you've saved your box tops fished under the couch cushions and pulled together
all your leftover lunch money and you are finally ready to build your first
gaming rig but what do you choose
AMD Intel
we couldn't decide either so today we're going to be building not one but two
budget-friendly gaming pcs each coming in at around a thousand us dollars and
we're gonna put them head-to-head to see just how they perform
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the build starts with one of the best budget cpus on the market right now the
AMD ryzen 3 3100 what's so great about
this is it uses the same zen 2 architecture as their higher priced
products but in a more
bite-sized package so instead of having six or 8 or 12 or 16 cores it's got just
four cores but they're fast ones and like the rest of AMD's ryzen lineup
there's full support for overclocking compared to our CPU our motherboard is
an area where we actually went beyond the bare minimum though to be clear the
b550 phantom gaming 4 from azrock isn't a high-end board but what it does have
is an upgrade path so in addition to having a couple of m.2 slots for ssds
it's got support for pci express gen 4 in both the top 16x slot and top SSD
slot if we ever wanted to upgrade the graphics card and it's got out of the
box compatibility with zen 3 ryzen 5000
series processors which up until this point have such high core counts and
high prices that they don't necessarily make sense for a budget build but that
doesn't mean it's not worth spending the extra you know 20 bucks or 30 bucks to
have the ability to go that route in the future representing Intel we've got the
core i3 10 100 just like our AMD competitor it's got four cores and eight
threads but unlike our AMD competitor it
is not capable of overclocking at all which did inform some of our other parts
choices for example our motherboard we could have gone with the h470 phantom
gaming 4 which does have another m.2 slot a couple more power phases as well
as slightly better usb connectivity but
because that didn't give us any overclocking potential and stepping all
the way up to a z series chipset just wasn't in the cards at this price point
we decided to save the what is it like 20 bucks 30 bucks something like that
yeah the last key difference between our two systems is our memory for the AMD
system we're using g skill rip jaws v and for the Intel system we're using g
skill rip jaws v but at a slightly
slower speed g-skill rightly pointed out when we requested memory for this
project that the Intel system wouldn't be able to take advantage of anything
higher than 2933 megahertz now because
3200 megahertz was exactly the same price at current promo pricing we opted
to go for that anyway with that out of the way to save you
guys some time and boredom we're going to talk about the rest of the parts with
just one of the systems the AMD one while colin assembles the other one on
the counter over there let's start then with the cooler we've gone with a
classic here ladies and gentlemen this is the hyper 212 evo v2 it's got a 120
millimeter fan it's a tower design with four heat pipes and they make direct
contact with the ihs of the CPU
basically this has been the go-to for like
10 years for cheap and cheerful CPU
cooling if you don't have an included cooler of course one common drawback
with budget oriented coolers is that the installation is well let's just say it's
some assembly required it's not difficult by any stretch of the
imagination but it does take a little bit more time than something like a
knock to a cooler once it's on there though hey that looks pretty freaking
great and the cherry on top is to tie our fan cable in a nice little bow and
plug it into the CPU fan header in line with our theme of building a
pretty nice gaming machine without wasting any money we've gone with the evga 550 b5 power supply it's a decent
quality unit with 80 plus bronze efficiency it's got a nice quiet fan
that can even be turned off that's right my friends it's got a
silent fan mode and it's one of the most inexpensive units on the market with a
fully modular interface while there are a ton of other cases on the market we
really like the 275r airflow for its good mix of price features and
performance it's got a tempered glass side panel filtered air intake on the
bottom excellent oh there you go airflow through the front three included 120
millimeter fans and really nice looking cable management that's going to give
our build a really clean look when we're done this isn't by any means a
step-by-step build guide but i also don't want to gloss over important stuff
like this with budget boards you do still have to install your own i o
shield which a lot of the time means bending these things and making sure
that they're not in the way once the motherboard actually goes in
try not to cut yourself this is like the highest probability of cutting yourself
part of dang it is it just cheaper to produce like external ones than to build them
into the motherboard because it's not just the cost of the actual units it's
like the tooling cost of creating the shroud and stuff because the i o is so
different on every motherboard like we blew so much of this thousand dollar
budget on the graphics card and the only way we can do that is by saving
three bucks here and two bucks there okay
for storage we normally steer clear of dram-less ssds for your operating system
but in this case because we're looking for a reasonable amount of capacity
faster than a hard drive and we don't want to spend any more than we have to
the patriot burst 960 gig ticks a lot of boxes one thing we might recommend in
the future as an upgrade when you've got a bit of extra budget is switch over to
using your SATA SSD just for your game drive and run your os off of an NVMe
drive that you put in later at around 500 us dollars our MSI mech Radeon 5700
xt represents about half of our total budget but given that this is a gaming
machine not a video editing pc or
3d modeling pc i think that is more than
justified and there's a lot of bang for the buck to be had here it's got a fast
GPU it's got 8 gigs of gddr6 memory and
it doesn't have fancies like HDMI 2.1 or
pci express gen 4 but if you want to play aaa games at
anywhere from i'd say up to 1440p
this is your ticket unfortunately attempting to enable xmp and get it
running at ddr4 3600 was a no-go even
though it's like supported but i still think we can do better than 2933 which
is what colin's gonna be stuck with with the Intel system there so we're just
gonna go to oh yes drm frequency let's
try 3 200. we could have saved our three dollars
here though now that the machines are built it's
time for the head-to-head showdown which of course means 1v1 but also with bots
on our side so whatever don't worry about it csgo
with my ryzen 3 i had a hard time running it anything higher than stock
RAM settings and i couldn't tell you whether that's down to my particular chips integrated memory controller or my
motherboard but that could be a significant disadvantage for my system
right now in spite of the fact that i have fast RAM installed in it as for
whether that's actually a competitive advantage i guess we'll find out soon enough
no spring prank yes headshot you know
what the bottom line is though regardless of who wins see that's what a
nice winner i am yeah is like these are both great experiences i'm having a
great time yeah i'm sure you're having a great time headshotting me every time you come
around the corner something to note though is i'm actually
hosting our server but cs go server is not like a super
intensive workload by any stretch okay we're going dual berettas dual berettas
boys wait what my my boss dead already what the
i didn't do it no you really didn't your bot killed both of us
oh she's kind of i kind of fear colin's blot more than him
hey there's games that colin's good at this just doesn't happen to be one of
them that's why i picked it so this is cool we're recording gameplay on our
graphics card i'm running a server and
we're both still running at like 200 250
FPS not too freaking shabby hey i've only
got like an extra 20 FPS on you is it worth like having the other person on
the server see if it's comparable i see what you're saying like to make sure
that that's not a huge performance difference honestly to me it doesn't
really affect the conclusion much here though because i'm looking at this going
man for a thousand dollars boy can you ever
get a whole hell of a lot of gaming like
this 1440p absolutely maxed out yeah it's an esports title but you are
getting an extremely competitive experience here yeah there's nothing
wrong with this gaming experience on either side and we can run some more
benchmarks if you really want to know which one edges out the other so why
don't we do that yeah which brings us perfectly to our next game where you
might notice i've chosen a canned benchmark rather than a head-to-head
battle got him seven three two one here we go
oh wow you might have looked good in cs go but
uh we're running at the same settings 1440p absolutely cranked and that Intel
CPU is uh holding back the GPU a little
bit here remember these systems are identical other than
the CPU and then the motherboard obviously to go with it i mean i guess
that's what an extra 100 bucks get you yes and no because if it wasn't for
prices being driven up by the holiday madness and shortages on AMD cpus
these would be basically the same darn price and we didn't have to go b550 we could
have saved a buck and gone with a lower end chipset knowing that we would have
to update the BIOS in order to get our third gen ryzen processor to work on it
out of the box so we could have gone b 450 and been right around the same price
okay now my minimums crossed you my low one
percent FPS are way above this must have
just been one frame this is clearly a better result low 0.1 percent even way
better well with uh that crushing defeat let's open up 3dmark you already ran
that right i did already run it so we can just load up the results perfect
and you come out ahead yes in every possible way i'm glad you asked
why that happened yes he didn't yet but he was going
the reason is that synthetic benchmarks
just cannot simulate every possible
gaming scenario every game engine and
every individual game using that engine
can have different idiosyncrasies that run better or worse on different
hardware and that's why we don't even talk about 3dmark in our graphics card
and CPU reviews now if you're doing something like overclocking it's a
valuable tool because it tells you on identical hardware am i faster than i
was before or slower than i was before but it's not great for comparing
non-identical hardware now let's actually carry on that theme
and fire up cyberpunk
illustrate that point AMD is actually coming slightly behind our Intel system
in this particular game cyberpunk 2077
is about eight to ten percent slower on our AMD
versus Intel system remember again using exactly the same graphics card and
exactly the same settings we're running on the medium preset at 1440p i mean
this is pretty indicative and i mean as we're sitting here like i'm cooler and
also faster i didn't even notice that you were running cooler right now how's
our 99th percentile oh wow you're way ahead in that okay well that's pretty
much it that's the conclusion for a thousand bucks you can get a fantastic
gaming experience whether you decide to go AMD or Intel as for
which one is slightly ahead of the other it's going
to come down to which games you want to play for my money i prefer the white box
here and the reason is that it's got a more clear upgrade path
but we also don't know for sure how rocket
lake from Intel which is also going to be on that same lga 1200 socket is going
to stack up which means no matter who comes out ahead AMD or Intel the big win
is for you the consumer you know what else is a big win me
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freshbooks.com Linus if you guys enjoyed this video
maybe check out the one where i took an old dell like frankenstein office pc and
turned it into a gaming rig it's pretty freaking sick and one thing we forgot to
mention when we were talking about the value prop between them is like
considering playstation 5 scalper prices
this is looking pretty compelling just saying i'm not going all pcmr on it i'm
just saying just say
no okay