- You've saved your box tops,
fished under the couch cushions
and pulled together all your leftover lunch money
and you are finally ready to build your first gaming rig.
But what do you choose?
AMD, Intel?
We couldn't decide either.
So today, we're going to be building not one,
but two budget friendly gaming PCs,
each coming in at around US$1000,
and we're gonna put them head to head,
to see just how they perform.
That is, after we perform, this message, for our sponsor.
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(electric music)
The build starts with one of the best budget CPU's
on the market right now, the AMD Ryzen 3 3100.
What's so great about this
is it uses the same Zen 2 architecture
as their higher price products
but in a more bite sized package.
So instead of having six or eight or 12 or 16 cores,
it's got just four cores, but they're fast ones
and like the rest of AMD's rise and lineup,
there's full support for overclocking.
Compared to our CPU, our motherboard
is an area where we actually went beyond
the bare minimum though.
To be clear, the B550 Phantom Gaming 4 ASROCK
isn't a high end board, but what it does have
is an upgrade path.
So in addition to having a couple of M.2 slots
for SSDs, it's got support for PCIe express Gen 4
in both the top 16 X slot and top SSD slot
If we ever wanted to upgrade the graphics card.
And it's got out of the box compatibility
with Zen 3 Ryzen 5000 Series Processors,
which up until this point
have such high core counts and high prices
that they don't necessarily make sense for a budget bill.
But that doesn't mean it's not worth spending the extra
you know, 20 bucks or 30 bucks
to have the ability to go that route in the future.
Representing Intel, we've got the Core i3-10100.
Just like our AMD competitor,
it's got four cores and eight threads,
but unlike our AMD competitor,
it is not capable of overclocking at all,
which did inform some of our other parts choices.
For example, our motherboard.
We could have gone with the H470 Phantom Gaming 4
which does have another M.2 slot,
a couple more power phases
as well as slightly better USB connectivity.
But because that didn't give us any overclocking potential
and stepping all the way up to a Z series chipset
just wasn't in the cards at this price point,
we decided to save the, what is it like 20 bucks, 30 bucks?
Something like that, yeah.
The last key difference between our two systems
is our memory.
For the AMD system, we're using G Skill Ripjaws V
and for the Intel, we're using G Skill Ripjaws V.
But at a slightly slower speed.
G Skill rightly pointed out,
when we requested memory for this project
that the Intel System wouldn't be able to take advantage
of anything higher than 2933 megahertz.
Now, because 3200 megahertz
was exactly the same price at current promo pricing,
we opted to go for that anyway.
With that out of the way,
to save you guys some time and boredom,
we're going to talk about the rest of the parts
with just one of the systems, the AMD one
while Colin assembles the other one
on the counter over there.
Let's start then with the cooler.
We've gone with a classic here, ladies and gentlemen.
This is the Hyper 212 EVO V2.
It's got a 120 millimeter fan.
It's a tower design with four heat pipes
and they make direct contact with the IHS of the CPU.
Basically, this has been the go to
for like 10 years for cheap and cheerful CPU cooling,
if you don't have an included cooler.
Of course one common drawback with budget oriented coolers
is that the installation is,
well let's just say it's some assembly required.
It's not difficult by any stretch of the imagination,
but it does take a little bit more time than something
like a knock to a cooler.
Once it's on there though.
Hey, that looks pretty freaking great,
and the cherry on top is to tie our fan cable
and a nice little bow and plug it into the CPU fan header.
In line with our theme of building up
pretty nice gaming machine without wasting any money,
we've gone with the EVGA 550 B5 supply.
It's a decent quality unit with 80 plus bronze efficiency.
It's got a nice quiet fan that can even be turned off.
That's right my friends,
it's got a silent fan mode
and it's one of the most inexpensive units
on the market with a fully modular interface.
While there are a ton of other cases on the market,
we really liked the 275R Airflow
for it's good mix of price, features and performance.
It's got a tempered glass side panel,
filtered air intake on the bottom, excellent,
oh, there you go, airflow through the front,
three included 120 millimeter fans
and really nice looking cable management
that's gonna give our build a really clean look
when we're done.
This isn't by any means a step by step build guide,
but I also don't wanna gloss over important stuff like this.
With budget boards,
you do still have to install your own IO shield
which a lot of the time means bending these things
and making sure that they're not in the way,
once the motherboard actually goes in.
Try not to cut yourself,
this is like the highest probability
of cutting yourself part of...
Dang it.
- [David] Is it just cheaper to produce external ones
than to build them into the motherboard.
- 'cause it's not just the cost of the actual units.
It's like the tooling cost of creating the shroud and stuff,
'cause the IO is so different on every motherboard.
Like we blew so much of this thousand dollar budget
on the graphics card.
And the only way we can do that
is by saving three bucks here and two bucks there, okay?
(laughing)
For storage, we normally steer clear
as the roundless SSDs for your operating system.
But in this case,
because we're looking for a reasonable amount of capacity,
faster than a hard drive,
and we don't wanna spend any more than we have to,
the Patriot Burst 960 gig takes a lot of boxes.
One thing we might recommend in the future as an upgrade
when you've got a bit of extra budget,
is switch over to using your SATA SSD
just for your game drive and run your ROS
off of an NBME drive that you put in later.
At around US$500,
our MSI MECH Radeon 5700 XT represents about half
of our total budget.
But given that this is a gaming machine,
not a video editing PC or 3D modeling PC,
I think that is more than justified
and there's a lot of bang for the buck to be heard here.
It's got a fast GPU, it's got eight gigs of GDDR6 memory
and it doesn't have fancies like HTMI 2.1
or PCIe express Gen 4.
But if you want to play triple a games at anywhere from,
I'd say up to 1440p, this is your ticket.
Unfortunately, attempting to enable XMP
and get it running at DDR4 3600
was a no go, even though it's like supported.
But I still think we can do better than 2933,
which is what Colin is gonna be stuck with,
with the Intel System there.
So we're just gonna go to,
oh yes, do you run frequency?
Let's try 3200.
Oop, I could have saved our $3 here though.
(laughing)
Now that the machines are built,
it's time for the head to head showdown,
which of course means one V1,
but also with bots on our side,
so whatever, don't worry about it.
See us go-- - Yeah.
- With my Ryzen 3.
I had a hard time running it.
Anything higher than stock RAM settings.
And I couldn't tell you whether that's down
to my particular chips integrated memory controller
or my motherboard,
but that could be a significant disadvantage
for my system right now,
in spite of the fact that I have fast RAM installed in it.
As for whether that's actually a competitive advantage,
I guess we'll find out soon enough.
(laughing)
Argh, no.
We aren't playing.
Yes, headshot.
You know what the bottom line is though,
regardless of who wins.
So that's what a nice winner I am.
- Yeah, of course.
- Is like, these are both great experiences.
I'm having a great time.
- Yeah, I'm sure you're having a great head shooting me
every time you come around the corner
(laughing)
- Something to note though
is I'm actually hosting our server.
But CSGO servers is not like a super intensive workload
by any stretch.
Okay, we're going duel berettas, duel berettas boys.
Wait, what?
My, my boss dead already, what the...
- [Collin] I didn't do it.
- No, you really didn't.
Your bot killed both of us.
I kinda fear Colin's bot more than him.
(laughing)
- Oh no.
- It is games that Colins good at--
- Listen. - This just doesn't happen
to be one of them.
That's why I picked it.
So this is cool.
We're recording gameplay on our graphics card,
I'm running a server,
and we're both running it like 200, 250 FPS.
Not too freaking shabby, hey.
- I've only got extra 20 FPS on you.
- [David] Is it worth having the other person on the server
to see if it's comparable?
- I see what you're saying,
like to make sure that's not a huge performance difference.
Honestly, to me it doesn't really affect
the conclusion much here though,
because I'm looking at this going,
then for a thousand dollars,
boy can you ever get a whole hell of a lot of gaming?
Like this 1440p absolutely maxed out,
yeah, it's an esports title,
but you are getting an extremely
competitive experience here.
- [Colin] Oh, there's nothing wrong
with this gaming experience.
- On either side and we can run some more benchmarks
if you really wanna know which one edges out the other.
So why don't we do that? - Yeah.
- Which brings us perfectly to our next game
where you might notice I've chosen a canned benchmark
rather than a head to head battle.
(laughing) Got them.
And, three, two, one, here we go.
Oh wow.
You might've looked good and see us go,
but we're running at the same settings
1440p absolutely cranked.
And that Intel CPU is holding back
the GPU a little, little bit here.
Remember, these systems are identical other than the CPU.
And then the motherboard, obviously to go with it.
- [Colin] Man, I guess
that's what an extra a hundred bucks got you.
- Yes I know, because if it wasn't
for prices being driven up by the holiday madness
and shortages on AMD CPU's,
these would be basically the same darn price.
- [Colin] Yeah.
- And we didn't have to go we could have to go B 550.
We could have saved a buck
and gone with a lower end chipset,
knowing that we would have to update the bios
in order to get our third Gen Ryzen Processor
to work on it out of the box.
So we could've gone B 450
and been right around the same price.
Okay.
Now, we have--
- [Colin] My minimums crushed you.
- My low 1% FPS are way above.
This must have just been one frame.
This is clearly a better result, low 0.1% even.
Way better.
- Well, with that crushing defeat, let's open up 3Mark.
- You already ran that, right?
- I did already run it.
So we can just load up the results.
- Perfect.
And you've come out ahead.
- [Colin] Yes.
- [Linus] In every possible way.
I'm glad you asked why that happened.
- [Colin] Yes. - He didn't yet.
But he was going to. - I was going.
- The reason is that synthetic benchmarks
just cannot simulate every possible gaming scenario.
Every game engine and every individual game
using that engine can have different idiosyncrasies
that run better or worse on different hardware.
And that's why we don't even talk about 3DMark
in our graphics card and CPU reviews.
Now, if you're doing something like overclocking
it's a valuable tool,
because it tells you on identical hardware
and am I my faster than I was before
or slower than I was before.
But it's not great for comparing non-identical hardware.
Now, let's actually carry on that theme and fire up
Cyberpunk 2077. - (indistinct)
- To illustrate that point,
AMD is actually coming slightly behind our Intel System
in this particular game.
Cyberpunk 2077 is about eight to 10% slower
on our AMD versus Intel System.
Remember again, using exactly the same graphics card
and exactly the same settings.
We're running on the medium preset at 1440p.
- [Colin] I mean, this is pretty indicative.
And I mean, as we're sitting here
like I'm cooler and also faster.
- I didn't even notice
that you were running cooler right now.
How's our 99th percentile.
Oh wow, you're way ahead in that.
Okay, well that's pretty much it.
That's the conclusion.
For a thousand bucks,
you can get a fantastic gaming experience
whether you decide to go AMD or Intel.
As for which one is slightly ahead of the other,
it's gonna come down to which games you wanna play.
For my money, I prefer the white box here.
And the reason is that, it's got a more clear upgrade path
but, we also don't know for sure how Rocket Lake from Intel,
which is also gonna be on that same LGA 1200 socket
is going to stack up.
Which means no matter who comes out ahead, AMD or Intel
the big win is for you, the consumer.
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If you guys enjoyed this video,
maybe check out the one where I took an old Dell,
like Frankenstein office PC and turned it into a gaming rig.
It's pretty freaking sick.
And one thing we forgot to mention
when we were talking about the value prop between them
is like considering PlayStation 5 scalper prices.
(electric music)
This is looking pretty compelling, just saying.
I'm not going all PCMR on it.
I'm just saying, to say...
No, okay.