Gadgetory

so this is a PC that I bought on Newegg as certified refurbished I believe it's a dell optiplex PC but it was about a hundred and ninety eight bucks on new egg used to refurbish however you wanna look at that I thought it was a pretty decent deal and I wondered could we turn this into an awesome gaming PC for just an extra couple hundred bucks and my thinking is if we fairly used gtx 1070 in here for $200 which is in my opinion the best money spent on a graphics card at this point if you're willing to consider both the new and used markets I think this could turn into a very viable gaming PC so we're gonna find that out in this video all right well it's packaged very nicely and this here is the system and you can see it is all wrapped up how good does it look on the inside all right here we go and yes kind of what I expected I'll walk you through each component in here and we'll talk about what we're gonna do to make this system viable at least somewhat for gaming so this ladies and gentlemen is a beautiful if I do say so myself old school I 5 PC actually not that old school technically speaking I've got a core i5 3470 in there 8 gigs of ddr3 looks like an M ATX motherboard we do have four PCI slots oh that's nice we can put a graphics card up here at the top 16 lanes slot and then we have a 128 gig SSD with Windows 10 loaded on it and it's activated we get this case here which I mean to be honest if you didn't like it you could just pull all this stuff out and put it in a new case it doesn't look super pretty I want to see though I'm not sure if they have dedicated PCIe cables with this power supply the power supply is Wow looks like max outputs 275 watts that's gonna be cutting it awfully close so I think we're gonna need to have a power supply upgrade with this system if we want to run a dead discrete graphics card but yeah as is when we have integrated integrated graphics here so if we just wanted to run a system to like you know use for Microsoft Word or Excel or just browse the web this could certainly handle that we want the discrete graphics if we're gonna play some games so we're gonna need to upgrade the power supply and then throw in that graphics card maybe even upgrade storage 128 gigs is it's great as an SSD but it's not a lot of storage so we might need to boost that up as well all I don't expect us to go much over $400 there total but total budget here maybe 40 bucks for a power supply and then another 40 for a hard drive so between four and $500 I'll tally it all up at the end of the video and tell you how much we spent with that let's go ahead and start upgrading all right and this is the new and improved system I'm gonna run through the upgrades and I'll have to tell you how I'm gonna run the test because I'm not sure if I'm going to test in 1080p or 1440p just to prove a point because I think this could handle 1440p but I might just do 1080p just to show you the higher frame rates we drop the resolution so the upgrades obviously the graphics card first we have an Rx 484 gig here which you can pick up for around a hundred bucks on eBay so really cheap staying in the tight budget space I also threw in a one terabyte WD blue hard driving at least for 30 40 bucks on Amazon also a 600 watt power supply you can get by with maybe a 500 watt here but 600 walk if it's a bit more lead way nothing fancy by any means sorry about that background noise Pepsi's Pepsi's playing with something what are you doing but anyway this is still cheap enough and safe enough I've used plenty of these in the past that I don't think you'll have anything to worry about and it's significantly better than that stock 275 watt PSV that was originally in here also I didn't mention this earlier but you get a five and a quarter inch little disk drive which is nice so if you want to run your DVD CDs in here it does come with that now many cases today do include that support so that's nice and yeah everything's powered up just for pin stuff I'm gonna EPS up top I just sets for your dedicated CPU power I think I'm just gonna stick with a stock CPU cooler I think I think something slightly better would do this build a lot of service but and just to keep things in check budget wise I don't think I'm gonna touch that this keeps us still I believe under 400 bucks in total for this so the whole system brand new we're not brand new but refurbished was 200 bucks or so and then we have a hundred all the graphics card that's 300 bucks 340 380 390 let's just call it an even 400 and yeah so here's your $400 build and right now we're gonna throw it through the wringer and see how well it performs in some of today's modern games now while we're setting this up I figured I should also mention the fact that you get a mouse included with the purchase this is not gonna be anything special by any means but I mean hey it's a mouse it literally weighs like 10 grams I'm not even joking it probably weighs yeah I'm pretty sure this box weighs more than this Mouse does still you get one you also get this beautiful membrane key bored you know real quick though one thing I did notice when I was installing the hard drive I just kind of let this hang here it's a SSD doesn't really matter is that this SSD is unbranded not that it really matters I mean it's going to be use a SATA 3 interface so I expect speeds between 250 and 500 megabytes per second this one really isn't I mean is that like a brand I've never heard of it's kind of unbranded but we'll be sure to test the speed of this as well because this isn't something that the listing was specific about another thing that I seemingly overlooked is the fact that this case really has no air flow so I mean there's one exhaust fan I'll pivot the camera here in a sec so there's one exhaust fan and it's right there and that's it like there's there's nothing else really to this build except for the CPU fan and of course the graphics card shroud so I'm hoping that the graphics code has enough air of being pulled into these bottom PCIe slots that it won't absolutely choke itself and then I think I mean despite not having fans up front for intake I still think that the CPU is gonna be able to get by on the little amount of air it's gonna need to cool the CPU just by having a small CPU cooler I mean it's a 35 70 right so it's not gonna it's not gonna really demand high amounts of power TDP s-- pretty low especially for this generation so I'm expecting like mid 70s or 80s which isn't too bad for the CPU and then the graphics card should stay kind of around the same temperature range I'd say in the 70s I'd be surprised if this was any hotter under load again we'll test all of that so let's get to the games first and then we'll check system stability alright that's powered on see how this goes okay actually at idle it's not it's not bad put the left side panel I think it'd actually be pretty quiet is the monitor oh that's lower this down a bit okay hard drive not found you know what I am an idiot I did not reconnect the SSD SATA cable now this should you know just realizes keyboards like smashed over here that's a shame well good thing is rebooting in Windows 10 and as far as I know this act this is activated already so we don't need to pay for a Windows 10 key which keeps the price of the total system down honestly this is a pretty sweet option like you're not gonna have the most up-to-date computer obviously the platform is kind of a dead end at this point I don't even know what motherboard that is I'm not even sure what chip said this is although I'm sure it's nothing fancy but if you just want something to game on and you have like no serious budget you have to make some compromises when you try to stick to this price range in the new market so the use market just gives you so so much more especially under 500 bucks so that's why I wanted to try this I really had no idea how this was gonna like perform I really I still don't I haven't tested it yet but I do think it's worth considering I mean a Core i5 4 cores for 200 bucks you know a whole system basically I think that's a great deal so the first test Iran was Cinebench are 20 member the scores gonna be a lot different than its DaVinci r15 so don't try to compare these with the older version but this score was subpar to say the least I think we scored just over 850 I believe it was 867 somewhere in that range and you're seeing it right now at times 10 speeds this is definitely a lot faster than it was in real life and just have four threads here four cores four threads it's definitely dated in 2019 and showing its age I wouldn't recommend this for productivity I would recommend this platform purely for gaming if you are on a tight budget next thing I wanted to do was test the speed of the SSD now look when a company is not willing to put their name their brand on a drive it's probably not gonna be that great I had my sneaking suspicions and sure enough this is a pretty terrible SSD like 240 or so megabytes per second for reads 232 for writes and things get a lot worse further down yeah this drive is dying for an upgrade although on this tight budget I would say this is still worth keeping it's much better still than a hard drive which would probably be around a hundred megabytes per second reads and writes so yeah we're just kind of stuck with us for now it could be a lot better but it's certainly better than an entire ISO I'm not gonna hate on it too much next up would have to test grandtheft out of five this is a game that usually bodes pretty well for Intel platforms and you can see here we're getting 60 or so FPS a high preset 1080p and if you if you notice CP utilization is pretty much maxed out so we're definitely CPU bound here you can see every thread for the most parts at 100% and our GPU up there top is around every now and then it's pecking a hundred percent but it's usually somewhere around 70 or 80 percent and sometimes it drops down to like zero and that to me just says that the CPU is definitely slowing things up the graphics card can't work as hard so I actually decided to frame scale and that's an option the Advanced tab when you go into the graphics settings for this game and it actually didn't trash the the framerate much at all in fact if anything it offset the load more to the graphics card reduced load on the CPU because the graphics card is now having to work harder and we just had a more balanced system overall you can see quite a number of places here the CP utilization across all four threads drops to under 80 percent that's good I'd say the sweet spots between sixty and ninety percent you don't want to go much above that because that's when you're really gonna see the limitations of the CPU unfold and affect your framerate so this is a lot better I'd much rather see a GPU bound scenario personally because it's easier to mitigate those in my opinion when you you know drop anti-aliasing other things that are graphically intensive maybe like grass foliage all of that can affect your framerate and and it's mostly limited by a graphics card so in this case I'd say G and GTA 5 is not bad considering reusing a CPU that is several years old and around 50 60 fps and 1080p for the high preset mind you it's pretty good next up was doom and look the Vulkan API is beautiful I say that pretty much every time benchmark this game I always try to benchmark with Vulcan because I just say I feel like the the the API utilizes resources much more efficiently than your standard DX 11 or 12 or even OpenGL so in this case we don't have the MSI Afterburner stuff on the left for some reason it wasn't opening for this game but we do have some info on the right to look at a framerate for the most part is into the 140 s 150 s which is really nice this is the high preset in 1080p so very pleasant you can see our frame times there are averaging under 10 milliseconds which again if you just do one over the millisecond that's your frame rate so really good and yeah not much more to say about this game this game always impresses me just how smooth it runs even on older hardware next up was pub G and because this game is not very well optimised I figured this is where the system would show its faults it stayed actually about 100 FPS most of the time when we start getting into the foliage the grass the shrubs of trees that's my frame rate typically drops below 100 FPS but this is the medium preset here and that's still pretty intense you know pub G's again not very well optimised I try to say that every time at benchmark at this game and yeah so you're seeing utilization there on the Left CPUs between 80 90 % that's pretty good although most of the time we are GPU bound so that is something to note what we could do is just turn off anti-aliasing a few other things to compensate I usually drop foliage to very low because that tends to help the framerate as well but with everything set to medium 100 FPS or so is pretty good and surprisingly our CPU is not the bottleneck last step I wanted to test which are three as usual GP bound here you can see GPU such up top is 100% I do want to point out the temperatures though for the GPU and CPU mid to low seventies it's better than I thought it would be especially for the CPU with that cheap Dell cooler that slanted 15 degrees typical Dell fashion there but I expected temps to be a lot higher than they were despite you know not overclocking I thought that just that cooler wouldn't be enough with the Left panel on but the temps are better than I thought they would be another thing to note CPU utilization for all four threads in the mid-70s I'd say this is very balanced from the CPU side of course our graphics card is really going to have to flex here to keep that frame rate up and surprisingly we're in the 80s at this point right 80 FPS for witcher 3 and the high preset 1080p for a $400 system pretty dang good and that's that's what you get when you know you have a GPU on scenario like this that's the really the graphics card is the only thing that is going to determine your frame rate unless you just have an absolutely terrible you know single core or dual core CPU in your system so yeah this is a very pleasant experience very good for a game like witcher 3 so i'm evident you were a little disappointed with at least one aspect of this system and that's okay it's okay to compromise especially when we're talking about a budget under five hundred bucks for a perfectly viable gaming PC I would say now for talking reliability the one thing I would definitely upgrade is the power supply the ones in here are just gonna be good enough for integrated graphics notice great card I mentioned that earlier so we threw that 600 watt power supply in here you get probably get by with 500 watts we're talking about an Rx 480 that's not even overclocked and a non k i5 skew from a few generations back the 30 470 is a capable CPU again bottlenecks quite a bit but it's not going to choke the system out right like yeah you might be CPU bound but your frame rate is not going to be absolutely terrible I mean Intel CPUs in general tend to give very smooth experiences unless we're talking about you know super old Celeron czar like Atom CPU who's you know like those generations obviously are not the best for gaming but Core i5 even five six years ago are still fine I know plenty of people gaming on like Core i5 2400 they're fine so the power splay upgrade for sure first thing I would do hard drive throw that in there takes 10 seconds very easy upgrade the other thing that I tried to do that you might have noticed in the time lapse was included gtx 1070 that would have bumped this entire cost to around 500 bucks I think the jump from a 580 to a 1070 for a hundred bucks is worth it though if you can squeeze that out I think a $500 build being able to get over 100 fps and 1080p and even sometimes 1440p if you want to drop in game settings just a bit more is a great great solution for ballers on budgets and look we've all been on budgets at one point or another I totally respect those who are willing to extract the most value out of their dollar so that's it this is our Dell Optiplex build and I really want to know what you guys think in the comments about this what you would do differently if you had four or five hundred bucks to spend on the best system possible and many ways to spend this money I've probably done budget builds like really tight budget bills like this one close to a dozen times I've made videos on at least half of those occasions and so you kind of know what's out there and again use markets always changing you got to be flexible you got to find stuff that is within your budget that you're willing to allocate some money to without compromising on other aspects of the bill you know you put so much money in your CPU and money left over for your graphics card so there's a fine balance there and I figured I would try out new egg with one of these old out optiplex systems because first off I'd never done it before and second off I wanted to see if this thing was actually in decent shape when it arrived now apart from the keyboard had a big ship out of it I'm not too concerned even though keyboard was included I'd say this system here overall being that it's refurbished is in great shape and you get Windows 10 Pro loaded on it free already activated well free but you know it's included in the price which is nice because a lot of these builds won't won't have that so I would look for that for sure also if you're gonna buy one of these systems don't buy the narrow m ATX versions because that's gonna mean that you can't fit a discrete card in their traditional 1070 or X 584 he's not gonna fit because it's not wide enough so I recommend getting a full size M ATX or ATX case ATX build like this one right here I've linked a few options down below in the video description most of them are from Newegg and they are certified refurbished I recommend getting all the nests as a deed because that means the operating system will be on the SSD sort of be very fast versus having to transfer everything from a hard drive to a new SSD gonna be a big pain look if there's nothing else that attracts you to this bill let it be this alright look in all seriousness I do really want to know what you think about this solution I know plenty of people actually on Twitter who saw the original picture of this build and were like hey I flipped these like this is what I do it's just a hobby I flip them on the side and make some B's in cash I'm actually going to try to flip this just to see how saturated the market is here in Florida at least my part of Florida and I'll let you guys know how it goes I think what I'm gonna do all-in I'm about four hundred and eighty bucks so I mean literally every part in here I paid for out of pocket like there's not a single part in here that was sent by a company for free or for a review whatever so I'm pretty much all in I'm on my own so anything I make on top of that just be gravy just be profit so it feels weird asking more than 500 bucks for the system because first off it doesn't look that pretty but I I still want to try I don't want to try to make maybe 50 bucks or even a hundred bucks I might throw it up there for 600 bucks and take like 5 20 or 5 for you that would be a $60 profit or you know there abouts that's not bad right and I got to make a video and play with it in the mean time so I think it's a win-win in my case and arguably for the buyer I mean unless they want to do this themselves which could take some time to source the parts and put it all together install the operating system what-have-you I think they're kind of making out of thereunto so there's a little bit of wiggle room there for negotiation and I'll be sure to log that for you in a subsequent video thumbs up if you liked this one be sure to click that red subscribe button if you haven't already become a member if you're feeling especially fancy get a star next to your name who doesn't love stars next to their names and we'll catch you in the next one this is science studio thanks for watching and thanks for building