Everything's gotten so expensive, I wouldn't blame you for just crawling into bed
and trying to forget about inflation for a day. But rip those sheets off!
Because what if I told you you can build an entire gaming PC?
You can build an entire gaming PC for the price of a single AAA game.
And I can hear you saying, oh Linus, a PC that cheap has to come
with some serious compromises, right? Well, aesthetically yes,
but other than that, maybe not. We have built some pretty impressive
$69 gaming PCs before, and this one blows its predecessors out of the water.
It can play cyberpunk, Baldur's Gate 3, and all manner of indie games
at very playable frame rates. And what's even better is that by the end of this video,
we're gonna equip you with the tech tips that you need to build a machine like this for yourself.
But wait, hold on. I gotta respond to this message from our marketplace seller.
Oh, they wanna know our price for our sponsor. Oh!
Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!
Oh! Oh! If you haven't figured it out yet,
this is gonna be an all second hand PC because barring some kind of catastrophic pricing error,
it's just not possible to build a brand new gaming PC
for anywhere close to this price. At least not one that you'd want to game on.
That doesn't mean it's not worth the effort, it just means you will have to put in a little effort.
See, building a PC for this cheap is a little different than a regular build.
You're gonna have to be flexible on your parts. You might not get exactly your preferred brand, for example.
The next thing is that the best deals are usually on bundles of components
rather than individual ones. So if you have your heart set on a particular CPU,
for instance, you might have to do a little bit of wheeling and dealing to get your hands on it.
With that in mind, it's not as hard as you would think.
All you've gotta do is educate yourself on what's possible by watching the rest of this video,
then set multiple search term notifications on your favorite secondary market,
and then you play the waiting game.
We're gonna showcase what we ended up buying, but what we're really trying to teach you is how to fish
instead of just handing you a monkey face prickleback.
The first thing you're gonna wanna reel in is an old pre-built PC or workstation.
Finding a good one of those is gonna cover a lot of your parts' needs,
but what specifically do you need to target? Let's start with the non-negotiables.
If you wanna play modern-ish games, you're gonna need a four-core CPU and eight gigs of RAM.
Luckily, finding an older pre-built or workstation with those specs isn't nearly as hard as it used to be.
Four cores has been pretty much standard even at the lower end for over a decade.
With that said, a nice to have is to try to get the most modern chip you can find,
since it's a pretty sure thing that a newer CPU
will outperform its older equivalent. And the newer the processor you find,
the newer the platform it'll be sitting in, so the more likely it is that you'll have
some kind of attractive upgrade path. If you're looking for a starting point,
Tom's Hardware, by the way, has a great tier list for legacy CPUs,
and we're gonna have that linked down below. We landed on this beauty of an HP Office PC
with an Intel Core i5-2500s for $17.50 US.
Let's take a look at some of the other parts inside. Let's see here.
We've got eight gigs of DDR3 1600 megatransfer
per second memory. We've got a 500 gig hard drive in there,
CD-DVD drive, and, hey look, okay,
cooler's not that exciting, but it's got one. It's $17.
What it doesn't have is any space for upgrades. How are we supposed to fit our extra stuff in here?
That's the fun part, you won't. Okay, so there are a few problems
with using a pre-built or a workstation. One is that a lot of them tend to be
small form factor systems, like this one, that might not have space for the parts
that you wanna upgrade them to. But that's a problem for about three minutes from now.
Number two is that compatibility can be a big problem.
That's gonna raise its ugly head in about one minute.
And finally, these systems are not designed for gaming.
So the dinky little power supplies that they ship with
often reflect that. To be clear, when I say dinky, I don't even necessarily mean that they're that much smaller
than a standard power supply. I mean that they aren't rated for enough capacity
to power a GPU. This one is just 240 watts.
Now you could bypass these hassles by paying a little bit extra for someone's old custom computer
that will provide a more flexible upgrade platform. And if you're a beginner PC builder,
that is a very valid route. But we have found that generally the best priced performance
is gonna be in old mass market machines like this one.
And besides, we're making a video. And us playing on hard mode means
that you guys get extra entertainment. Decidedly not entertaining is the amount of time
I spent failing to solve problem number three. Finding a prebuilt that includes a power supply
with the necessary eight pin PCIe connector that you need for most GPUs.
Ours did not come with one, which means that we had to spend 10 whole dollars
buying this very old 400 watt C-Sonic.
Let's install it. Our new standard power supply has a regular 24 pin connector,
but our HP motherboard wants three proprietary ones.
Luckily, we don't need to get rid of the old power supply.
It can stay here and power everything but the GPU,
which will get juice from our new C-Sonic. One paperclip jumper wire leader and blamo.
You got like 650 watts of juice, yo.
Complete with this super slick mounting system. I'm calling gravity.
Okay, we're not gonna install the power supply right now because installation is as simple as plugging in
one connector, but it's a good time to warn you that it's not ideal to go all two PSUs and one PC.
As you may have instability and reliability issues, the best route long-term would be to buy an adapter cable
that's available for common Dell and HP work stations that adapts 24 pin to whatever they're using.
But that costs extra money and we can't afford the extra $5 to $10 if we're gonna hit our budget.
So how do you plan on fitting that GPU? Oh, I'm so glad you asked.
I have two options. One's janky, but costs $5.
And the other one's really janky, but it's free. Which one do you think we should do?
Well, that was easy. What do you think about side panel? Because we're gonna have to deal with this handle.
I think if we wanna, oh, maybe not. There might be enough clearance. So we'll just cut a hole.
All right, moment of truth, it's fine, it fits.
Yeah, it loves it. That's so good.
Oh my God. Hell yeah. Oh, the nice thing too is if we ever need
to have a sag bracket, we can just put something here. Yeah.
This is the best. Amazing work, Alex. Now we need to solve the next problem,
which is fitting this GPU around this CPU cooler.
It's supposed to be like that. But that heat pipe is gonna get in our way.
Turn it like that. Oh yeah. And then maybe it fits.
I think that's gonna fit. Oh yeah, no problem.
Easy fit, sweet. We might need to cut one more thing.
This might get in the way.
In a perfect world, we would have taken the computer parts out of the PC when we did this,
but it's fine.
We might need one more hole in our case. I didn't even think about RAM clearance.
I think more cutting is the solution.
There we go. Nice.
If you have room in your budget, I recommend scraping off the old thermal crust
and replacing it with PTM7950 to get better thermal performance.
And for taking the part computer, LTT Precision Driver Kit, this thing fucking rocks.
Now we can pretty easily fit a dual slot graphics card in here.
It's quite nice. But now that we've got the space,
which graphics card should we go with? Well, once again, it's not as simple as us
just naming the one perfect GPU and you buying it.
You'll need to be flexible and patient to see what's actually available in your area.
To help you on your way, we found this tier list of older GPUs
over on the LTT forum from user 191x7.
Your goal should be to spend somewhere between $30 to $50 on a card that is below the 980 Ti,
but above the GTX 1060. Now, you might not find that price advertised,
but this is a great tech tip. Be courteous.
Politely asking for someone's best price can help save you money.
We ended up saving about $25 total on our build today.
Perfectly illustrating our point about needing to be flexible, we ended up with two non-ideal options for our GPU.
We got this RX 570 with four gigs of VRAM for $28,
which is really not enough today,
or for about $6.90 more,
we got this RX 580, which has eight gigs of VRAM and is a little faster,
but technically broke our budget. The funny thing is we didn't think
we were going to have to compromise quite this much. 578 gigs were used extensively for crypto mining
and can be had for very cheap. The issue is that we got bamboozled
and this just isn't one of them, which, hey, look, if we're being realistic
and we're talking about exactly what the experience is like building a PC like this, we've got to meet head on.
So we got scammed on our GPU and you might too.
It is worth noting this is not a perfect situation,
even aside from the parts you can see, this handy PCIe cover, we're going to put right here
to make sure that the fan on the GPU doesn't rub against our heatsink.
Oh, oh, that's perfect. Clearance, baby. Oh, she's sick.
The last thing we're going to need with whatever money we have left is a cheap SSD.
Spinning rust just isn't going to cut it anymore. Now, some of you are probably going to be surprised
to see us using an SSD like this one. SATA SSDs are both slower and more expensive
than M.2 drives these days. The issue is that our motherboard doesn't have an M.2 slot.
So we settled on our Patriot P210 for $14.
We're going to use that as a boot drive and then we're going to reuse the 500 gig hard drive
that came with our workstation for bulk storage. Now we just need this power supply,
maybe a little jumper so they both go on at the same time.
Nice. Although it should be noted that you can do this with just a little piece of wire,
if you want to get adventurous. And that's it. It's alive.
Did we build an entire gaming PC for the price of a single AAA game?
Yes, we did, $69.50.
Let's see if it's any good. Why don't we kick things off at the bottom of the challenge poll
with a competitive gaming title that we've seen run on a literal potato, Counter-Strike 2.
It's not bad. It's working. It's not bad. It's a little bit lower than when I was testing.
And the 1% lows are kind of nasty. When she dips, she dips.
I do wonder how much of that is the fact that we're stuck with a four gig
rather than an eight gig card though. Yeah, when I was testing,
I was testing with an eight gig card and this was not an issue. It's still playable,
but you're definitely not getting an edge from this computer. And the other four gigs of VRAM
is going to be the best of $6 you ever spent. Do we have that?
Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. We could, we could take it with the settings. Right now there's no FSR on.
So we could probably get a little bit back. Sure. Yeah. Let's, let's try and mess with the settings a little bit.
I have it all low, but I turned FSR off. There's no question.
You're going to want to spend another 10 bucks on a GPU with more VRAM and maybe even another 10 bucks on a better CPU.
But there's also no question that this is a modern title that is absolutely running and absolutely playable.
I actually got this 3570 for five Canadian dollars.
Oh, really? Yeah. And it would be a substantial upgrade. Mostly because this is a lower wattage chip.
Here's a controller that costs more than twice the computer. Yeah. The Wolverine Pro did not make it far
into our recent controller showdown. I mean, can't be upset with 150 frames a second.
No, you really can't, can you? I think that's one of the strongest cases
for a computer like this is playing indie games. Yeah. This is a perfectly
formula gaming experience. Yeah. The struggle is in loading areas.
I think either CPU lets us down or storage,
but even that's not that big of a deal. You just load into an area and then it's done. And dude, that's the kind of thing
that we can always upgrade later. Yeah. This is awesome.
Yeah. It's not the prettiest thing ever, but it's $70.
So Dragon Dogma 2 is a good one to play because that is a $70 game.
Sure. 50 FPS on a two-dimensional loading screen
is not a great indicator. I think it's doing stuff in the background.
Oh, okay. This looks like it's got to be all low.
Yeah. And FSR. This doesn't look like it's performance at FSR.
Oh. Oh. Yeah. That's a lot of FSR.
Yeah. I can really see it when we're moving around.
Ooh. This one's on the hard drive too. So I'm wondering if that's going to have an impact
on when we're moving between areas, but that doesn't feel like the kind of area
that's loading assets. No, it really doesn't.
Trying to check if I get another really bad stutter when I'm not moving at all.
Yeah. We're not even looking at a bottleneck situation. We're looking at a system that can give it's all
and it's all is not enough. This is pretty slow.
The low times are pretty atrocious. This is 100% off of the hard drive and we will feel it.
The nice thing is Baldur's Gate 3 has a slow hard drive mode.
I'm not 100% sure what it does, but it's supposed to help with streaming the assets
in a way that balances it a little bit more. Good Galarian. The best guy.
You know what I think the coolest thing about the PC is though?
We're sitting here going, okay, the $70 machine. It might play Baldur's Gate 3.
And realistically looking at this,
it's probably not gonna be the smoothest experience of all time.
But if Baldur's Gate 3 doesn't run in a way that we find acceptable, we could play Baldur's Gate 2
or Baldur's Gate 1 or Neverwinter Nights. The library that can be accessed by this thing.
Decades. Decades. Decades of life. Of Game Library.
You know, it's so cool.
Okay. Well, that answers that question then.
There might be some settings we could turn down. I don't think that's the right answer.
I think the right answer is spend the extra $6. Yes. Get the 8Gig card. It's worth it.
Or in some cases, don't even spend the extra. We did find other listings for 570s
that had 8 gigs at the same price. We just happened to run into someone who bamboozled us.
I would rather play Baldur's Gate 3 like this than not play Baldur's Gate 3 at all.
I tell you what. And this is a game that costs as much as the computer.
Okay. We're going to max out Bellatro. I've never played it. You've never played it?
Oh, it's basically poker with Roguelite elements. Okay. It's so fun.
You're getting him addicted to Bellatro. Got it. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Hold on. Hold on. Hold on.
The company's done. The moment he gets in on this game. There's nothing more important than Bellatro.
You know what's more important than Bellatro? Having a PC that can even play Bellatro.
And now you can have one for $70. $70? Frickin' dollars.
Bottom line, I can't believe what we got for the money,
but that doesn't mean that a few more dollars wouldn't help.
And the first thing I think would probably be a graphics card with eight gigs of VRAM.
Yes. And then shortly after that, I need a little bit more SSD storage.
Heck yeah, you do. There were games that we were running that I felt like, dude, this is playable,
except when it would stutter. And I think Baldur's Gate probably took a solid
minute and a half to open. Yeah, it was painful. It's like going back in time.
I also see you holding a couple of other options. Like what does a RAM upgrade gonna cost?
About 10 to 15 bucks if you want DDR3. And if we wanted to go for something like a Core i5-3570,
which is a higher TDB chip that's gonna turbo hire and give us better performance in lightly threaded games,
we're looking at about another 10 bucks there as well. That's the thing about these old machines
is if you have a working motherboard and a working power supply,
those tend to be the things that fail first. So there is a surplus of replacement parts
for things like CPUs and RAM that don't fail as often.
One thing that's really frustrating is I couldn't find a good upgrade path from a 588 gig.
Without spending like... A significant 100 bucks on just the GPU.
That's so rough. If you can find a 588 gig, hold on to that until you have about $150, $200, I think.
Maybe what we should do is we should do a $169 gaming PC or a $269
and see how much better performance we can get. I would love to do that.
Why don't you tell us which one you wanna see in the comments below? Why don't you tell us about our segue to our sponsor?
If you guys like scrappy builds like this one,
you should check out the compilation that we put together of the first ever scrapyard wars.
It's an amazing little time capsule of how things used to be around the LTT office.