This is the $69 gaming PC, and it's great.
Except for one small problem. It keeps turning all of my favorite new AAA games
into what I call slideshow simulator.
Which got me wondering, what would happen if we added just a little bit more budget?
Could we play any game on the market with legitimately good performance?
To find out, I personally signed a big, beautiful budget increase of $200,
allowing us to upgrade our hot dog to a hot damn.
I'm talking games like Doom the Dark Ages, Dragon's Dogma 2, and Cyberpunk at 1080p 60 FPS.
And I picked up another set of parts to show that if we start our $269 built-in scratch,
we can do even better. Wow, this is actually much higher end than I expected.
Is this a 2080 Super?
I know. Can you believe that? That's almost as unbelievable as this 360 pop shove
Willie Grind, segue to our sponsor.
All things considered, our latest $69 gaming PC
is a fantastic little machine. But it was built with compromise at its core.
Like these dangerously rough cutouts.
Wow. These two precarious power supplies,
not to mention the low power CPU that was meant more for crunching spreadsheets than games.
That's a good place for us to start by asking what is the best CPU
that we can put into this motherboard without swapping any of our other components?
And the answer is the Core i7 3770K.
But when we found this Core i5 3570 non-K
for just five Canadian dollars, that was a deal we couldn't refuse.
Even if it does mean we'll lose a few FPS versus its big brother.
Now, if you're looking at that deal thinking, oh, is this another David build
where he just flexes his deal hunting skills on us mere mortals?
The answer is no. For budgeting purposes, I made him use prices
that were actually readily available across a combination of Marketplace and eBay.
So this CPU counts against him for $15.
But even so, we have lots of budget left for other upgrades,
like this four by four gig kit of memory from Corsair for about $10.
We're not only doubling our capacity here, but it's faster than our old mini greenies too,
at least in theory. I do have some doubts about this HP motherboard
actually supporting the stuff at full speed.
Next, we're gonna improve our storage situation with an upgrade to a Hitachi one terabyte hard drive
for $10. What are all the great things I can say about this drive?
Well, it has one terabyte of storage, which is enough that we won't need
to constantly redownload our games, and it saves us the $30 to $40
that we would spend on a larger SSD. With all of those positives out of the way,
let me make this clear. For anything but a game drive, I don't really recommend random old used hard drives,
but for an application like this where reliability doesn't matter, it's totally valid.
Now, for obvious reasons, we played around with the idea of replacing the case
from our original $69 PC, but we realized that that would have cascading consequences.
For one thing, our motherboard might not fit in the new chassis,
and for another, we would need a new power supply that is actually enough for the entire system
because we'd have nowhere to mount our second power supply.
So instead, we opted to go all in
and invest our remaining budget in our GPU.
With about $166 left, our options are somewhat limited,
but if we sell the old RX 570
for the price we originally paid, which shouldn't be a challenge, we got a great deal,
all of a sudden, we have over $200 to play with.
With that kind of dash in our pocket, it was tempting then to go for the legendary GTX 1080 Ti,
which can be had for less than $150 these days.
But we're starting to see games that require feature support
that that card simply doesn't have, which pushes us to newer cards
that have hardware ray tracing support, like an AMD 6700 or a GeForce 2070 Super.
Now it is worth noting, if you get really lucky, you might be able to get something better.
We found a handful of 2080s, we've even 2080 supers for just around $200 US,
and looking at the sold listings on eBay, that's not an unrealistic target
if you're willing to play the game in order to play games.
But that was a little bit outside of the easy to obtain range that I had for David,
so we're gonna go with the 2070 Super for our build.
Sorry, David, this is a little tricky, so while we're getting everything aligned,
let's talk about the importance of casting a wide net for parts that fit your budget,
and then pulling the trigger when you see the right deal.
You've gotta have some idea what you're aiming for, set up your keyword notifications,
then pounce. And if you're not sure where to start
on what kind of hardware is gonna work for you, we really like the Toms hardware,
CPU and GPU hierarchy charts. Oh, and another really good resource
is those super helpful head-to-head benchmark videos that you can find on YouTube.
Shout out to the creators of those. All right.
Yay. Let's fire it up.
Is what I would say, if it wasn't for the big question we need to answer,
would we have just been better off building a $269 gaming PC in the first place
rather than building a $69 gaming PC and upgrading it?
Short answer, maybe. Our higher initial budget makes it easier
for us to target someone's old custom PC rather than being stuck with a dusty workstation.
Ideally then, we can find something with a newer CPU.
In general, it's worth noting that you're still better off trying to buy things in a bundle versus individual parts.
You'll save on delivery time and cost. And ideally, you'll be able to test the bundle together
before you actually hand over the cash, like you've seen us do during Scrapyard Wars.
For stability testing, we like using stress tests like OCCT and Furmark.
And for monitoring temperatures, hardware info is a great choice.
With that said, when I'm buying budget parts in particular,
I'm usually okay with the seller just sending me a video
of them running a stress test as long as they have a decent rating.
But I'll leave that up to your judgment. We picked up a few different bundles,
each with their own strengths and weaknesses. But the one we liked best was built around
one of our favorite target CPUs for builds like this, the Intel Core i5-8400.
This chip could trade blows with the previous generation's flagship
thanks to its six cores that boost to up to four gigahertz.
And because it was so popular, there are tons of people trying to get rid of them,
meaning that deals on these chips are plentiful. This H310 motherboard that it came with
offers us a decent upgrade path. And the whole platform is new enough
that it shouldn't have any significant obstacles to running Windows 11.
Included with our bundle for a hundred US dollars, we got 16 gigs of team group RAM
at 2666 mega transfers per second, a decent mid-sized case, and an optical drive.
But none of that is enough to test out these parts to make sure we didn't get scammed.
So we also picked up this C-Sonic X650W power supply
for around $30. Now buying a used power supply is a roll of the dice
on the best of days, especially a modular one.
Make sure you get all the cables, they are not interchangeable.
So if you must buy a used power supply, you might want to look to eBay.
Between a visible seller rating, not to mention more robust fire protection,
the online auction house might be our preferred source for used power supplies.
Let's get this one installed.
Next up, we need some decent storage. We actually got offered a free 128 gig SSD
when we picked up our core system. Just goes to show you, it's always worth being a good polite buyer
because occasionally you might get some freebie stone in. But that's just gravy because our motherboard is new enough
that we can aim for an NVMe SSD instead, like this 500 gig Kingston NV2
that we got for just under $20. Now to be clear, if you're in a hurry,
you might have to settle for a SATA drive for this budget. But deals like this one are definitely out there.
And I gotta say, this computer is a lot more modern than I expected so far.
Let's stress test it. OCCT is a great tool for stress testing computers
and they've even got these helpful little tooltips throughout the UI that will help you configure it
to stress the correct components for what you're trying to validate.
Shout out to their team, by the way, they're working on a new LTT themed skin.
So stay tuned for that. It's coming whenever it comes.
Look at her go. It's also not a bad idea to run Crystal Disk Info
to check out the power on hours and see if there are any smart errors on your SSD.
Assuming nothing's defective, we should be able to run stress tests like this indefinitely.
It's not like we're overclocking or anything. On that subject, choosing parts that can overclock
is not a bad choice for stretching out the life of budget parts.
But the flip side is that if it doesn't support overclocking,
it means it's never been overclocked. So you know that it hasn't been pushed to its limits.
Hey, we passed. Now that we trust our core system then,
it's time to plan our next move. We could move up in the RAM world,
but it's gonna be hard to find a noticeable bump in performance for a low price.
So I think we're gonna skip that. We already have a pretty good case
and a functioning cooler. I mean, I wouldn't blame you for upgrading that,
but personally, I wouldn't bother until I've sorted out everything else.
This time around, because we were trying to build a system that would provide a more balanced experience,
not to mention an easier upgrade path, we actually have a little less money to invest in our GPU,
which means we're probably gonna end up with a 2060
or a 2060 Super for around $160.
Oh, even at that price, it kind of breaks our budget, putting us around $300.
But David pointed out that he was able to find these cards for more like $125 to $130 with a little bit of patience.
And if you're able to be really patient, we even saw a couple of 2070 class cards in this range.
So happy hunting. Something, something transparent screwdriver,
lttstore.com, let's go. Look at this thing. I've actually been waiting so long for this stage.
Look at it go. It's like an LTT screwdriver, but clearer.
Question now is which of our systems gives us a better overall gaming experience?
Right out of the gate. Yours is really loud. Yes.
Kind of unpleasant. Also, the shader caching on his.
Took at least half an hour. At least, that was brutal.
Yeah, you're doing a little bit better. Your men's are higher than my average.
It goes to show you the most powerful GPU
is not always the correct answer. I wasn't expecting such a huge disparity.
Then again, I mean, that's what? Third gen and this is an eighth gen.
It's a huge, huge difference. That's a big difference in CPU performance.
Still, this is not an especially pretty game, but there's no denying it's demanding
and it's running way better on the from the ground up to $69 gaming PC.
That being said, this computer is still mostly playable.
Like you're not having a great time and you're having frame drops to sub 10 once in a while,
but you could get through this game probably. Yeah.
So if our goal was to build a PC that can run any modern game,
Dragon's Dogma 2 isn't gonna stop us. Let's try the next one.
I'm really feeling my hard drive right now.
You just finished a game, reloaded into a game
and are playing before I even loaded my first one. Yeah, it's pretty brutal, dude.
Disconnected, no. Oh, we're on the same game.
No way. Yeah, but uh. Oh, nice.
Okay, let's go. Oh, that's you, hey.
Dang it. I wouldn't have won. This is not great.
I'm above 60 on my 1% lows, but it feels quite choppy.
How is yours feeling? Mine feels great. Why wasn't that?
I have no excuses.
Oh boy. Oh, I screen peeked. I was waiting for you to pop around that corner.
You piece of crap. But I didn't get you. Oh no.
How dare you? God, I'm not. Ah, mother lover.
I gotta say, my minimums are 84,
but it doesn't feel quite that smooth actually. Really?
Oh, I got him. Oh, you did get me. It's over. You're the better CS player.
Here, try this.
Oh my God, that's so much better. Yeah, yours is definitely worse,
but it's not as worse or as it should be.
I think if we fandangled the settings a bit, we would get a better experience on both of them.
Yeah. I just wanted sort of to set a benchmark. You can absolutely play esports games on either of them.
100%. But that's a way better experience because we have a way better CPU.
All right, what else we got? How you doing over there? It would be so nice for the menu to load.
Oh yeah, this is what happens. Oh.
Oh, that's rough. So if our goal is to be able to play any AAA game,
we're basically stuck with the ground up build
where we choose a more modern platform. And you could choose a more modern office PC,
but from my experience, the more recent stuff is still kind of deployed slash still has an obvious value.
So you're not able to get as good a deal on it as you are compared to the really obsolete office PCs.
This is the office PC I found that's similar to that one. It's got an 8,500 in it.
And it was about $110. Okay.
So pretty good value. And we could have like modified it, made it work. But it's also really similar in price
to the custom one we got. So it doesn't set itself apart in terms of value.
And we're stuck with this proprietary power supply and really limiting case.
So when you're looking at new enough stuff, it probably does make more sense to go for a custom PC.
100%. Yep. Okay, she's demanding.
We might need a little bit of DLSS out there. Medium was also probably an error.
Oh yeah, it's too low. Maybe some DLSS. Okay, yeah.
Fast paced game like this, you are not going to want to play at dips down to 15 FPS.
Let's try just low first or do you want to have DLSS on? Let's try low first.
Because 1% lows are pretty damn low. Yeah, this is not great.
It could deal with this. I could play the game though. Yeah, it looks like it doesn't feel as choppy as it,
the frame times are saying. What is it about id and just being able to make games
that look incredible and run pretty damn incredible?
Just for me, can you try DLSS? Oh, absolutely. I think with quality, that's all we're going to need.
That is a playable experience. Very.
Looks a little softer obviously, but very playable, not just a little.
And say what you want about DLSS and fake frames and all that.
I would rather play like this than like I was before at native. 100%.
It's pretty incredible what you can get for 269 bucks though, I got to say.
Unbelievable. This is freaking awesome.
Say what you will about the state of the new PC market.
It is a great time to build a sub $500 PC
if you're willing to use used parts. There are solid deals out there,
both on mostly built computers that have not that old platforms
and on three generation old cards that as you can see, still hold up pretty darn well.
As far as narrowing down your choices, personally, I would avoid pre-RTX NVIDIA
and pre-5000 series AMD if you're interested in running modern games
since we're expecting to see more and more titles that require an up-to-date feature set.
Most Intel cards should be fine, but we've noticed that it's hard to find them
at a good price and that could be a combination of the lack of widespread adoption
and also the fact that Arc is riding a new wave of popularity.
Maybe it's a bit of both. But you know what else is riding a new wave of popularity?
These segues to our sponsor.
If you guys enjoyed this video and you like budget builds, you should definitely check out
how we built the $69 gaming PC that we started with in this video.
It was quite the hands-on project.