Gadgetory

in the last episode of the $69 gaming PC saga we bought a Dell Optiplex for 27 bucks on eBay stuck in a $30 graphics card and got playable frame rates in a variety of popular casual and eSports games that is depending on your standard for playable but we didn't stop there for our second installment we're actually taking a combination of our own advice yeah brand some from our community to bring that standard that playable standard up by upgrading our original system with a few more budget parts and hopefully turning it into an actually decent gaming PC so can we build it yes we can maybe the new be quiet silent bass 801 offers great usability and utilizes noise dampening events to keep your PC quiet check it out on new egg at the link below so here's the deal using current-gen parts the cheapest gaming PC that you could build today and that would actually be worth building is probably around 350 to 400 bucks so in order to make our Frankenstein ish collection of parts worth the time investment and the inherent risks that come with buying used hardware we figure we've got to undercut that price by a pretty good margin while getting legitimately decent frame rates so our goal here is smooth 1080p gaming at medium or so settings so as a refresher here's our original system there are some things we can upgrade in here like the cardboard but there are some other things that are gonna be stuck with like the mother bore the cooler the case and the power supply once we start replacing those core components that usually means we're better off building something new but that also means that we're gonna have to be stuck with the 255 watt power limit so the most obvious component to upgrade here given that our GTX 650 poor thing broken fan had a stuck at 720p and low settings for the most part is the graphics card but there's been a lot of generations of graphics cards since the 600 series so which one should we go with newer ones are obviously gonna get us better performance but they stand to potentially be bottlenecks and they obviously come with a higher price tag so to find the best bang for the buck we hooked up our gtx 750ti a dt x 950 and a gtx 1050 Ti and ran some tests there's some good news here for those of you who are allergic to jank by the way I mean we're not know clearly but some people are and that is that many of these newer GPUs actually are so much more power efficient that we can get rid of that SATA to 6-pin PCI Express power adapter because they can draw all the power they need from the slot so no more of this weird cable since yes like this one yeah oh great Oh oh shoot actually I'm sorry well we're still gonna need that PCI Express riser yeah yeah charge you right click and then you're gonna get yeah you can't hold it forever yeah use life stuff oh you're dead yeah if you press either you would have lived okay so that's overwatch looks pretty good Wow look at the CPU usage though 90% yeah yeah get him so yeah it was rocket League we're getting around the same frame rate even though we've upgraded the GPU so it's actually still very impressive you know we're getting very playable framerates you're eating right nice and smooth 1080 even as you went through a whole particle cloud it was I've been 90 right there but we're not getting that much of an improvement you know once again CPU activity pinned above 90% yep all the way oh well this is uh pretty much all we need to know but why don't we open up one more game just for a good measure here okay so once again we are now running at 1080p what kind of details are we looking at here all right slow everything low everything and really no improvement to speak of yeah still around like 40 something yeah this is this is noticeably choppy yeah we were at like I think we got a well bad guy yeah I can't tell the difference in csgo when they don't have big red markers above their heads like an overwatch they do they have that in overwatch so that's why I like it so in summary going with a 750ti believing everything else the same gets overwatch more playable and then similar results in csgo in rocket League but this time at 1080p instead of 720p so it's an improvement but the issue here is that our frame rates are still not yeah great they're about the same they dipped below comfortably playable exactly so time to upgrade all right let's do it did I leave you hang in there no I owe that time I did this guy's cheating you definitely happen using net hacks what is the net heck I don't even know that hacks are the strongest tax their hacks that interfere with the network connection oh nice did you see that kill even with a CPU even even with the system being CPU bound I'm trashing the competition okay you're only firing at the lot like the big guy yeah because that's all you can hit he's a big target 35 SES oh just got my ultimate oh okay you're just gonna play goalie well I mean I shouldn't surprise me that much I knew Lera cpu-bound but I thought maybe yeah and like nothing's happening on screen I'm just like walking around it's still it like well ok now it's at 50 but its second ago is that like for you and your dip down under 40 32 there so in summary then even with our first GPU upgrade we saw limited to no improvement and then because of a fairly obvious significant CPU bottleneck here well we continued to have the same experience as we made our way up the GPU stack so the next upgrade is obviously going to be our CPU not only is our original one here from 2007 it's also a dual core which wasn't a problem for gaming then but it definitely is now so according to Intel's compatibility list the most powerful CPU for this chipset the Intel g-41 Express is the core 2 quad QX 9650 it actually runs at a similar clock speed but it's got twice as many cores and we happen to have one it's a good thing we did all the testing before I started oh great I got a screwdriver - let's do it together I'll lead by example I'm sure there was a time once well it's nice how easy these upgrades hard to get out here it's just like a hinge yeah great great what's not so great is the fact that there is more to CPU compatibility than Intel's guidelines I'm afraid it turns out Dell never validated the QX 9650 on this motherboard which I guess kind of makes sense since who would put an Extreme Edition in a business tower that doesn't make maybe a crazy person would try that race so we needed to find one of the processors on Dells compatibility list and our old friends at free geek a non-profit electronics recycling outfit located here in Vancouver came to the rescue they hooked us up with an Intel Core 2 quad 9550 it's a couple steps down from the QX 9650 and it has a slightly lower clock speed than even our East 7500 but it's still a quad core so we're hoping for a big improvement csgo whoa go oh dang sputtering that is way smoother look at that and like this is what the 750 Ti is the 750 Ti and $30 more for a CPU quad-core CPU Wow I mean I still can't kill anything but yeah you know so you're hovering around 90 a hundred plus right now yeah going going up from 45 and far more importantly if you're playing something competitive is when there's a bunch of action on the screen we're not getting those same kinds of frame drops or dips or hitches like it's it's smooth when you pan around the corner there's no stutter you know it honestly blowing me away this is very playable yeah boom boom boom boom whoa he went flying well I fired larger than what Steve oh you fire large bullets when I play csgo I like to fire a slightly larger bullet than everyone else I closed it like an idiot but we were sitting at only around 60% CPU usage ROI so there you go just not running into a bottleneck just having a couple of extra cores available to it huh ended up increasing our FPS what like 70% I'm bad at math that's crazy but it went up a lot all right let's see you pulling some noobs down 204 yeah you're in the middle you smart guy let's go let's go this guy is really bad but you haven't killed him yet no but this is on his hard sleep did you get eliminated eliminated that's what I do to bad guys that's killed each other though interestingly though that's our CPU utilization in overwatch so we were still running into a CPU bottleneck which means that even though we only upgraded our GPU one more tier we probably wouldn't get any further improvements out of them even better one because we had such a great experience with csgo and overwatch we decided it's the cheapest gaming PC we might as well add the cheapest free game most popular free game how do you just like get rid of your stupid yeah this is this is what's so annoying you can't get rid of it you have to land oh you got oh damn I'm gonna take his stuff you mind you mind him to death I like this game yeah it's somewhat playable what are we running down here so this is a 1080p iam medium okay alright upgrading the CPU and the GPU got us excellent results in terms of price to performance so far our Optiplex here was 30 bucks the quad-core CPU was another 30 bucks and a 750 Ti is about 60 bucks making this a 1080p 60fps gaming PC for a hundred and twenty bucks and the crazy thing is we're still not done yet now we won't be improving gaming performance this time around but going from a hard drive to an SSD is certainly a quality of life improvement which is why we actually did it before we started running all of our benchmarks and like filming this video because otherwise we'd waste a lot of time waiting around for that hard drive so so pretty much anything will do you but we chucked in a Corsair force le and with Windows 10 installed it makes this old junker of a machine almost feel like a new PC almost so given that you can get a 120 gig SSD for about 30 bucks on Amazon 150 dollar gaming PC boom got it not bad I mean like look at the responsiveness here like whether you're just kind of switching tabs like you guys saw me opening up Photoshop they're like let's launch a web browser like it doesn't feel like a decade old computer at all the only thing that's left is to deal with this measly four gigs of ram but upgrading ram on older systems like this one can be a little bit challenging and it can even pretty confusing to even get started now according to the spec sheet for the Dell Optiplex 380 our system only supports 4 gigs of RAM to 2 gigabyte DIMMs but since we have some ddr3 lying around we figured we just might as well throw in another 4 gig stick and see what happens come on Riley don't screw it up again oh I love the sound of that I'm not checking your work I'm just yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah sure sure sure wait are we expecting this to work or not I'm not sure I've never done this before so oh wow it worked whoo what was it supposed to not sure really doing this for the first time so don't know about Ram I thought you prepared this video yeah it's ok look at ya eight gigs of DDR 3 days oh it worked oh thank goodness ok I really can't tell what did you think this was gonna work or not I'm not sure so there can be any number of restrictions on the kind of memory that you can run in these sorts of pre-built systems what speed the sticks run at whether they're single sided or double sided dims and even just straight-up Hardware locks so that they'll only work with certain brands or certain models and given that our ram upgrade actually didn't have that much of an effect on gaming performance our take here is that if you have some 4 gig ddr3 dimms lying around give it a shot but otherwise it might not be worth it especially since once you've crossed that 200 dollar threshold or once you need to do more than just gain like if you have to get actual work done it might be time to start thinking about spending a bit more to get something more modern with that said a bit of frustration on the RAM upgrade doesn't change that overall this was an incredibly successful experiment I mean we're not saying that we'd recommend that everyone you know tries this at home you know buying new PCs is dead yeah that would be the click of the clickbait thumbnail what don't you clearly but it does show that contrary to popular belief PC gaming isn't that expensive to get into provided that you're willing to do some bargain hunting which I am you hunted this that's why it's dead no looks dead my computer it's like dismembered you know I can't recommend enough the mass drops sennheiser HD 6 XX headphones these are based closely on one of Sennheiser's all-time best pairs of headphones they're actually the ones I use at home and they're one of mass drops all-time bestsellers with over 40,000 of their members picking them up to date they have not changed the driver and sound structure compared to the HD 650 s meaning you get a nice balanced mid-range and natural sounding bass they've got a detachable 6 foot cable though instead of a 10 foot cable based on community feedback and they've got three and a half millimeter and quarter inch jack compatibility for everyday use it comes included with Sennheiser's long-term support and you can check out the link below in the video description so thanks for watching guys if you dislike this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get subscribed or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description also down there's our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally join is that gonna be our our thumbnail yeah I think I'm thinking something are you editing are you editing our thumbnail on the machine wow yeah it's like thumbnail ception it's like it's it's good for work and play that's very stylized I know yeah what about this