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 fella.
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 5 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 12400F's more
modern architecture and maximum turbo speed of 4.4 GHz 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 chipset motherboards have quietly GONE FROM NO
GOD 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
XMPP now, so you can get the most out of nonJeck memory kits like this 3200 mega
transfer per second 16 gig kit of Corsair Vengeance LPX that we got for
about $60. Now, that speed not actually
ideal for peak performance, but the huge jump in price for 3600 megat transfer
per second made this decision a pretty easy one. Just like it was easy to
finally tell you about our sponsor
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linked down below. 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 TBTE 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
anymore. Look at that, two M.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 Versus 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 W power supply like this
Thermaltake 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 GTA 6.
>> It's coming out this year. >> Yeah, sure. Let's get these installed.
We interrupt this chill montage to bring you one of the potential pitfalls of
buying secondhand hardware. It appears that the housing around the USB3 header
on our motherboard is uh gone. 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 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.
With that in mind, then what is our total damage, David? $544,
which actually leaves us enough budget that we could get a Gamester Cyclone 2
that's brand new, which is one of my favorite controllers, or a used Dual
Sense, which feels a little more appropriate considering we're going against a PS5. Let's game. Let's do uh
I'd never press the power button, but hey, uh that's what I love about
sometimes budget power supplies and motherboards. They just kind of you
provide power to them and they're like, I'm going, you know what? I'm going to
go big picture, too, for the more consolelike experience.
>> Okay, here we go. Dude, this looks freaking awesome. >> Yeah, I mean, both look really, really
good. Go to where Ragnarok is 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 HDR.
>> 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 cut
scene and then I'm going to 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.
>> Yeah, >> slightly. Oh, you're having some flickering in the background, too. Oh,
it's gone now. >> I think that's the wind. >> No, there was like a light.
>> Oh, 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 8 gigs of VRAM. We're at
7.49 that there's a certain distance
that it has trouble with the textures. Interesting. >> So, we could probably switch uh one of
our settings. >> Yeah, >> but that's PC gaming for you. You got to do a little bit of tweaking. 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.
>> 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. Ah,
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. >> We'll do Returnal. >> Yeah, let's let's do Returnal.
>> Does this game support HDR? >> Yep. >> On PC?
>> Oh, I don't know. I think it does, but I'm 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.
>> Wa! Holy sniky. >> Yeah, this is not close, brother.
>> Not close. Smackdown. Holy crap. >> Are you running at a 60 or a 30 FPS?
>> This is a 60. At 60. >> At 60. Cuz I'm definitely falling well
below 60. Uh graphics. Okay. So, oh man,
I'm I'm still at quality assess too. Yes, >> 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. >> Hold on. >> So, I'm down to medium now. And I
definitely am still sharper.
>> Yeah, >> but it doesn't look like super betterer
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. >> No, you're dropping down to around 40.
>> Yeah, my HDR looks really good. >> Yeah, that I 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. Uh, Death Stranding. >> Death. >> 3 2 1.
>> 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.
Oh, don't continue.
>> I mean, >> it wasn't that way. That was really
close. >> My performance is not
>> Let's uh dial you in a little bit. >> Can you uh 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 going full speed pan?
>> I think I'm above you now. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. You've got motion blur to kind of
mask it, but I at medium am now above 60
FPS even in my image. >> Once again, noticeably sharper on the PS5. >> You know what though? Hold on a second.
I think I like the way the PS5 is handling level of detail better.
>> Oh, >> look at this. >> Oh, yeah. Huh.
>> So, very near. I think I'm on par.
>> Yep. >> In the distance. I think I've had to I
think I've had to cut too much. >> Let me have a look. Maybe 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 Cerny
would surely point out again that secondhand hardware is a pretty big
advantage. And as we pointed out earlier, secondhand 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-disounted
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?
Uh, >> 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 out at a certain time, but they don't want to get it out
at that time anymore because the RAM is so expensive. The SSDs are so expensive.
So, I don't think they are sure what they're going to 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. >> At least
DDR5 has maybe started to start to come
down. So maybe in another 6 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, okay, well, 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 3 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 going to have trouble
getting more audience. So, they're going to 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
going to come on PC, but they've said that they don't want to 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 uh $380
US. So, it's a special edition, open box, and it's still out there. You just
got to 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 >> and I'm really excited about the new Castlevania game. Yeah, I don't think
we're going to 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? >> Telling these fine folks about our
>> Yeah. So, that's my guy. He starts every one of my videos with a tech tip.
>> Fascinating. Just a little tip. >> Just a little tip. It warms people up
for my message. >> Right. Which is >> that ODO's got every app you need to run
your business in one userfriendly and customizable platform. >> And that's good news for everyone.
>> Mhm. Mhm. But not everyone. >> Mhm. Mhm. Well, the uh business app
council would disagree. No. Who? The
group that wants you to pay for a bunch of different app subscriptions instead.
They often chase after and try to stop you. I believe they did actually catch
you at one point. Oh, those guys. Oh,
yeah. No, that's just like a fun game we play. I think they are trying to hurt
you. >> Nah, we're buddies. There he is. >> I think they want to play right now.
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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 Alman. But it's
still not a bad little rig.