You want to build a sick gaming PC on a reasonable budget, but the thing is,
a thousand bucks doesn't stretch as far as it used to.
Even a console can cost that much these days.
Maybe the solution is time travel.
No, not literally. I mean taking your part selection back a few generations.
But how much performance are you leaving on the table?
I mean 9600 is a much higher number than 5700,
so it must be a much better choice, right?
Right? No. And in fact, these two CPUs are kind of the perfect springboard for our little
investigation slash experiment here. Should we just stop buying the latest hardware?
To find out, we built two entire systems using two wildly different philosophies.
This one can only use current generation parts,
while this one can reach as far back into the past as it wants
in search of the best bang for the buck. Now, as you would expect, pricing is always changing.
So if we built these systems a week ago or a week from now,
we might get very different computers. But we're still interested in identifying any trends,
tips and tricks that we can see that might help you get the most out of your next build
or even your current one. We're also interested in identifying our sponsor.
AMD doesn't really do new Ryzen 3 or Ryzen 5 CPUs anymore,
so our brand new PC was kind of stuck with the Ryzen 7 9600X.
Not that that's a terrible thing. I mean, when you consider that it uses Zen 5
versus the Zen 3 we're going to be using in this system,
you'd think the answer would be obvious. But our older 5700X3D has two extra cores and is packed to the gills with 3D vCache.
Now, this chip hasn't quite achieved 1080Ti levels of legendary,
but the more than $150 savings versus its bigger brother frees up some
very interesting budget for some big upgrades later on.
That's benefit numero uno of the oldest gold philosophy, choice.
Not only is there generally more selection, but you can get substantial discounts on new in-box hardware
that retailers are hoping to clear from their shelves. That is, as long as you're ready to strike.
There can be trade-offs though. For example, our 5700X3D here uses Socket AM4,
which is a dead end for future upgrades and even for some current ones.
Even if you paired this chip with the best compatible motherboard on the market,
you'd still be stuck with PCIe Gen 4 and DDR4 memory.
Although, it's worth noting those probably aren't major considerations at a $1,000 budget.
Even our SSD, we'd have probably stuck with a Gen 4 boot drive even if we had extra money to spend.
Gen 5 drives cost more, don't really benefit gaming, and they run hotter.
At least they do today. But who knows what the future holds for devices that'll fit in these slots.
And being compatible with future hardware is a tangible advantage for Team Shiny here.
It can also be an advantage today. DDR5, all other things being equal, offers a small,
but measurable benefit over DDR4. And our 16 gigs of T-Force Delta RGB fit perfectly in our budget.
We would have rather gone with something a little bit faster, but that kind of trade-off is kind of our point.
If we want something new, we don't always get a best-in-class part.
It has gotten really hard to spec a well-rounded $1,000 machine with all new Gen parts.
Meanwhile, in TARDIS LAN though, we've got that same 16 gig capacity,
but this time right in the price-performance sweet spot,
with the only downside being that when we want to upgrade a few years down the road,
we're going to need to replace our CPU, RAM, and motherboard all in one fell swoop.
Speaking of motherboard, this ASUS Prime B550MA is a pretty good value,
when it's on sale for around $100.
Meanwhile, this Gigabyte X870 Gaming Plus Wi-Fi 6 ran us $220.
That is a huge difference. But then again, so is Wi-Fi 6, PCIe Gen 5 for both the GPU and SSD,
not to mention an AM5 socket, which AMD has committed to support until at least 2027.
That means new chips, new drivers, and, maybe most importantly, new security updates.
AMD has recently said that they will not be patching Ryzen 1000, 2000, or 3000 series chips
for the sync close vulnerability. Although they backtracked on the 3000 series after some community outrage,
and seeing as the latest 3000 series came out in 2020,
the same year that we started getting 5000 series processors,
the end of support for our older platform, oh not that one, this one,
is probably coming soon. Clearly that won't matter when it comes to our next part though, the case.
On this side, we've got our random old case that was cheap.
And over here, we've got the Phanteks Eclipse G360A.
Now in terms of size and features, they're both fairly similar,
but with cases, the devil's in the details. Good ventilation, cable management that's not going to cut your fingers in,
some high quality included fans. Very nice Phanteks. Meanwhile over here, this is what fit in our budget.
Heck yeah. Cool, well thankfully we probably won't need as much cooling for these components
because we're not going to have it. There is cable management though, and it's got one fan included.
I expect our Corsair CX650W to give us a better long-term experience than our
$41 thermal take smart 600W. But it was the only thing that fit in this budget.
And honestly speaking, even our better Corsair could end up near its limit.
If you were to replicate these builds, we would strongly recommend a juicier power supply for both of these systems.
And if you are by the way, we're going to have all the parts linked down below.
You'll notice that what's in the system is not actually the 600W one.
This is such a crappy power supply, it wouldn't even boot the system.
Is this over budget now? It's a $20 more for 60 more watts.
Seems to be doing the trick, but yeah.
For our cooler, we settled on the thermal write phantom spirit. It's so nice, we bought it twice.
Yep, this thing is so good, we used the same one for both systems.
Which actually brings us to the big difference, our GPUs.
Until the NVIDIA RTX 5000 series comes out.
And I guess also maybe eventually has an option that doesn't cost
more than our entire budget. We're stuck with the Zotac TwinEdge RTX 4060.
To be clear, it's not a terrible card. It's got decent 1080p gaming performance,
with the usual NVIDIA features that turn it into a far more compelling package than its
wimpy 8GB of VRAM would normally allow.
I can see why it's popular compared to its AMD equivalent.
But here's the thing. This XFX Speedster Radeon 7800XT is not an equivalent card.
We were able to spend an extra $200 on it thanks to our frugality elsewhere.
So even though it's hard to compare spec for spec across Team Green and Team Red,
we can probably expect a huge performance delta.
Not to mention the double PCIe bandwidth.
Of course, in theory, that shouldn't impact the real world too much.
But hey, why am I talking about theory? It's time to put these systems to the test.
This... Representing Team Brand New will be David while I will be taking our old machine.
Not because I know the outcome and I like winning.
Because you're old. But you made that one too easy.
Let's start with a Cinebench Drag Race. Ready and go!
I'm tired. I'm going to sit down. I guess I'm the old one.
My knee's cracked.
I'm totally out of head!
He must have been trying to distract from the fact that the all-new system is pulling ahead.
You know what? The difference isn't that much. Especially when you consider that that is two generations newer.
But then I'm not really sure what I expected because I have two more cores.
Let's move on to gaming. I love what you've done with the backgrounds, by the way.
Abe Simpson is my familiar.
It follows me around everywhere. No one else can see him. I would think 1440p.
Yeah, that's what I've been testing everything. 120.
That's going to be pretty rough. 4060. Not my problem.
I would also be curious to run it at a lower resolution to see...
If your faster cores are a huge benefit or are they even faster?
I got X3D.
Your game just crashed. Booted me out. We were having some trouble with Expo on this system.
That's the thing. It's technically overclocking. We might need to go back to Jdex settings.
That's not going to help your performance numbers, but it's the luck of the draw.
Hey, your performance is looking pretty good. Yeah.
350. 350 FPS. I'll take it.
Oh, I thought you had them. Oh, I missed. I like flinched.
I'm a flincher. Well, you haven't dropped below 200 and I seem to live there.
It's almost like having a way better GPU makes a pretty big difference for gaming.
Who'd have known? Let's test my theory that I could switch to very high and still have better FPS than you.
That's very high? Yeah. Oh, hey, I'm winning.
Barely, though. Barely. This is an entire notch up in in-game settings and about the same level of performance.
And I'm noticing my 1% lows dropping to below 100 too.
Actually, yeah. My 1% lows are significantly better than yours.
Let's do Final Fantasy XVI next. After about a one-minute unskippable cutscene, we can jump right to the pretty epic icon fight.
That'll give us a pretty good indicator of what our performance is going to be. And this is a very on-topic game right now,
since this is one of the big PlayStation 5 exclusives that has just come to PC.
Right on the heels of launch of the PS5 Pro. And so if you guys want us to make a PS5 Pro killer,
give this video a thumbs up, and we will make that happen. We wouldn't even need to save that much money compared to this budget,
with how expensive that thing is.
Oh, no. Oh, wow.
Oh, no. Not even 30.
That's not close, dude. That was chugging.
Yeah, that was below 20. I mean, NVIDIA's got a lot of cool technology to make up for having an underpowered GPU,
like Framegen. But wouldn't you rather just have more frames?
This is definitely a game that's designed around upscaling,
which is a bit unfortunate, but this is pretty hopeless,
considering this is already 4, 240p.
But even I'm having frame drops in the video.
I also couldn't help noticing my GPUs running 20 degrees cooler than yours.
Holy crap. There's something to be said for investing in a case with way better airflow.
I mean, I don't know how much it would matter. My GPU is pinned at 100% just playing this freaking video.
This may be an engine, but capped. But because yours can barely handle it, it's running at 100%, whereas mine's not.
That makes a lot of sense. Chugging, dude. It's chugga-lugging.
Look at that. 15 FPS.
This is a thousand dollar PC. Like this is a pretty hefty investment.
And you haven't just blown money on dumb stuff either.
You've spent too much on your motherboard by getting a top tier chipset.
Second to top tier. That's true. But other than that, you haven't really done anything stupid.
No. I legitimately tried to make a good thousand dollar build.
It's hard. You just tried a lot harder over here. No, it's just easier.
There's so many more choices. And if you guys think, oh, you guys just cherry picked
a couple of games that run way better on Linus's machine,
that's not the case at all. David already pre-benchmarked a handful of other games.
And even if we were able to get Expo running on this machine,
it's not going to make up the kind of difference we're observing here.
It's night and day. I'm tempted to turn on Framegen.
Sure. And see if you can even make up the ground using that.
Okay. Well, that gets you there.
It's noticeably blurrier. You can tell that it's lower resolution.
But it's not bad. How does it feel? It's pretty good.
It's pretty snappy. I'm not upset. We're making a pretty good case for a DLSS.
This went from a pretty unplayable mess to it's not bad.
Okay. What about if we're looking off into the distance?
Okay. Like how's the water look? Yours definitely has a little more detailed resolved.
This is kind of, it almost feels less contrasty, even though these are the same monitors.
Yep. And it's the same in the textures on the character model.
It's clearly a little bit sharper for me.
Oh yeah. You can really see that in the chain mail. Yeah. And to your point.
Oh, ew. Oh, ew. Oh, not good.
So it can be pretty distracting sometimes. And I haven't turned on any of my upscaling.
If you just want to see FPS number go up, I got that too.
I really did not get a lot of extra frames. And I just got a sharpness filter applied to everything.
Dang it, FSR. Not nearly as good. Hey, and I'm getting my 30 FPS cutscenes now.
I did it. Incredible.
DLSS and FrameGen really is the compelling argument to make for the modern gen system.
And it's worth noting that if you strongly do prefer one brand of GPU over the other,
it's not like we couldn't have put an NVIDIA card in our older gen system.
We could have gone with 3070 or something like that.
You can even get some really great deals on 3080s. But we decided for the sake of this video that we weren't going to look at used cards.
We were just going to stick to stuff that you could buy brand new. All that's left now is to answer the question of which of these systems would you buy?
Let us know in the comments, the oldie but goodie or the shiny new toy.
And also to talk about what we've learned. First of all, timing is everything.
The AM5 platform is coming up on three years old with the AM4 platform crossing the eight-year
mark just recently. So it's no wonder that there's lots of deals to be had here and not so many over here.
But you can't take that for granted. Once NVIDIA cleared out their 3000 series charts, they cleared them out.
And while you still can find them brand new from time to time, it's pretty rare.
Another thing we learned is that generational gains don't seem to trump the savings of buying
older hardware. At least it's not a guarantee.
There were a lot of challenges in picking the parts for these. There's going to be a Floatplane exclusive closer look where David's going to be discussing
how allowing ourselves to look at used hardware might have affected our choices.
Either way, it's pretty clear that you should not lock yourself into the newest releases.
PC hardware is not evolving at the same pace that it once was.
And you just don't need the latest gear to have an excellent experience.
What you do need is the segue to our sponsor. If you guys enjoyed this video and you like budget builds, why not check out our complete
edit of Scrapyard Wars 9 where Luke and I competed to build the best PC for $800.
No offense, David, but we crushed you.
It's you. I know it's you. It's a whole different game.