- A portion of this video is sponsored by IBM.
With inflation running rampant,
PC gaming has gotten out of reach
for millions of people around the world or has it?
It's been four years since we built our last hyper budget,
$69 gaming PC, and I think you guys are going to be shocked
by what we were able to achieve with some savvy shopping
and a little bit of patience.
We're talking quad core CPU, 16 gigs of RAM
and enough GPU horsepower to play the latest eSports titles
with your friends.
And yes, no joke for the grand total price
of just 69 US dollars.
Sounds great, let's build it.
What are we waiting for?
This message from our sponsor.
- Thanks to IBM for sponsoring a portion of this video.
IBM believes what business needs most to drive progress
in this next era is creativity.
Yes, you heard that correctly, creativity.
I'm not talking about creativity
in the traditional sense of artists and musicians now.
I'm talking about the developers, the data scientists
the visionaries who are creatively applying technology
in business to drive change.
IBM calls them new creators
and you can learn more about them later in this video.
- Thanks IBM for sponsoring that portion of the video.
The $69 we spent last time around is more like $82 today.
So by sticking to the same dollar value
we are gonna be working with a lower overall budget
than the Dell based machine that I built
with Riley back in 2018.
The good news is that consumer electronics
continue to be a terrible investment.
Meaning that that 380 tower that we used last time
fared even worse than the cash stuffed in our mattresses.
That means we can do better.
Meet the Z420.
It's a 2012 workstation from HP,
that for its time was blazing fast
and that considering our budget, still blazes to this day.
It was primarily marketed to industries
like VFX that require fatty processors
to optimize the render times
which is why it's hardware is fit more for a server
than the desk of an office worker.
It's got an Intel Xeon processor up to eight sticks
of error correcting DDR3 memory
and typically an Nvidia Quadro or AMD FirePro GPU.
Let's take a closer look at it.
Well, this is, yeah
this is definitely feeling pretty 10 years old though
to their credit, that is damn clean
for 10 years of dust build up.
There's a lot to talk about in here.
You won't find support for modern features
like M.2 NVME drives or multi gigabit LAN,
but what it does have is standard PCI Express Gen 3 slots.
So you could bloat it up with any kinds of expansion cards
that you would want.
It supports a whopping 10 drives
with these SATA ports down here.
It's got USB three, both in the front and in the back.
And this, look at this,
this is a 20 pin ATX connector, I think.
Wait, is it even 20?
What the hell is this?
18 pin motherboard power with what appears to be
a more standard EPS connector in the top.
HP, why you gotta be like that?
Just use a 24-pin connector like everyone else.
This cooler's pretty funny.
It uses three heat pipes and an aluminum fin stack
but normally you would just bend the heat pipes in a U
and you would put the fin stack right on top of the socket.
I don't know why they did it this way.
And this is cool.
They've actually got this little memory cooler
that clips on on top of your RAM slots.
Assuming I can actually...
Hello?
Oh, this is cute.
Angela B signed the back of it.
Sup Angie, I guess this was your work station.
There it goes.
Geez. Okay, there you go.
Got a total of two sticks of RAM in here.
Four would've been optimal given that the CPU
has a quad channel memory controller
but budgetary constraints.
Conspicuously absent is a hard drive.
This was probably shredded due to the data security policies
of whatever organization this machine came from.
There's a 600 watt power supply, pretty dec.
Nothing about 80 plus or anything about efficiency anywhere.
And it doesn't seem to be standard ATX,
so thanks, HP I guess.
Here's a benefit to their proprietary nonsense though,
this seems to be a 92 millimeter fan blowing directly
through the power supply.
It kind of reminds me of Antec's attempted CPX
form factor power supplies.
That's probably a pretty efficient way to cool it.
Honestly, the power supply and maybe the RAM
are probably the best cooled parts of this computer,
looks like the entire rest of the chassis
gets a single 92 millimeter fan here at the back
and there's nothing in the side panel that...
Oh my God.
Did you put this here?
- [David] Nope, that was there when we got it.
- This was already here?
I love it.
This says November, 2022.
Wait, November 2022 what year is it?
We're not 2023 yet. - Yeah, it's 2022.
- Oh, yeah so what is this?
- [David] It's from the future dude.
- It's from the future.
Haha, the RAM is installed wrong.
Convenient little diagram here
showing you which order to populate the slots in it.
It doesn't really matter though.
It'll still be operating in dual channel mode
so if it works, it works.
It's just to help improve compatibility.
Overall, I am super impressed.
This is a ton of computer for a few stems
more than five Canadian dime bags,
which translates to $44.49 of real American money
leaving us with $25.20 remaining.
If you're inspired by our thriftiness by the way
and you wanna purchase a unit like this for yourself,
don't be surprised if it takes a little while
to find one at the right price.
The availability of these most chronical workstations
can be a little bit boomer bust with nothing on the market
for months at a time, and then a big office
or a school upgrades, flooding the market
and crashing prices for a week or two
giving you the perfect opportunity to sneak in there
and make your move.
It's also not the only option
so keep your eyes peeled for other models in the HP Z line
like the Z440, 620, 820, et cetera,
and Dell and Lenovo also have similar workstations
from this period that are worth watching out for
like the Precision T3600
and the ThinkStation S30 respectively.
If you know of anyone that uses
these workstations currently,
it also might be worth getting in touch
with someone from their organization
to see if they're planning to upgrade soon.
With a little bit of luck,
you might even be able to convince them
to give you a heads up when the units
are about to find their way out the door.
And if you're a lottery winner lucky,
and build good rapport,
they might even sell you one directly for a low price.
This is the kind of benign social engineering
that we don't often talk about on this channel
but when you're bargain hunting can be the difference
between tens of dollars and hundreds of dollars spent
to achieve your goal.
On the topic of social engineering,
let's talk about the sponsor for this portion of the video.
- This portion of the video was sponsored by IBM.
As mentioned up front,
the new creators are the visionaries
creatively applying technology in business to drive change.
At Linus Media Group,
we're always trying to find ways to further our business
and craft through creativity, much like the new creators.
And one of the new creators
that we resonate the most with is Stephanie Caruthers.
The chief people hacker for X-Force Red Team at IBM.
She's responsible for overseeing
a global team of hackers hired to break into organizations
and uncover risky vulnerabilities that attackers may use
for personal gain.
Stephanie pokes and prods organizations
for security gaps through social engineering,
the most fun kind of engineering.
She's driven by her natural curiosity
and that's why she's always asking
"How can I take this step further?
How can I test them?"
And we here at LMG relate to her approach
'cause there's not a day that goes by
where we don't think how can we design
or engineer a better reaction.
If you wanna learn more, check out IBM's YouTube channel
or a new creator's homepage at the links below.
- Thanks IBM for sponsoring that portion of the video.
There's $25 left in our coffer and two parts we still need.
A hard drive 'cause we don't have one
and a graphics card upgrade.
This NVS 510 is a lower end Nvidia Quadro
that's designed more for CAD or CGI work
than playing video games.
To be clear, it can play games.
Overwatch and CS GO ran at 10 ADP low settings.
Well, I shouldn't say ran,
but they definitely walked
and bumping the resolution down to 720P
actually gave us better frame rates than the OG $69 PC.
That's thanks to our much faster CPU
but in Rocket League,
a game that might as well be running directly off the GPU,
our precious Z420 here gets wallet.
We can't have that.
And unfortunately, while it may not be 2021 anymore,
graphics card prices down at the very low end
haven't actually dipped that much.
At least not yet.
We had wanted to pick up a 750 Ti
to benefit from its more modern Maxwell architecture
compared to the rest of the 700 series.
But every time we attempted to buy one on eBay
the listing vaporized, so we took our search local.
To avoid a later season scrapyard war scenario
where the seller recognizes us and gives us a deal,
we had our faceless probationary employee
begins scouring local listings to find something legit.
We found this listing for an R9 270X,
only 30 Canada Federation tokens.
And it had been up for a month
and got an update just over a week ago.
Ryder boy even talked him down to 25 looneys.
We were in luck until we weren't.
The luck was a pipe dream,
The seller told us he was out of town for a week.
And then we messaged him on the day
he was supposed to return and he had already sold it.
Somehow though, we had missed a perfectly good GTX 760,
$30 Canadian and we weren't gonna make the same mistake
we did last time.
Sent the email and picked it up.
Hit me.
Good throw.
Conveniently, our workstation already has...
Okay, toolless mechanism for installing GPU.
One potential challenge you might run into
is that this older power supply
only has six pin PCI Express connectors
and you might find some modern GPUs
that have a single eight pin instead.
So we did need to use an adapter
but many eight pin GPUs, especially from this era
actually did come with dual six pin adapters
so it's quite possible that it'll be included with your GPU.
Not a bad little upgrade.
So after our conversion to freedom bucks,
how much do we have left? - $2.07.
- A hard drive for $2.07
capable of actually storing games
at a speed faster than a turtle covered in molasses.
No problem.
Let's check eBay.
On the one hand, this one is $2 and 250 gigabytes,
That'll hold War Zone.
On the other, it's a spinning disc and it's from 2008.
That's gonna be a big fat boat load of nope, let's move on.
Five bucks, 250 gigs, but still spinning disk
and somehow this one is even older.
$8, maybe 320 gigs, spinning disc 2011
too slow, too old.
Okay, forget eBay.
Let's go back to the local listings.
How about Craigslist?
How are people selling these used drives
for the same prices they cost brand new?
Maybe Facebook marketplace?
More expensive than new.
All right, we'll head to Amazon I guess.
The ADATA SU635, 240 gig.
That seems good enough
but how do we actually fit it in our budget?
Where do we get $21 from?
Is it still a $69 PC if we have to do
a special brownie bake sale in order to raise funds?
What do you think, David?
Seems like the kind of rule bending
you would engage in? - Oh yeah, sell the GPU.
- We've actually got behind the scenes brownie eating
and more available on floatplane.com by the way,
go check it out.
But wait, we can't bake brownies,
but what we do have is this extra workstation GPU
with two gigs of VRAM
that is capable of running four displays.
What's that worth on eBay?
At a price of $19.92, that gives us 21.99.
Yeah, okay.
And there it is.
The final piece of the $69 gaming PC.
Okay, doesn't exactly have an SSD mounting point
but that's okay, we don't really need that.
We're just gonna do that.
We don't really have any budget left for double sided tape.
So we're just gonna chuck that in there
a little, something like that.
Oh, gorgeous, it's beautiful.
Truth be told, if we really tried to maximize our budget
we probably could have gotten more
like 30 bucks for our GPU.
And with that extra $9 an SSD with a DRAM cache
like the ADATA SU760,
or maybe we could have picked up a lanyard
from lttstore.com with our extra budget.
Now the only question that remains
is how does this thing perform
now that we've got all the parts?
Oh, she goes.
Okay.
Ooh, escape key for startup menu.
I mean, I'm just curious, right?
Like, do you wanna...
Do you guys wanna see the UBFI application.
Device configuration.
Our drive shows up.
Cool, cool.
SATA mode, IDE.
That was default back then, I guess.
So you can turn up the idle fan speed.
Wow, there's really not a lot to change in here.
We can turn hyper threading on and off though.
Wow me CS GO.
Okay, this is gonna be awesome.
I'm stoked, 'cause we are definitely getting over 120 FPS
on 120 Hertz monitor on a $70 freaking gaming computer.
This is absolutely playable.
How are there so many enemies?
What is happening here?
Is this death match or something?
Oh, we're playing death...
Did I say a deathmatch?
This isn't even just a little bit usable.
This is completely, absolutely playable.
A 130, 140, 170 FPS.
Like, what?
Oh, I love it.
I'm being penalized for leaving my last match early.
Wow, this is running great.
What is it?
Control+Z, Alt+Z do not have G force experience on here.
If the point is just to see how it's performing,
it's very clear that this is running well enough
for me to play the game.
Did I kill that guy? - Yeah.
- I don't know what's happening here, man.
I stepped in his gross blood.
Where'd you go?
There's a turd.
I don't know how to play this game.
Wait, is this set to high?
This is running awesome.
What just happened?
I died, but that's okay
'cause damn it, I died in style.
Look at this 90, 100 FPS.
We are running at high, 1080P.
Ah, okay, dipped down to like 80 there for a bit,
still though, come on.
If I'm getting kills in Overwatch,
it's a good computer, okay?
Because I do not know how to play this game for crap.
Did I get 'em? I got 'em.
This is freaking awesome.
We managed up to triple the frame rates
compared to our last $69 PC in some cases.
Even being able to crank the settings in some of these games
while still getting comfortable frame rates.
It can even run Shadow of the Tomb Raider
and almost play it stably, clocking an average of 30 FPS.
I think with a slightly better GPU,
recent AAA games could be in reach.
Maybe one that's still getting driver updates
rather than just security fixes for example.
That would also be a big help running newer games
that require DirectX 12 or more than two gigabytes of VRAM.
Titles like Tiny Tina's Wonderlands or Elden Ring
won't run at all out of the box,
though there may be some workarounds available
like this hack of Elden Ring that lets you run
in an offline mode.
It actually runs pretty well for a game that costs
nearly as much as the hardware it's running on.
It might be 720P on low settings
but it's only stuttering occasionally.
Certainly not a bad enough experience
to justify such a quick death on such an early level.
Maybe this section is just less demanding.
But hey, this entire gaming rig
costs the same as the LTT screwdriver at lttstore.com.
I'd say the fact that it can open Elden Ring at all
is pretty freaking impressive.
So everything's said and done with a little bit of patience,
it's clear that getting a modestly competent gaming PC
for under $70 is completely within the realm of possibility.
It's not gonna play the latest AAA games
at ultra settings,
but what it will do is get you up and running
in comedy sports titles at 1080P
and even at high frame rates that will allow you
to be competitive.
Go check out our last $69 PC build
if you haven't already and hit subscribe
so you are in the know right away
when we upgrade this bad boy,
because yes, we are definitely going to do that again
to push it to the limit.