Gadgetory

- Hey, guys, this is Austin. This is the Photon 3.0, and at $500, it really is aimed at the majority of gamers. So inside this guy, it is using an Intel Pentium G4600. So Pentiums have typically not had a great rap as far as gaming goes, and that's typically because they've been pure dual core parts. What that means is, is that when it actually comes to gaming, a lot of times games will actually really require four cores or at least some Hyper-threading. In the past, you had to at least jump up to a Core i3. However, with this latest Kaby Lake edition, you actually do have Hyper-threading in a cheap Pentium chip. So for about $30, $40 cheaper than a Core i3. You're still getting a 3.6 gigahertz processor and for most games, that's going to be totally fine. Alongside it, we have the EVGA GTX 1050Ti graphics card. So as you can see in the system, it might not be the biggest card in the world, but don't let that fool you. This definitely has plenty of power. If you caught my video on Cryptomining, you'll know that most high-end graphics cards are nearly impossible to find in stock, and the ones that are, are incredibly expensive. But thankfully, the 1050Ti has been mostly unaffected. Now a big reason for that is that while it isn't quite the best Cryptomining card, it is still great for gaming. Thanks to the four gigabytes of memory on board, as well as the fairly low power consumption, which means that not only does it nicely fit in that tiny little card, but almost more importantly than that, you don't need to connect external PCI power. It pulls everything it needs from the motherboard. For a motherboard, we're using the Gigabyte B250M-EVO. Now, this is a fairly basic motherboard, but it does support not only our Pentium processor, but all the way up to a Core i7, so if you do wanna make some upgrades, that's easy to do. And speaking of upgrades, it also does have an M2 slot directly on the board. so on top of the SSD and any kind of hard drives that you wanna have inside the system, you can also add a super fast M2 drive straight to the board. For memory, we have eight gigabytes of Corsair Vengeance LPX RAM. So eight gigabytes is going to be enough to run pretty much any game as is and of course if you do want to upgrade to 16 gigabytes, it's as simple as grabbing one more stick and throwing it in your system. It's also going to be DDR4, 2400 megahertz, that's pretty much all you need for now. For the SSD, we're doing something a little different this time. So this is a 250 gigabyte WD Blue SSD. So I've been using WD Blue drives in my builds for a very, very long time. This is the first time I've used one of their SSDs. To be fair, pricing is actually pretty solid. So for about $80 you're going to be getting 250 gig drive, which should be enough for most people. However, if you do need more space, because it's a gaming PC, of course you can always throw a hard drive inside. On top of that, if you are building a computer in 2017, you really should be using an SSD. It makes such a huge difference to how snappy and responsive pretty much loading everything on the computer is. When you go back to a hard drive, it really does feel like a huge downgrade. For the power supply, we have a 450 watt EVGA unit. So this is another part that I've used in a lot of builds over the years and for good reason. Not only is it going to be fairly reliable, but it's also cheap and with power supplies, those two things don't always go together. So this guys is going to be a 80 PLUS Bronze rated and with 450 watts of capacity, not only is it enough for the build as is, you can do some pretty serious upgrades without having to touch the supply. For the case we're using the Rosewill Tyrfing? So weird name aside, it actually is a pretty solid case. So it's going to be full-size ATX, so there's plenty of room inside and for about 40 dollars, we're actually getting some pretty decent value. So not only does it have a pair of 120 millimeter fans but also does have a window to show off your super cool cable management. Now yes, build quality could be a little bit better but for the price there's not a lot to complain about. So the Photon 3.0 really is aimed at 1080p gaming. First we have Rocket League. This is a game that is not that difficult to run and as you can see here, it's absolutely no problem for the Photon. We're getting about 140 frames per second on high settings and that is with a frame rate cap. If we actually uncapped that, we'd probably go even higher. Next we have Shadow of Mordor. Now yes, this is a little bit of an older game. However, it's really well optimized and it does hold up even on higher end rigs and on high settings at 1080p, when we're getting in the 80s to 90s, depending on how much action we have here. Completely playable. Another game that's slightly older but still looks really nice is GTA5. So again on very high settings at 1080p, it looks really nice. And frame rate wise, we're still doing pretty solid. So we're keeping in the, generally 50 to 60 frame rate per second range. Again, super super playable. The more I use the system to game, the more I realize just how quiet it is. I mean, even right beside it, I can barely hear anything at all. Another game the Photon 3.0 can definitely handle is Overwatch. So here on Ultra settings at 1080p, we're getting really nice frame rates. So right now we're hovering between 90 to 100 and especially with a high refresh rate monitor like we're using right now, it looks really nice. Plus, Overwatch is just a nice looking game on Ultra settings anyway. As always, I'll have all the links you guys need to build the Photon 3.0 in the description and if you are curious on how to actually build a gaming PC, I did do a full 2017 tutorial using this system. So be sure to go check that out and I will catch you in the next one.