In an unprecedented move from Sony, the PS5 family just got the biggest price increase
that a console has ever seen. Yet another blow against affordable gaming.
But I think we can help. First, by shining a spotlight on the healthy market
for secondhand PS5s. There are tens of millions of these consoles out there now.
And because of that, there are deals to be had.
Also, I believe that despite Sony's move,
that may remain true throughout the rest of this console generation.
More on that later though, because second, there are hundreds of millions of PCs out there.
And with a little bit of scrapyard spirit, I think that even in the current climate,
we can beat the performance of the PS5 at its new price.
But there will be some obstacles. And the first is of course, RAM.
While I do believe that the worst may be behind us, memory pricing remains high
thanks to the insatiable needs of AI data centers. But what a lot of folks might not realize
is that not all RAM has been affected equally. DDR4 is very much still in play,
especially less desirable kits. And CPUs as recently as just one platform ago
can still support it. Which is why we're starting our build with an Intel Core i5-12400F.
Just $83 for this little feller. And like the rest of the deals that we're going to highlight,
getting one for this price shouldn't be a major challenge anywhere with a healthy marketplace community.
This seems to be mainly for two reasons. One is that Intel has lost a lot of their sex appeal
for gamers over the last five years, which has lowered demand on the secondary market
for their chips. And the second is that in spite of the lower sex appeal,
Intel quietly still kind of dominates the CPU market by volume.
So there are a lot of these things out there
with suppressed demand. Okay, yeah, it has two fewer cores than an AMD price equivalent
or even the PS5 for that matter, but the 1200F more modern architecture
and maximum turbo speed of 4.4 gigahertz should more than even out the score.
With that said, nothing in life is free and a little bit of that sweet, sweet savings gets offset
by the generally higher price for Intel motherboards is what I would say if we were buying a new motherboard,
but we're not. And while we're at it, I got another tech tip for you.
Over the last few generations, budget chips at motherboards have quietly gone from,
no, God, no, no, God, no.
All the way to, oh, yeah, those are kind of okay compromises.
Like on this ASUS Prime H610M MATX motherboard,
it can be found for less than $50. And not only does it support our 12th gen CPU,
it can even take a 14th gen upgrade down the line. Also, while it wasn't the case for a while,
Intel's low-end chipsets even support XMP now,
so you can get the most out of non-JDEC memory kits.
Like this 3,200 megatransfer per second 16 gig kit
of Corsair Vendance LPX that we got for about $60.
Now, that speed, not actually ideal for peak performance,
but the huge jump in price for 3,600 megatransfer per second
made this decision a pretty easy one. Just like it was easy to finally tell you about our sponsor.
Aside from RAM, the other tough one right now is SSD prices.
And unfortunately, looking at kind of the timing of the RAM apocalypse and potential recovery,
this one might take a bit longer to settle down. We had to pay about $100 for a one terabyte DRAM
cashless model that, in my opinion, isn't worth more than about 50.
Thankfully, we did find some outlier deals for quite a bit less than what we paid,
so if you're patient, there are still bargains to be had.
And worst case scenario, guys, storage is one of the easiest things to upgrade
or expand down the road, thanks to, again, entry-level motherboards not being total dog-do anymore.
Look at that, 2M.2 slots. It is worth noting we could have saved a buck,
either by buying a SATA SSD or a smaller SSD
along with a larger hard drive. And if I was configuring the system for a friend,
I would actually strongly consider that route. But if we're comparing to the PlayStation 5,
a shortcut like that feels kind of unfair. What does feel fair is paying less than $10 for a case.
Okay, sure. It's a little battle-worn, and sure,
it's a thermal take with a few missing parts. But when the comparison is the PS5, honestly,
I think the Versa 17 comes out looking pretty good. Oh, sorry, Sony.
And we pinched our pennies equally hard for our cooler,
though you might not have to. The 12400F does technically include one in the box.
It's just that most of the ones that we saw secondhand didn't have the box anymore.
The good news, though, is these can be had for around five bucks.
And for not many more buckaroos, you can get a 500-watt power supply
like this thermal take smart 500. It's not an amazing power supply,
but it should get the job done at least until it's time to build your PS6 killer for GTA6.
It's coming out this year. Yeah, sure. Let's get these installed.
Let's go.
We interrupt this chill montage to bring you one of the potential pitfalls of buying secondhand hardware.
It appears that the housing around the USB 3 header
on our motherboard is done, The good news is the pins are all in there
and they're all straight and we would be able to tell
which way this goes on without the key because one of these holes is supposed to be blocked
except whoever had this before must have plugged it in the backwards
and they pierced the one that's supposed to be empty so I'm actually not sure.
Here's a tech tip, don't do that. Thanks David, that's helpful.
With all that done, it's time for the cherry on top, the GPU.
Now, this was a tough one to lock in because my initial thought was Intel B580 and we're done.
But after crunching the numbers and looking at the very sparse availability
of used Intel GPUs, I realized we could do better.
We don't have to do better. To match a PS5, all we need is something
in the neighborhood of an AMD 6600 XT but as it turns out, GPUs are one area
where pricing has been on the mend for a little while now
and we can do better. NVIDIA's 3000 series now sits in kind of a sweet spot.
It's new enough to still support most of Team Green's most appealing features
but old enough that most AI bros just plain aren't that interested in them, which is good for us
because the RTX 3070 is a whole lot of gaming goodness
for just 215 US dollars.
With that in mind then, what is our total damage, David? $544, which actually leaves us enough budget
that we could get a GameSir Cyclone 2 that's brand new which is one of my favorite controllers
or a used DualSense, which feels a little more appropriate
considering we're going against a PS5. Let's game. Let's do.
I'd never press the power button but hey,
that's what I love about sometimes budget power supplies
and motherboard is they just kind of, you pride power to them and they're like, I'm going.
You know what, I'm gonna go big picture too for the more console like experience.
Okay, here we go. Dude, this looks freaking awesome. Yeah, I mean, both look really, really good.
Go to war right now, it's a really nice looking game. Okay, I want to start kind of poking at fur.
You know what, my fur is better. Yep, DLSS baby. Ooh, this is some yucky flickering back here.
Interesting. And that's probably one of the most distracting
visual artifacts to me. Yep. Don't know exactly what it is but your HDR
is a little more HDRE. It's because I get to configure it every time I display,
I connect to a new display, it gives me a little wizard and then I configure it and then I get the most
out of my display. Yeah, and to be clear, I can do that
but I was not at any stage prompted to do it. So let's get out of this cutscene
and then I'm gonna configure it and see if I can close that gap a little bit.
Just the way it's reflecting off of the metal on his shoulders.
Yeah, that looks way more washed out than mine. Yep.
Slightly, oh, you're having some flickering in the background too, it's gone now.
I think that's the wind. No, there was like a light.
I caught something there. Yeah, that. So there's a weird, I think, LOD thing
where we're pushing the VRAM so hard, we got eight gigs of VRAM, we're at 7.49,
that there's a certain distance that it has trouble with the textures.
So we could probably switch one of our settings
but that's PC gaming for you, you gotta do a little bit of tweak and get the most out of it.
Ultra screen calibration, let's go. Let's go.
Enable HDR, oh, I don't even have it on. Get it on. Well, there's the problem.
Now I've got HDR on, this should be better. That still looks way better.
Yeah. Yeah, no question. Windows HDR, man, I figure it out.
HDR display calibration, here we go. Get, I have to download it.
Oh. It's not as good still, it's quite a bit better.
Yeah. My performance is dropping a little bit more in these more complex environments.
You're still pretty much above 60 other than a few drops.
Yep. And with VRR, it's like, this would be acceptable game performance for me.
Absolutely, no question. Let's try another game.
With the Returnal. Yeah, let's do Returnal.
Does this game support HDR? Yep. On PC?
Oh, I don't know. I think it does, but we'll have to double check. That's something to watch out for,
is even if the HDR experience is perfect on PC,
not all games that support HDR on a console necessarily support it on PC.
Wow, yours looks so much better, holy crap.
Whoa, holy schnike.
Yeah, this is not close, brother. Not close, smack down, holy crap.
Are you running at a 60 or a 30 FPS? This is a 60 at 61.
At 60? Yeah. Cause I'm definitely falling well below 60.
Graphics, okay, so. Oh man, I'm still at quality for deal assess too.
Yeah. I bet you'll still be sharper than this. I'm getting really big FPS dips though.
Look at that stutter. Huh. Hold on a second here.
So I'm down to medium now. And I definitely am still sharper.
Yeah. But it doesn't look like super better anymore,
in my opinion. But now I'm actually in more complex environments
and still maintaining like a solid, very playable FPS.
Even then it isn't 60 though. Nope, you're dropping down to around 40.
Yeah. My HDR looks really good. Yeah, I think your HDR actually looks better
than mine right now. With that said, you wouldn't normally be sitting this close.
No, if I was all the way back there, I think this would,
none of this would be an issue. But that's the point of pixel peeping is to get in here and really judge it.
Okay. Let's do our next one. Let's do it. Let's start the game at the same time.
Yeah. Death Stranding? Death Stranding. Three, two, one.
Oh, crap. That's okay. I'm like a fraction of a second behind.
You're going to end up probably 30 seconds behind me. Yes.
Oh.
I mean. It wasn't that. What? That was really close.
My performance is not. Let's dial you in a little bit.
Can you pan a bit? I mean, that's not 60 FPS either.
I'm going to go medium. I'm going to turn off motion blur.
I cannot turn off motion blur because this is a console game and that's just not a thing.
Are we on full speed pan?
I think I'm above you now. Yeah. Yeah.
I'm going to turn off motion blur to kind of mask it. Yeah. But I at medium, I'm now above 60 FPS
even in my medium. Once again, notice to be sharper on the PS5. You know what though? Hold on a second.
I think I like the way the PS5 is handling
a level of detail better. Oh. Look at this.
Oh yeah. Huh. So very near.
I think I'm on par. Yeah. In the distance.
I think I've had to cut too much.
Oh. Let me have a look. That's something I can tune though.
Okay. Here. Can we just go to the top of here? Right where you are. I want to see the terrain quality again.
Can you turn back this way? Yeah. Okay. We're close now. We're close.
I think I'm basically on par now. Okay. What about our main character? Oh, mine's better.
Oh, substantially. Look at that hair. Yeah. Okay.
Would you say that we've killed the PS5?
At the new price, I think there's an argument to be made that we did.
We got equal or in some cases even more performance for less.
But Mark Serney would surely point out again
that second hand hardware is a pretty big advantage.
And as we pointed out earlier, second hand PS5s and even brand new PS5s
are not selling at that new retail price,
which kind of raises an interesting question. Is this a real price increase?
I think it's hard to know until we've done a full year cycle, but I could imagine that they're raising the price
so that they can do big discounts and get people to rush out and buy PS5s
for games when they want them to. But it might also be something else.
My theory too is that they could be testing the market,
doing what you're talking about, going, okay, here's our MSRP, but here's our discount for the holiday.
And then using that to take the temperature of the market to maybe establish what will be
the non-discounted new MSRP of the PS6.
That way, no one will be talking about it during the launch that the price went up
and then they can continue to sell PS5s at a normal price.
Are they playing 4D chess? It's hard to know.
I think part of the challenge is they don't really know either because they've probably booked the fab time
for the PS5 or PS6's SOC. So they need to get it at a certain time,
but they don't want to get it at that time anymore because the RAM is so expensive,
the SSDs are so expensive. So I don't think they're sure what they're gonna do.
All right, changing gears. Do you think we could have gone DDR5?
If we kept mostly the same system, but just changed the motherboard to one that does DDR5
and the RAM to DDR5, it adds about 150 bucks.
That's too much. It breaks the budget. You could downgrade your CPU,
but then it's just a different system. It's not as good. I think this is the better option right now.
Right now is the keyword because DDR5 has maybe started to start to come down.
So maybe in another six months, 12 months, we'll be having a totally different conversation,
but for now, this is pretty good. What about some of the other aspects
of PC versus PlayStation 5? I know that this is sort of a passionate
conversation topic for you, but people often talk about how game pricing
is so much better on PC thanks to Steam Summer Sales,
but you often bring up a cable. When was the last time that you paid full MSRP
for a game on the PlayStation Store? Yeah, there's pretty similar sales
for pretty similar games on PlayStation. I think there's kind of a threshold
that we've kind of figured out to go for the sales, to get those games that are three to four years old sold.
I do worry right now about the Sony ecosystem
because they had on their investor call, they know that they're gonna have trouble
getting more audience, so they're gonna try and extract more out of their current audience.
So what does that mean? Higher game prices, new hardware, I don't know,
but I don't like that. Locking exclusives back down again?
That's a big thing too, is it was a really nice couple of years that it was almost a sure bet
that Sony games were gonna come on PC, but they've said that they don't wanna do that
because they know that that's how they sell more PS5 hardware is they make exclusives.
Or they make great value hardware, even at the new price.
I hate to say this, it's still really competitive.
And if you're willing to buy used or open box,
you can get really good deals. I literally bought a PS5, the 30th anniversary one
for $380 US, so it's a special edition open box
and it's still out there, you just gotta look. Or not, I mean, there's a lot of good news here today
and I'm glad to report that building a sweet budget PC rig is still possible if you channel a little bit
of your inner scrapyard warrior. Even if that means you won't have the latest
and greatest and flashiest features, this system is a great reminder that there are tens
of thousands of games out there that we can enjoy without buying into the latest hype.
And a good reminder that games were good
before generationally locked optimization and they will be after as well.
Personally, I'm really looking forward to Alabaster John from Radical Fish.
I'm really excited about the new Castlevania game. Yeah, I don't think we're gonna need anything more
than this PC or a secondhand PlayStation 5
in order to enjoy those. Exactly right. You know what else I'm looking forward to? What's that?
Telling these fine folks about our sponsor. If you guys enjoyed this video,
you might like other videos where we build PCs for a fixed budget.
Why not check out our recent $1,000 build? Sadly, it's not as much performance as we should be getting.
Thank you, Sam Altman, but it's still not a bad little rig.