- Two years.
It was two years ago,
to the day.
The last time we built a $500 gaming PC
with an actual freaking GPU in it.
That is how long gamers have waited
for graphics card pricing to come back down to Earth,
but it has hasn't it. The crypto bros may be crying
but right now gamers are rejoicing at the tsunami
of cards hitting the used market.
RTX 3090's, a thousand dollars.
3070's, how about 500 bucks for a non LHR version?
But wait, hold on.
I hear you guys.
$500. That's still a freaking ton of money for just a GPU.
So today we're gonna build an entire budget gaming PC
that was inspired by an eBay listing
that I would've thought impossible
just a few short weeks ago. An RTX 2060
for just 200 bucks,
impossible.
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(techno music)
- I'm just in such a good mood today, guys
because the main premise of this channel
that anyone can build a computer
and that it doesn't have to be outlandishly expensive
is finally true again.
For our motherboard,
we've gone with the H610M E-D4.
Yeah, it doesn't have the greatest IO and
there's no cooling on the VRMs,
but this puppy can be had
for a hundred dollars brand new or for around $65 on eBay.
All with support for the latest 12th gen Intel processors.
It's got two M.2 slots for SSD storage
LP at gen three speeds,
support for dual channel DDR form memory,
and it's even got one of the older style
12 volt non-addressable RGB headers.
(ding)
But hold on a second, Linus what are you doing?
Building a budget rig with current gen Intel.
Ah, that is where my good friend
the core I312-100 comes in.
There is a lot to like about this chip,
starting with the fact that it has four
of the same golden cove P cores
that you would find in the rest of Intel's 12th gen lineup.
It also has support for up to PCI express gen five
and DDR five, like the rest of the 12th gen lineup.
Now there's only four of those cores, eight threads total.
So you're not gonna be setting any cinebench world records
but they will turbo to up to 4.3 gigahertz
meaning that this chip is a low key gaming monster.
And I haven't even mentioned the best parts yet.
It's just over a hundred dollars
and you can get it down to 105,
if you go for the F version of the SKU
which doesn't include onboard graphics, that's wild.
And unlike AMD's closest competitor, LGA 1200,
has a clear upgrade path.
You can either go to an I5 or an I7 12th gen
or you can move to the upcoming 13th gen Raptor Lake
which is confirmed to be backwards compatible.
And it gets even better.
Unlike the rich people, K SKU's Intel's basic processors
actually come with coolers in the box.
They're nothing amazing.
And our particular one seems to have received some touch ups
at the factory, but they are super easy to install,
look pretty decent and are perfectly capable of taming
the 89 watt maximum boost TDP of a chip like this one.
(techno music)
Ram ended up being a pretty straightforward choice for us.
This 16 gig kit of 3200 mega transfer per second
CL 16 DDR4 is pretty much the sweet spot
for price to performance.
And it also happens to be the maximum transfer rate
that this particular CPU and motherboard combo supports.
As for why we chose a team group T force vulcan Z,
frankly it just came down to price.
It was about 50 bucks
and you'll actually find plenty
of comparables from other brands.
And the budget hits keep coming.
We've gone with a crucial P2 500 gig for our boot SSD.
Why you might ask, because at $45, it is cheap as chips.
It might be PCI express gen three
and it might not have a DRAM cache
but at this kind of price point
your only other options are maybe a WD SN570,
which is gonna be around the same price anyway,
or a mechanical hard drive,
which frankly is not what you wanna be booting off of
in a modern system. Which isn't to say
that mechanical hard drives don't have their place.
For bulk storage,
their cost per gigabyte is absolutely untouchable
which is why we made sure to find a case that has support
for at least one hard drive.
This is the FBM-X1 from Rosewill.
Is it the greatest case ever?
No, but it can be had for as little as like 10 bucks
on eBay and hopefully between the front 120 millimeter
and rear 80 millimeter cooling fan
we will have enough cooling.
You know what else you can never get enough of?
Fun exclusives and behind the scenes
which are only available on floatplane.com.
(yelling)
And I took that personally.
This is a budget build, so we won't find
any fancy features like built in IO shields.
We'll be popping our shield in the old fashioned way.
Oh, so hard.
Oh, I should have spent twice as much on my motherboard.
It's fine, I'm kidding.
Then, as long as we've got our standoffs
in the right locations,
please do make sure you double check that.
We'll just go ahead, pop our board in.
How you doing there, buddy?
Oh yeah, look at that.
Man, how cool is it
that even budget components can be color coordinated now
like this build looks awesome.
Oh, oops.
It's still not really worth the extra cost
but this wouldn't have happened with the built in IO shield.
I accidentally got the little tabs here for grounding
inside the ports, rather than on top of them.
So I'm going to need to take the board out
and put it back in.
- There's not much cable management room.
- Yeah.
Not much in the way of cable management in this case.
That's okay.
We'll make it work.
That's a pretty cool hack to get some cable management room
on the back.
Just kind of pop out the panel a little bit.
I like it.
Linus approves.
Oh, what the hell?
Whoever disassembled this last time ripped the
- Oh
plastic housing for the USB three header off
of the motherboard.
You know how I talk about how fragile
and horrible these connectors are all the time.
This is what I'm talking about.
Look at this.
It ripped the female housing right off
the last motherboard that it was in
See that?
Don't worry little H610M,
that won't happen to you.
Doesn't it just kind of feel like summer?
Don't you just wanna wear a party shirt from LTTstore.com.
- Yeah.
(laughing)
- We showed up wearing the exact same thing today.
I swear we didn't coordinate this.
Twins.
- Twinsies.
- Oh wow.
This cable management is gonna be horrible.
This is just gonna traverse the motherboard
like this apparently.
Boom, cable managed.
You can call me the cable guy.
Just kidding.
- Cable guy
- My career hasn't sunk that low.
Our power supply was a pretty obvious choice.
We went with the CV650 from Corsair.
It's non modular
and it's not gonna have bells and whistles like, you know
silent zero decibel fan modes or anything like that.
But it's 650 freaking watts.
It's still 80 plus bronze.
So it's reasonably efficient
and it's got all black sleeved cables.
So our finished rig is not gonna have any of that ketchup
and mustard look like an older one would.
Even when you're working with a non modular power supply
it can be a useful little trick to plug in hard
to access connectors, like the CPU eight pin connector,
before you actually install the power supply.
There's our 24 pin.
For cable management,
the only thing we're gonna leave accessible is
our PCI express six plus two pin connectors.
And the rest we can just
cram in the five and a quarter inch space old school style.
Now we paid $42 brand new for this bad boy
but I would hazard a guess that in the coming months
we are going to see, much like GPUs, a surplus
of power supplies on the secondhand market.
Probably not lower wattage ones like this, but I
would expect to see wild deals on 850, 1000,
and 1200 watt units as minors, try to divest themselves
at this hardware.
Finally, it's time to talk GPU.
Now I gave a $200 price for an RTX 2060
but the truth is
it's a little bit more complicated than that.
You probably aren't getting a founder's edition for $200
but we've seen other RTX 2060's, which by the way
will perform the same, sold for as low as $160.
If you're more of a team red type of character
you can also get a 5600 XT for about the same price,
160 at the low end and those top out around the $190 range.
It's a ton of GPU for the money, especially in the context
of the last two years.
Uh oh, this is gonna be a little tight.
Oh no, it seems fine.
Nevermind. Nevermind.
I lied.
It's all good.
Does take a bit of maneuvering to get it in there but,
it's in.
Now we just need our power connector.
Oh, you know what?
I bet I can look through here to see what I'm doing
- Oh, no way
you actually probably even have enough room, for sure.
- Hi camera.
I'm having so much fun right now, you know,
like I can't believe we can finally build budget rigs again.
This might not be the best gaming rig for $500
but that's kind of the fun of it.
There's a lot of different ways to tackle a budget rig.
Whereas with a high end one
buy all the most expensive stuff
and slap it together. Here, we've gotta make sacrifices.
Are we more focused on CPU or are we more focused on GPU?
What's our risk tolerance for used hardware?
That is something to be aware of.
If you're picking up these crypto mind GPUs.
Yeah. They might not last as long as a brand
new one and you're certainly not gonna get any
warranty coverage on them.
So it's a die.
You gotta be tempted to roll.
I mean, I certainly was back in the day.
Don't take my word for it though.
All we've gotta do now is close it up
and show you guys the results.
Obviously these peripherals are a bit of
a mismatch for our system
but I'm using them to emphasize the capability of this rig.
And I dare say it actually looks pretty good too.
- Oh geez.
(laughing)
- Uh oh - The case is in the way.
- Does that fit
- Of our ports, look.
- Uh oh, that's stupid.
Yeah. I think I remember that being a problem in this case
it's got this little folded piece
of metal here that makes it so that you
- Can't plug it in.
- You can't actually get this lay port cable in there.
I think I made it worse. - Yeah. I think you did.
- No. Why this, no
Time for another power fist.
(banging)
- Oh that looks like it'll fit now.
(laughing)
- There you go.
Fixed that for your Rosewill percussive maintenance.
moment of truth time, here we go.
16 gigs Ram, CPU detected,
M.2 detected.
(clap)
Boom!
Everything good to go.
That's a bit of a concern.
The only front air intake is here
- Is on the bottom
- and these feet are super low profile.
It's possible that we're going to need some speed holes.
(drilling)
- I ask you how you are and you just have to say that you're
- I think it'll be okay.
I think that I'm going get prepared to make speed holes.
- Okay. But don't until we actually test.
- Its a 12100
(drilling)
- Yeah. And a third and a 2060, like I think it'll be fine.
- You heard it here first,
Plouffe says thermals will be fine
with a solid front panel.
- It's low end hardware.
It'll be okay.
It's not a 3070, or like a 12700K, I think it'll be okay.
- Definitely some minor quality of life challenges.
Can't get, can't get a plug into this.
There it goes.
Just give it a little bend there.
- Can you get it out?
- That should be better.
I'm sure I can get it out. Yes, yes.
I can get it out
Now I can't get it back in though.
In CS:GO, we're running at 1080P
with everything basically cranked and something else to note
as we're going through this exercise is
that I am screen recording at the same time.
That's right.
This machine is not only capable of playing games.
It is also capable of streaming.
Something that you could not do for 500 bucks
just a few short weeks ago.
As always it won't actually make you a good gamer, but yeah
just low key 250, 300 frames per second.
Let's go.
Oh, it feels good, doesn't it?
- It's 12 year old game, but yeah
- Doesn't it feel good?
Wait, look,
(laughing)
Hey 300 FPS in anything for 500 bucks,
I'll take it after this last fricking couple of years.
It's worth noting that even
though this is an older e-sport centric title,
so not the most demanding game, a big part
of why we're able to push these extremely high frame rates
which actually have a benefit.
Even if you don't have a high refresh rate monitor
because they reduce input latency
is due to those golden cove P cores.
Now you could spend another 40 bucks
and you could get six of them rather than four.
But we were trying really hard to hit
that 500ish dollar price point.
Oh 100, man what a steal.
Oh wait, what the
where's my knife.
Oh boy, went to, I went to press a melee button,
forgot what game I was playing.
(laughing)
We're getting Halo Infinite.
Where's the,
- Because you set it to installed only.
(yelling)
- This is one area where this CPU's gonna hold us back.
Downloading games, poor thing.
We're only at 300 megabit.
It's at 48% CPU usage.
Oh we should have a look at what our temps were in game.
Our CPU maxed out around 65 degrees
and our GPU maxed out around 69 degrees.
I'd say thats
- That's nice.
- I'd say that's pretty nice
but I don't know if we had actually reached peak.
- Sure.
- Okay.
- Sure.
- And we're gonna run a more demanding game now.
Obviously this is a little bit more impressive.
We've got Halo Infinite running at medium
at around 75 frames per second.
That is more than smooth enough
for actually a pretty, ah, no, crap.
Well, that was a tactical error.
(laughing)
Ah, whoops.
- Now you're in the lava.
- Oh man,
(smack)
that was a bit of a fail, but what's not a fail.
Is that we're sitting at 90% CPU utilization,
98% GPU utilization.
The system is still freaking quiet and we've peaked
at 76 degrees on our GPU and around 80 on our CPU.
So we are nowhere near thermal throttling territory.
- I told you
- You were right.
When you're right, you're right, Plouffe.
- Thanks
- And reminder, of course
I'm still recording this game.
Okay, I want one kill and then I'm
- Okay. - And then I'm good to leave.
- Get the guy on the ghost.
(yelling)
- Just got meleed
It's embarrassing.
That's it then.
The $500 gaming PC, it's back, ladies and gentlemen.
Great performance, damn near silent, adequate thermals.
And you can go even cheaper, if you're willing
to get more of the components used.
We're gonna have all the ones that we bought by the way,
linked in the video description
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- If you guys enjoyed this video
why don't you check out the one from two years ago?
And while you're at it, check out the comments.
People got real mad about how impossible
it was to buy a computer like this.
"What are you guys magic?"
No, we just made that video right
before things went completely to shiz.