Gadgetory

offering only the finest in PC enthusiasts apparel awesomesauce shirts are not only threaded they're hyper threaded and come factory over cloth get yours today at the awesomesauce tool what's up guys so today I am pretty darn excited because I finally get to build a particular PC that's been on my mind for the last few weeks it all started when I posted a picture of the Lian Li P Co 5 on Instagram and several of you suggested I use it for a console replacement build so four weeks later I've gathered all the parts to make it happen just for you and kind of for me naturally the name console killer immediately comes to mind a term used to describe a PC that outperforms today's gaming consoles for around the same price and while the system I'm building today will indubitably outperform a ps4 or Xbox one in most cases hopefully building in a chassis as extravagant as the PCO 5 will forcibly push me far past the price point of either console I guess this makes it more of an overkill console killer or a console / killer so as I go over the components for the build I'll also be discussing ways to bring costs down for those of you looking for a more conventional approach to building a console killer I should also note that this is a two-part series so in this video I'll just be assembling the system and I'll be conducting the actual performance benchmarks in part 2 so with that said our first piece of hardware on the table is the AMD athlon x4 860 K it's really no surprise I'm going team red for this build considering we're trying to keep costs to a minimum but that doesn't necessarily mean we're skimping out on performance this m2 processor offers outstanding price to performance in the sub $100 price range and it's 4 cores will be ready to handle the increasing number of games that take advantage of multiple cores holding everything together is the f2 a 88 X and Wi-Fi from gigabyte this was the most affordable FM 2 plus motherboard I could find with console esque features like built-in Bluetooth and Wi-Fi additionally it's got Gigabit Ethernet LAN front panel USB and a dual BIOS making it a great addition to our arsenal for system memory I've chosen a 2 by 4 gig 1333 speed kit from G skills sniper series G skills really never let me down when it comes to offering reliable modules at prices typically lower than the competition and having eight gigs of RAM aboard the system will be more than enough for even today's most demanding PC titles doing the bulk of heavy lifting for our games is the power color r9 280 this rebranded 7950 from AMD packs a three gig frame buffer on a 384 bit bus while giving us a good amount of overclocking Headroom to really push our frame rate considering the ps4 and Xbox one support 1.8 and 1.3 teraflops of compute performance respectively the r9 280 s 3.3 teraflops is a big step towards building a bonafide console killer and at just 160 bucks after mail-in rebate this card from power color is nothing short of a steal cooling our f1 cpu is the shadow rock LP from be quiet it's quiet slim and sexy lucious I was so impressed by its performance during the recent review I did of it that I just had to use it for this build though my insistence on its inclusion might lead to high clearance issues with the glass panel on the pc o5 if push comes to shove I do have a slim fan lying around that will make the cooler fit at the cost of some performance mind you for those of you operating within a console budget I'd suggest using the stock cooler that came with your CPU yeah it'll be noisy and it won't offer much overclocking Headroom but it is one of the easiest spots to cut corners here and it'll make for a most welcome upgrade in the future our operating system will live on this 240 gig SSD now v300 from kingston tossing an SSD in the mix gives us all-around faster performance when launching games and booting into the OS though it's honestly more of a luxury item when building a console killer on budget to shave costs down I'd recommend sticking with a single reliable hard drive like this Seagate Barracuda I'm using this 2 terabyte model that I pulled from an old external hard drive enclosure but if you don't have a spare mechanical lying around you can certainly find cheaper drives than the Barracuda now rarely ever is the most expensive component in your system the case but I suppose you should expect nothing less from the borderline art piece that is the PCO 5 from Leon Lee high quality aluminium and glass construction make up a striking contemporary enclosure that will probably be the best looking piece of hardware in your house but not without a hefty premium clearly this is another area where you can really cut down on costs with the cheaper case so assuming you aren't building in a high-end wall mountable chassis by the way I do plan on wall mounting this sucker I would suggest going with something like the cooler Master Elite 120 advanced which you can pick up for just a fraction of the cost another caveat of the PCO five is that it lacks support for an ATX power supply drastically reducing our options to sfx units so here we have the silverstone s FX series 500 watt fully modular power supply so yes this is another component I admittedly splurged on however this also means yet another opportunity to save some cash assuming we were building in something like the elite 120 which supports full sized ATX units there's a handful of solid options in the sub $60 price range to suit your needs and power requirements for a bill such as this one that being said this unit's 80 plus gold rating semi fanless design and flat black modular cables make this one of the nicest power supplies in its class and finally just to add some icing on the cake I'll be lining the case with a few of these led alchemy strips from BitFenix accent lighting isn't really something you consider when building on a budget but given the circumstances of that beautiful tempered-glass panel on the PCO 5 I felt it would be a sin not to embellish just a little so altogether the total cost of my console over killer build came out to be just south of a cool grant nine hundred and seventy two dollars and twenty one cents to be exact not exactly a favorable number for those on a console budget however if we make all the affer mentioned revisions to the parts list we can bring the total cost down to just under five hundred dollars without affecting much of our overall gaming performance since we'd still be keeping our CPU motherboard memory and graphics card making this a much more compelling offer as a console alternative so now that all the hardware fixings are said and done the next logical question here is how well does this system perform but in order to answer that will first need to build the actual system this has been Captain Obvious signing off all right so the build turned out pretty great it looks beautiful but as you can probably tell from the footage not everything went according to plan so first off you can see right here that the ATX power supply cable was not long enough to route behind the motherboard tray just because of the unique layout of the PC o-5 I actually ended up having to route it just right above right in front of the RAM you can also probably tell that I had ended up having to use the stock AMD cooler which is pretty expected I suppose because the shadow rock LP was too tall to fit in here with that tempered glass side panel but so let me show you what I did I took the fan off and I replaced it with this slim size fan with the some zip ties it looks kind of a kind of janky but when you're looking at it from the perspective of the way it'll be mounted into the case you can't really tell it's not too bad but even with the height clearance issues solved I was still running into issues with the RAM clearance because I just underestimated how tall the heat spreaders on the sniper modules are and I can't really get the cooler down onto the CPU without the heatsink scraping up against the top of the heat spreaders there so I could just replace the heatsink with with a shorter one or with one that has more clearance for the RAM but then I'd probably run into the high clearance issues again with a glass panel so I think the better option here the only option really is to replace the sniper modules which I'm kind of bummed about because I really like them in here but I do have some low profile RAM in the stream box system over there which I could probably swap out put the RAM modules in there and then and then do a little switcheroo and it should be okay but I'm going to save all those upgrades and those little updates to the rig for part 2 which is also the video where I do the benchmark so all together a fantastic looking rig so far a couple quirks here and there but overall pretty nice so there you guys have it I know I am pretty gosh darn excited to see this thing in action but as always I'm curious to hear from you guys as well so let me know in the comments what you think of this overkill console killer and also your thoughts on the sub five hundred dollar version that we noted earlier do you think it's enough to take on a current gen console I think so but either way stay tuned for part two where I put this rig to the ultimate test you'll also get to see the completed system mounted on my wall before I go I'd like to thank today's sponsor lynda.com know their site is an excellent source of information where you can learn all sorts of computer stuff not that any of you would be interested in that if you have a custom built workstation PC sitting by you right now why not put it to good use and no I'm not talking about playing games do I look like I'm playing games if you're interested it's completely free to try just cruise over to lynda.com slash awesome sauce and learn something new today apart from that you can toss me a like on this video if you enjoyed it and let's face it you enjoyed it also don't forget to check the description for my Amazon affiliate link below bookmark it use it when you buy stuff and watch as my videos magically become less and less awful I'm Kyle with awesomesauce Network thank you guys for watching subscribe to the channel if you haven't already and I'll see you guys in the next video