Gadgetory

we've built quite a number of expensive rigs in the channel recently so we'd prepared a budget PC build for you guys and pack this video with tips and tricks when it comes to building a solid 1080p gaming rig for under 500 USD in light of spending lightly this video is brought to you by arrow pools new a cylon mini clocking in at around 35 bucks it's the first area you can save money when building on a tight budget you'll get the addressable RGB integration which is pretty sweet for this price category and the micro ATX form factor pairs nicely with cheaper m ATX motherboards click the link below for more details so let's start things off with our own budget billet for late 2018 and we'll mix in some buying tips along the way there are certainly compromises involved every budget build will have at least one but I don't think you'll be too disappointed with this one for the price we spent about 450 bucks on it what you're looking at here is arisin 3 1300 X paired with the stock cooler and the cheapest a m4 motherboard we could find it was actually reviewed in this video right here rather extensively now I know what you're thinking a 1300 X come on Greg you'd be just fine with the 1200 this is wasted money and you're right in all honesty our 1200 sample was a bit preoccupied at time of filming but we're linking it down below in place to the 1300 X because the frequency disparity alone in our testing wall cut heavily into your frame rates that and a 1300 X is virtually out of stock everywhere thanks to Black Friday sales so at 77 bucks on Amazon I'd say the 1200 will do just fine it'll also run super cool and the stock cooler thanks to its ultra low TDP and the lack of overclocking support on our a320 chipset the RAM we're sporting is tuned specifically for rise in platforms meaning we had no problems at all reaching 3,000 megahertz even on this cheap am 4 board higher frequencies are important for aizen we've discussed this in previous videos Layton sees between CC X's are tied directly to the speed and the lower frequencies can negatively impact gaming performance as a result this particular kit consists of 2 8 gig modules for 16 in total which is becoming the recommended minimum for a lot of newer titles total costs it's about 130 bucks but you could find cheaper kits again I'm stressin the frequency in this case stuff isn't really optimized for the chipset won't likely run it rated frequencies out of the box on 1st gen Rison and of all of my rated rise in samples this many of them allowed me to run action p out of the box that's zero there are certainly trade-offs here and I just decided to approach it with the best Ram kit we could buy in around $120 price range the black also looks pretty sweet with our black cooler and board as well up next is our graphics card this is a GTX 970 from EVGA I covered it in this dedicated video or right here but I sincerely believe this to be one of the best bargain buys of 2018 even the 92 TI for some upper level gaming in 1440p but for 1080p a medium to high settings the GTX 970 just it takes the cake in my book it clocks in just below a typical 6 gig GTX 1060 which often costs two to three times more I mean sure comparing a used product to anyone it's a bit unfair and you'll certainly have less luck buying used versus new but I think you'll be alright in most cases people willing to lie and sell you stuff that doesn't work over a site like eBay have to deal with the buyer protection guarantee nine times out of ten I'll say you'll get your money back without a hitch at all if the product wasn't as advertised most people just aren't gonna waste your time you'll always hear the outlier louder than anyone else or didn't get my money back you pay rip me off but eBay is popular for a reason and if they had these reputation issues nobody would use them I think it's a great place to potentially save a lot of cash on especially a graphics card will show benchmarks by the way of the system a little later in the video don't worry next up we've got storage this is where things become very preferential I try to stay away from hard drives altogether even in budget builds when SSDs are cheap enough we picked up a couple of 500 gig Samsung 860 Evo's for 73 bucks apiece on Black Friday and that price is actually still holding true today you can find them linked below half a terabyte in my opinion is more than enough for several larger games on Steam and if you're anything like me you really only play about two or three games intently at a time so unless you plan on installing your entire Steam library onto a drive at one time one or two of these will do just fine they'll also load content significantly faster than their hard drive counterparts we installed one 500 gig drive into this system and if the user feels the need to say add additional storage in the future for games throwing one terabyte hard drive or two won't be an issue in a case like the cylon many we used here one of the last things we have to cover in this build is the power supply and some people will swear by only like 80 plus a golden higher rated units but in a budget bill that isn't likely to consume above say 300 plots and that's a liberal estimate a 500 watt unit with at least an 80 plus rating will do just fine a lot of my earlier builds in the channel that were under $1000 supported 500 watt EBG ApS use with a mere 80 plus bronze rating they were quiet and almost as power efficient by energy saved as their significantly higher rated units right so 80 plus sufficient at 500 Watts consumed results in the same power saved as a 90% efficient at a thousand watts consumed and that's exactly why higher wattage units typically have higher 80-plus efficiencies the unit we went with here is the corsair vs 551 it's a 550 watt 80 plus non modular power supply it stays actually pretty quiet under loads quiter and i thought it would be and yeah I mean that's something I didn't expect for a $40.00 unit sure cables are the ugly and ketchup and mustard kind but you can't expect too much had such an affordable component oh and also to touch on the used market for power supplies and storage drives just a bit I think those are the two things that I would try to avoid on the used market and I say that for a few reasons for one failure rates for older cheaper power supplies especially are typically a lot higher and these are the parts of your system that can potentially take other components with them including another big failure point motherboards and let me tell ya motherboards are a pain to troubleshoot they're the last thing you hope breaks in a system but it happens more often than you probably think storage drives are the same way I mean you really have no idea how many times did has been wiped from them and they have a certain you know rewrite rate a certain number of rewrite times that each drive will hold and until you do some digging and physically connect the drive you've got really no idea what data actually might still be on the try from the previous owner could have viruses could have something else a it's it's definitely like tinfoil hat time here with with these two but and just to play it safe my rule of thumb if you can afford the extra 10 or 20 bucks for each unit they're typically not too expensive to begin with it just makes more sense to buy something with a better warranty and that is new so you have more peace of mind if it doesn't work out of the just return it hassle-free and you'll get something new very soon now on to performance I'm always impressed with how great these rising CPUs are from a value perspective I mean sure for physical cores is kind of a kick in the teeth all around in 2018 but for well under a hundred bucks I mean it's difficult to complain right a CPU pushing out this kind of Cinebench score or two or three years ago would have cost around 200 bucks we're talking about core i5 7400 territory from Intel and we have the same core count here right four cores similar frequencies well at least two to virtually trade blows and nearly all synthetic tests and yeah I got 7400 at the time was actually a really great budget game a CPU so on two games Grand Theft Auto 5 was a promising 1080p title for this rate averaging nearly 100 FPS on high settings all around save anti-aliasing in advanced graphics all right say this is a win for a 450 or so US dollar computer and to top it off our 1% lowest frame rates still averaged above 60 meaning even infrequent dips and performance stay above an acceptable threshold up next is a shadow of the Tomb Raider and the high preset gave us pretty much what we expected in 1080p this is newer title it's pretty pretty graphically intensive especially in the DirectX 12 API overall our average FPS was 53 just shy of our 60fps target in this case a GPU was definitely our limiting factor keeping things behind approximately 94% of the time according to the in-game benchmark witcher 3 is another game we expect to perform slightly worse than the status-quo extremely GPU intensive our GTX 970 takes over a majority of the load here despite the game only running in the default high preset shelling out an average 53 FPS with our lowest 1% of frames rendered dropping to a mere 43 on average and like this isn't terrible by any means but this is still an exception to the 60 FPS floor we're trying to stay above else we're dropping settings to medium should pick up the slack though Oh an FYI which are three cripples even high-end systems but cheaper rigs will suffer greatly so playing around with individual settings is important in my opinion if you insist on keeping say anti-aliasing around which is pretty graphically intensive make sure it's used sparingly nothing more than say times 2 for any of these titles up next is pub G still not optimized for older platforms and still very choppy even in the high preset we did manage well above 60fps on average but the full story has revealed in our 1% lows a mere 45 isn't gonna cut it I mean that's nearly half of our average frame rate in this case it means that we're gonna have quite the chop when we're gaming that's a terrible experience all around for a game of this caliber pretty fast-paced and competitive fortnight yields a much more playable experience and almost always does with respect to its pub G counterpart F 1 2017 provided an excellent in-game experience in the high preset our budget rig pumped out 100 FPS get that on average and the high preset with the lowest 1% of frames dropping just to a mere 90 I mean that's no big deal right this is pretty sweet actually especially when seen in the context of a racing game right with questionable weather conditions and high speed turns though in general racing games do run smoother than their first-person-shooter counterparts and this maps are much smaller more consolidated and detail in this case is strictly emphasized on the road so our system doesn't really break a sweat here and all in all I think anyone on a tight budget would be very impressed with the performance this little machines packing we've got the SSD with ample storage for quick boot times and plenty of files and games a solid graphics card a proper quad-core CPU despite having stock cooler it's actually very quiet a quiet power supply as well and a case that gets the job done for cheap while looking good at the same time feel free to play around with a different parts link below and build something similar for yourself or a friend of saving money as a top priority look there's nothing wrong with saving money at all and I think most of us have been in a situation where we're pretty tight on cash and you want to squeeze that as much value as you can nothing wrong with that at all so that's a wrap folks I do hope you've enjoyed this one budget builds are always fun and I have plans to build more like this very soon so don't worry just stay tuned thanks again air-cool for 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