Who says you have to spend a ton of money on a gaming PC? Meet the Boson and see what
you can do for just $300.
I’ve done a lot of gaming PC builds and people are always asking for cheaper and cheaper
options. Now while it's totally possible to build yourself a computer for very cheap however
the gaming part of gaming PC is kind of important. With the Boson you’re looking at a $300
PC that’s not only very easy to build but it can also handle nearly any game you throw
at it. Jump into Bioshock Infinite and we’re looking at a totally playable 41 frames per
second on medium at 720p. Move over to Grid 2 and you can notch the settings up to medium
at 1080p and still get just over 36 FPS. With League of Legends you can keep the graphics
maxed at 1080p and still see frame rates in the 40s with occasional dips into the 30s.
Minecraft also works fine as long as you turn the render distance down a bit, popping Vsync
on can help smooth things out as well. Finally run the Boson through the 3DMark Fire Strike
benchmark and you’ll see it stacks up fairly well against many of my much more expensive
builds. Now don’t expect to crush games at 4K with the Boson however most games are
perfectly playable at 720p or even 1080p in some cases. Powering the build is AMD’s
new Athlon 5350 APU. This features a quad core CPU clocked at just over two gigahertz,
hardly something to blow you away but it’s enough for most games. It also contains decent
onboard graphics which while we aren’t using them for this build if gaming really isn’t
your priority you could actually skip the dedicated graphics card and bring the entire
price of the Boson down to less than $250. Speaking of the graphics card, the Asus Radeon
R7 240 is what turns the Boson into an actual gaming PC. With two gigabytes of DDR3 memory
in a single slot, low powered package the 240 gives quite a bit more gaming performance
to the build. Paired with our APU the R7 240 strikes a nice balance between performance
and price. Putting it all together we have a Gigabyte AM1M-S2H motherboard. Like most
AM1 boards you won’t find a lot of extra features although you do have a pair of SATA
3 ports along with two USB 3.0 ports built-in. One nice thing about this build is that while
the Athlon 5350 is the highest end APU for this platform at the moment it should support
future upgrades of even faster APUs a little later on. For memory we’re using four gigabytes
of Crucial Ballistix Sport memory. Clocked at 1600 megahertz this is the fastest stuff
our build supports out of the box and should be enough for most any game the Boson can
handle. Like the APU though you can feel free to upgrade this to eight or even sixteen gigabytes
of RAM later on. With 1 terabyte of capacity the Seagate Barracuda hard drive gives you
plenty of storage for games, pictures, video and whatever else you want to keep on your
PC. One of my favorite parts of building your own computer is that you can customize basically
everything and the hard drive is no exception. So if you like you can always add a second
hard drive to the build or even an SSD if you like. For the case we’re using a Rosewill
FBM-01. This is a MicroATX chassis with a front 120mm fan and an 80mm exhaust fan around
back. You’ve also got the usual things like USB and audio jacks up front along with a
built-in 450 watt power supply. I usually don’t like to use power supplies built into
cases however since the entire Boson only requires just over 60 watts at load it should
be just fine. All together for $300 you’re getting a killer little gaming build. Of course
prices change all the time so I will have a link in the description which goes over
all the different parts of the build. Also I did a full tutorial showing you step by
step how to put the entire Boson together from scratch so if you guys want to see that
that link will also be in the description of this video. Anyway guys I’ve got to give
a huge shoutout to Audible for making this video possible! Audible.com is a leading provider
of audiobooks with more than 150,000 downloadable titles across all types of literature, including
fiction, non-fiction and periodicals. Right now Audible is offering a free audiobook if
you try them out and that includes the excellent A Feast for Crows by George R.R. Martin. I’m
a huge fan of the Game of Thrones books and TV show and A Feast for Crows is easily one
of my favorite books in the series. To download A Feast for Crows or another audiobook for
free just head over to audible.com/austin! Audible has always been a huge supporter of
the channel so if you want to keep seeing gaming PC videos like this definitely be sure
to go to audible.com/austin and give them a shot! Anyway guys thank you so much watching
and I will catch you in the next one!