 dollars left
to spend on a two and a half gig network card that'll go a long way towards
modernizing our system for our high speed Network transfers we're using a
card from Trend net which is technically out of our budget but it was lying
around in the warehouse well we're connected at two and a half gigabit per
second so that's good but because of other system bottlenecks we weren't able
to crack around 800 megabit so maybe we can address that
later but first let's play around with our two 69 gaming PC
oh here's our eight cores and 16 threads by the way pretty sick
yeah I know I would say this is running meaningfully better I think it's pretty
clear from the FPS counter in the corner that we're not getting way higher frame
rates than we were before with our eight core CPU they are significantly more
consistent and that's a really good thing because it's making the game feel
a lot more you know smoother than the
FPS counter would indicate that's awesome
great our 99th percentile low frame
times are equivalent to over 100 FPS man
you want to play some GTA 5. we don't have it cranked or anything but
the game is running pretty high we're still pinned at like 120 FPS which
yes it's not the city but like damn what's not to like here this is enough
performance for 1080p gaming in pretty much any game you'd want to play at 269
dollars absolutely amazing for the price
but I want more more what well as I
alluded to before I think we could have better storage in this system now that I
can play so many games 256 gigs isn't
going to be enough to satisfy me and while I could just sell off your my
precious GTX 760 and use my 23 to
patiently wait for a one terabyte hard drive to show up somewhere
I want this PC to be better than that the smart choice is probably a 512 gig
or one terabyte two and a half inch SSD like this something like an adata Su 760
is going to give me a dram cache drive for only 50 bucks for 512 or 85 dollars
for a terabyte but our next budget tier
is 369 dollars and this amount of spare
cash has me not really thinking straight here I'm thinking high speed NVMe Drive
I mean yes this computer predates NVMe
drives but I don't care I'm flush with cash and
throwing caution to the wind problem number one is that modern NVMe drives
are almost exclusively available in the m.2 form factor and our motherboard has
no m.2 slot but I've already kind of given away the solution here you can get
cards like this one from Angel bird that allow you to adapt a regular old PCI
Express slot to an m.2 slot and the reason that these
are so inexpensive is because they're not actually really doing anything see
here's all your power pins over here and here's all your data pins over here and
they just go right there we have this fancy looking
one from Angel bird lying around but there is no reason that you couldn't
just use an off-brand one which should run you around 13 then for our drive we
picked up the second hand Samsung 970 Evo one terabyte that cost us a hundred
and 120 Canadian dineros which is about
equivalent to 87 real dollars at the
time of filming anyway actually that's probably at the time of calculating it a
week ago which uh there we go
we're done
no or not see that there isn't even a sub menu in
the BIOS for NVMe drives but that doesn't mean that the system can't see
it if we boot into Windows from our SATA drive it actually shows up in device
manager as a PCIe device it just doesn't
show up as a drive so we need to find a workaround
thankfully we can take a page from the
Hackintosh user's manual so all we need is a USB drive that we don't need
anymore one gig or larger doesn't even need to be USB 3 then we're going to put
the Clover bootloader on it and allow our system to boot from the flash drive
Clover can understand what NVMe drives are which means that it can bridge the
gap between our system which can boot to USB and clover which can read our NVMe
drive now we don't really want a USB drive sticking off of our system if we
can avoid it so if we want to hide it but also ensure that it stays put we can
scrounge up an old front panel USB connection from an old case that maybe
somebody's getting rid of plug our drive into one of the many open USB 2 headers
on our motherboard
okay there it is now we can boot from our
Kingston data traveler 3.0 here we go
automatic boot in one second uh by the way if you don't want to just leave this
hang in here you could use an LTT Store cable tie to hold it in place
there now it will never move this is immediately noticeably faster
it's responsive you know what I mean
like let's uh here let's fire up let's fire up steam bring up task manager like
this does not feel like a eight-year-old
system we're back in game now the performance is very similar to what we
had before but that's not the point of fast storage this is the point of fast
storage boom I'll Tab out I'm doing stuff I'm using my computer I'll tab
well I make sure I hit the right window and I'm back in my game it's the
responsiveness that's what makes this feel like a modern new system and not
something from eight years ago but we're not done yet we promised you guys a 420
computer didn't we I was told I was getting fifty dollars in RGB lighting
and this is what they handed me I guess that's fair enough at this budget that
would be a pretty stupid thing to spend another fifty dollars on actually I
would probably go the route of adding a little bit more GPU power maybe step up
to something like a 5700 or something along those lines but realistically I
don't feel like most people are gonna feel like they need to upgrade this
thing this is cyberpunk 27 seven running
on basically High presets what's our
99th percentile lows here like 37 35 FPS
no it's not perfect but there is no
question whatsoever that this is playable which means basically you can
play any game and at this price point
that is quite the accomplishment if you like this video check out the first
video where we built the 69 rig or maybe the extended version of it on float
plane we included some too hot for our sponsors bits in there