Gadgetory

the AMDR x 480 a budget graphics card with an enthusiast grade punch as I and many other reviewers have proven in our official reviews of the 480 mine of which you can check out right here this card has the ability to keep up with the mid-range fat cats of the last generation namely the r9 390 and GTX 970 these two cards also cost approximately 100 US dollars more than AMD's newest release at least here in the US so it's safe to say then that AMD had the word of budget in mind when they were creating the RX 480 but how far can we stretch that word in terms of PC components that we pair the card with does this mean that we can pair the card with an ultra cheap ultra old PC and expect similar frame rates well in short the answer is no old CPUs will always be a bottleneck in some fashion some just more than others so that being said then how does a $350 PC sound or to make things a little clearer how do the $350 PC sound in which the graphics card accounts for two-thirds of the total price now we're getting somewhere that's exactly what I've been working on the entire weekend here in the studio I found cheap parts on craigslist and ebay to throw into this rig and was able to keep the price within console range this should be good now I'm not going to start a whole PC verse console fanboy battle whatever you want to call it I've already tried to do that the past and at this point it's just not worth it but keeping the price around 350 bucks allows those who already prefer personal computers over consoles to reconsider they'll end up with a new graphics card and well a not-so-new cpu speaking of which let's jump into the parts I used first up is the Foxconn a 78 ax Series am 2 plus motherboard yes Foxconn not a brand you generally think of when you think of a new PC but that's probably because they only offer a single motherboard currently this supports the LGA 1151 chipset nei their skill set rests with older equipment when the OEM was thriving on the demand for motherboards in the mid 2000s this thing's a perfect blend of old and modern I guess you could say offering plenty of SATA ports PCI expansion slots and IDE interface for old-school hard disk drives and optical drives and even a floppy drive port if you really want to get kinky with it the a 78 ax also offers plenty of rear i/o support including 5.1 channel audio something I was honestly surprised Foxconn threw into this board the heart of this build is the athlon x4 635 a quad-core CPU made in 2010 and based on 45 nanometer architecture it was originally designed for the am-3 socket but is backwards compatible with a m2 plus motherboards as long as the BIOS is up-to-date and ours is with our Foxconn Board the chip itself looks identical to the FX series lineup with the pins on the processor rather than the motherboard this is a trend AMD has been following for quite some time to cool the CPU will be using one that looks very similar to Andy's new wraith cooler actually although this one's much much louder it kept a little Athlon below 50 C for pretty much of the duration of my test to my surprise though the clock speed on the chip admittedly wasn't high i over clocked this chip to 3.2 gigahertz from its 2.9 stock frequency out of the box for some reason the multiplier was locked in this particular BIOS but I was able to overclock using the base clock method which was just fine for RAM I've got two sticks of low profile ddr2 clock to 800 megahertz for a total of 4 gigabytes running a dual channel these DIMMs are also known as VOP modules VLP standing for very low profile under most circumstances I would elect for at least 8 gigabytes of RAM in a gaming PC but being that this is an old computer and that I got this thing on the cheap 4 gigabytes should be just fine we'll be cutting it close but for spine all three of these components by the way the motherboard the CPU and RAM cost me $60 in total thanks to a gentleman I found on Craigslist here locally in Florida so if you're watching this video I appreciate your business these processors alone sell for upwards of 40 to 50 bucks on eBay a bit overpriced if I do say so myself so he definitely hooked us up the graphics card I used is of course the 8 gigabyte AMD R X 480 however thanks to some recent power issues with this card and this card only the 92 TI work just fine with the Foxconn motherboard I've decided to undervolt the card to reduce the amount of stress exerted on the PCIe slot but don't worry I cover this issue in much more detail right here the graphics card requires a single 6 pin power connector and that's exactly what this 400 watt power supply is equipped with while AMD does technically recommend a 500 watt power supply be paired with this card we're going to be just fine using a 400 watt these are just suggestions made by the company to make sure that there's not a shadow of a doubt that your power supply is not working properly or you know causing your computer to be unstable so they say 500 odds because well there's definitely no chance of 504 our case there's no chance at 400 either trust me the math works out just fine for storage I threw in a 320 gigabyte 7200 rpm hard disk drive from Seagate which I obtained for free actually although for the sake of this video we will regard it as a $20.00 unit this system doesn't have any fans mounted to the case I reused from an old build the Thermaltake vs. v3 AMD black edition but our temperature under loads stayed within their limits so I didn't bother adding anything else to the budget the CPU fan is also blowing towards the motherboard which should provide adequate cooling for the V RMS and large capacitors if you do plan on building a computer similar to this one however I recommend that you try your best to incorporate at least one fan subtle airflow is better than no airflow oh and one more thing I kind of misplaced the power button on the tower itself which means that powering the sucker on at least for the time being requires a jump of to physical pins on the board itself how are a spring-loaded switch with something like aluminum should be enough where fix in the near future but I'm not worried about that at this point because I'm not worried about selling it at this point I installed Windows 10 64 bit without any issues as well as the most recent Crimson drivers for the RX 480 oh and I forgot to mention my WD black one terabyte hard drive was thrown in temporarily so that I could run all the required gaming benchmarks I was not about to redownload all of those games speaking of which let's find out how well this thing stacks up for $350 first up instead of bench we get a feel for just how powerful this quad-core CPU is both of these are overclocked by the way this one 23.2 gigahertz and this one two four point six and a 250 7cb it's okay keep in mind that this 635 is six years old as of 2016 and with respect to the 6700 K it's not all that bad a performer Geekbench tells us much of the same while it's single core score is lagging behind 1570 the multi-core score is actually decent thanks to the four cores on board let's see how this translate to frame rates in games how much of a bottleneck with this athlon x4 635 B let's start things off with Grand Theft Auto 5 which introduces a blend of both CPU and GPU intensive scenes frankly to my surprise the Athlon how to better than I thought it would check this out while running everything at either Ultra or very high the maximum presets for all the settings in the regular settings tab the exceptions being anti-aliasing and ambient occlusion the PC managed a hefty 47 frames per second on the average with minimums dipping just slightly below what I would call the bare minimum 30 frames per second for gaming but no grade we want to see 60 frames per second not 30 where PC gamers not console gamers whoops did I offend anybody Perry there are plenty of ps4 Xbox one games the run of 60fps true there are but I guarantee you they aren't running at the most optimal settings compromises had to be made and the case is no different here turning everything down to normal in the Settings tab resulted in a huge framerate gain across the board I mean if you don't look anywhere else in this graph check out the minimum frame rates what 51 that's better than my $1200 gaming and editing rig and max settings very impressive this Athlon 635 and rx 40 combo is but is this the case across all titles in short No let's check out City skylines a very CPU intensive game by all means running everything at max settings yields undeniably pitiful frame rates this is what we call in the PC gaming sphere unplayable I actually recorded a bit of this with my camera as well since using an onboard screen recorder dropped these frame rates to near zero it was that bad the stuttering intensified the closer I zoomed in emphasizing the lack of CPU horsepower we had that was required to run this game at any desirable framerate reducing the in game settings brought the game to life again but only barely arm in máximos more bad but the average frame rate still hovered much closer to the minimum meaning that this game was still relatively unstable another cpu-intensive title is total war Warhammer things get especially taxing on the CPU when the battles get especially intense and much like city skylines zooming and makes everything much worse our average frame rate and maximum settings - anti-aliasing was a whopping 36.6 which isn't all that far off from our i7 6700 k's average although the minimums and maximums were both much lower I mean come on 11 frames per second and this wasn't the only time that the frame rate to dip this low it was a frequent occurrence actually almost similar to stuttering as a result of a bad internet connection I'm sure most of us know what that feels like I imagine our 4 gigabytes of RAM was also slightly limiting to be fair in this regard but being as though most of this game relies on video memory the CPU is still likely the culprit I would like to point out however that lowering the settings bump these minimums quite a bit giving the game what I would call at least an enjoyable experience because in a game like this 40 frames per second is actually manageable I would say in a first-person shooter or something like a racing game you would want more than 40 something like 60 70 something around there hitman was a title I expected much more fun with this rig however I experienced much of the same about half the framerate I received with the rx 480 in my i7 rig I honestly expected the RX 40 to exceed my expectations in this game being that it was kind of designed around this platform but across the board the minimums were just disappointing I should also note that DirectX 12 was a no-go with this machine for reasons unknown the DirectX 12 preset and supporting titles always resulted in a crash about halfway through each benchmark disappointing to say the least and I think we have the Athlon to blame rise of the Tomb Raider also running in dx11 was a mixed bag while the averages stayed well above 30 I experienced infrequent dips - I'm talking about three fps the game would run smoothly pause for a split second and then continue running smoothly a bit strange and a bit annoying but overall still playable I suppose dropping the Settings reduced the framerate dips but not to a substantial enough amount in my personal opinion to justify the compromising graphical clarity the last game I tested was ashes of the singularity now for a few initial start ups the game crashed if I liked the intro video play all the way through this never happened for some odd reason but if I skipped ahead to the menu screen the game would crash before the benchmark even started when the game did decide to not miss with the system basically the same story emerged about half the frame rates of the i7 obtained across the board and check this out 9.8 frames per second on the heavy section so with all that said I hope that if you take anything away from this video it's that the RX 480 while budget-minded in its own right is not meant to be paired with a mediocre platform from several years ago so many Triple A titles today rely on harmonious blends of CPU and GPU horsepower and if you have one but not the other it'll be hit or miss for the most part unless of course you plan on heavily compromising on those in-game graphics and in case you're wondering games like csgo and dota 2 achieve very playable frame rates with both averages topping out at around 100 not bad for a super cheap processor so while this computer might not be able to play every triple-a title in max settings it certainly held its own when settings were turned down at 1080p it's definitely a compromise eye-opening for a platform of this calibre but if you pair it with an RX 480 the card alone should be strong enough to pull your frame rates along maybe not to your desired amount but hey when you compromise on PC components you should also compromise on your expectations even when the computer itself is paired with a brand-new 8 gigabyte video card from AMD if you like what you saw in this video be sure to give this thing a thumbs up give it a thumbs down if you feel the complete opposite or if you hate everything about life be sure to click the subscribe but if you haven't already stay tuned for new content here on the channel this is science studio thanks for learning with you