- This case is unbelievable,
the holes,,
they're not tapped,
there's no threads,
there's no way to screw into them.
Compared to last generation,
the current crop of consoles from Sony, and Microsoft,
boast pretty good performance for anywhere from 300 to $500.
But everyone knows that PC is king, right?
(heavenly music)
To prove it,
we set out to build a gaming PC for 500 bucks,
that can beat the Xbox Series X,
and put those console peasants in their place.
"But Linus."
You might say, "That's illegal."
Well, so is this segue to my sponsor.
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(upbeat music)
Spoiler alert,
this build did not go as planned.
Building a competent gaming rig for $500,
that's a piece of cake,
building one that can match the up
to 4K 120 hertz performance of the Series X,
that is no small task,
and by the end of this video,
you are going to see why,
because remember guys,
unless you can also work a controller into the price,
you didn't match it,
so, here is what we came up with.
In spite of being re-manufactured,
that is to say,
that this motherboard is brand new,
but the chipset on it is second hand,
and salvaged from another motherboard,
this X99 board looks, at least on paper,
like an absolutely outstanding value.
It was one of the cheapest that we could find,
at just $62 from AliExpress,
which is amazing considering
that we get NVME support,
with an M.2 slot for storage,
and another slot for Wi-Fi,
and compatibility with older Intel Xeon CPUs,
that can be found super affordably
on the used market,
and that's exactly what we paired it with.
Meet the Xeon E5-2667 V3,
these puppies are coming to the point in their life cycle,
where data center admins,
are phasing them out in favor of newer,
more power efficient chips,
so there is an abundance of these on eBay,
which means supply and demand, baby,
you can get them for as little as $69, nice.
Now, it may not be the fastest anymore,
having been originally released in late 2014,
but eight cores with a base clock of 3.2 gigahertz,
boosting up to 3.6 is nothing to scoff at either,
as long as you get the right thing in the mail,
unfortunately, we didn't.
Upon arrival,
we found that the seller sent us a V4 chip,
instead of a V3,
good news, right?
Well, not so much.
The small bump to the cache size,
and the more advanced manufacturing process,
would have both been welcome upgrades,
and as far as we could tell from the motherboard listing,
it should have been fine,
but should is at the very top of my list,
of famous last words,
while the listing claimed compatibility,
despite the best efforts of me,
Collin, and Anthony,
we could not get this combo to boot,
and after proving that both the chip,
and the motherboard worked separate from each other,
and chasing down any hope of a BIOS update,
we were left with no option,
but to replace one half of this,
obviously, incompatible pair.
So, our second motherboard from AliExpress,
even had a hack-y BIOS,
that unlocked overclocking,
just one problem,
it also didn't work.
- [Collin] That's the wrong box,
- Well... (beeping)
At that point,
we couldn't just keep kicking the proverbial can
down the road,
so to move along,
we grabbed a compatible CPU from our warehouse,
that is close-ish in performance.
This is an Intel Core i7-6900K,
and I know, I know,
it's a better chip than the E5,
and it comes at a higher price tag,
around $130,
we'll just have to keep that in mind,
when we draw our conclusions.
Sticking to our budget as best we could,
we shoved in a single 16 gig DIMM of Samsung DDR4,
2133 ECC Ram,
which, at $32 on eBay,
is darn near as much memory as we could cram
into this thing for the price.
That brings us to $235,
with the substitute CPU and board,
that is half of our budget,
and we haven't even gotten to the graphics card yet.
We ended up snagging this used,
Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1070 on eBay for $200,
a hefty chunk of the budget,
not to mention that it looks like it was either run
in a a mining operation,
or extremely poor air quality in their house,
which left us with $64 for the case,
storage, power supply, and a game controller.
The cheapest case we could find,
was this Rosewill FBM-X1 for 29.99.
Now, we could've done a cardboard box build,
and with the build quality of this thing,
maybe we should've.
This case is unbelievable,
the holes, they're not tapped,
there's no threads,
there's no way to screw into them,
but this motherboard, honestly,
from my point of view,
is kind of a fire hazard,
so we stuck with the metal case.
We grabbed this Chintzy air cooler for 28 bucks,
I don't have a ton of hope for this thing,
but we'll see, I guess,
and an Adata SU365 SSD,
it's only 240 gigs,
but that's all we could afford at $43.
Finally, we went with an EVGA,
a non-modular, 400 watt power supply,
so that power rating is cutting it pretty close here,
but as I've said before,
and I'll say again,
you're better off with a decent quality power supply,
at a lower wattage rating,
than one that's rated for a thousand watts,
but it's 20 bucks,
'cause that one's gonna blow up.
That set us back $40,
leading us into our controller,
yes, my friends,
this eBay special,
Xbox 360 controller ripoff can be yours,
for just $18 and 50 cents.
Personally, I like the color,
even if the quality of the switches isn't quite up
to the original,
that leaves us with, excuse me,
negative money, kind of though.
The build we intended to create,
comes in at $507 and 57 cents,
which if we could find a heat sink,
and or a case in a scrap heap,
would sneak in at under $500.
As for what I actually have in front of me,
it's more like 580,
but, hey,
that is a minor price to pay to be the proud owner
of this piece of fine,
PC master race gaming machinery,
so it's time to game,
head-to-head against the Xbox Series X,
and see how we did.
I told Collin, I was like,
"I trust you,
"I believe you, really,
"but are you sure this memory
"and CPU is gonna work together?"
Core i7 6900K,
this is a 16 gig stick of ECC Ram,
Core i7s are not supposed
to have a memory controller on them,
that is capable of addressing registered memory,
that's registered ECC.
- [Collin] Let it be known,
I just proved Linus wrong.
- [Linus] This is actually a surprisingly robust BIOS,
like, it's kinda got everything we would want in here.
- [Collin] I can't remember if this is the one I updated,
I think this might be the one that I updated,
from like a weird Russian GitHub.
- Task Manager thinks this motherboard has 16 memory slots,
four was actually the correct number, minor details.
I mean, all the CPU cores are showing up
and everything, though,
there you go,
eight quarters with hyper-threading.
Immediately, our hardware begins to show its age,
while we can run at 4K, 60 Hertz,
this TV,
and actually the Xbox Series X for that matter,
are both capable of 4K 120 Hertz,
so that is a bit of a compromise,
not that I'm too concerned about a,
what is it, a 1070?
being able to run at 4K,
120 hertz really anyway.
Should we start with something lighter?
- [Collin] Yeah.
- Rocket League, let's do it.
- [Collin] Give it a fighting chance.
- Hey, what, what?
Are you being all defeatist right now?
- [Collin] That's my job.
- "Give it a fighting chance."
This is a PC,
it's a PC master race.
- [Collin] It's a 1070.
- This joystick is not good,
it just like doesn't register,
look at that.
- [Collin] Oh, there it goes.
- All right, sure.
And I'm done, bud.
Wow - RIP.
- Okay, well the good news
is I'm getting 130 frames per second,
and it looks great.
I don't know how to play this game.
I am getting absolutely destroyed by bots right now.
Whatever, the game's running great,
let's flip over to the Xbox.
You know what?
I think it is fair to say,
that it actually does look marginally better on the PC.
I have a feeling this one's gonna be rough,
Doom Eternal at 4K runs pretty nice on the Xbox Series X.
We're running at 62 FPS.
- [Collin] At 4K.
- [Linus] At 4K.
- [Colling] Ultra.
- [Linus] That's not terrible.
- [Collin] It's not a bad gaming experience.
- Not at all, not at all.
- [Collin] Well, in a menu,
let's see when you get some, you know--
- "Well, (grunts),
"it's in the menu (grunts)."
- It's a fair-- - (grunts).
- [Collin] Okay.
- To be clear guys,
we are aware of the deeper blacks on the Xbox,
we think it has to do with the capture card pass through,
not detecting full,
versus limited range properly,
so we're not holding that against either of them.
Our SSD is not as fast, Collin.
- [Collin] Not even close.
- Not to mention that it's a quarter the capacity.
This controller feels so cheap and crappy by comparison.
It weighs like nothing,
oh, not to mention that it's wired.
Look, okay,
we acknowledge there are a handful
of ways that our system is not as perfect.
The game's running really well, though,
62 FPS,
we're like pretty much locked 60 FPS,
like it's almost
like the game developer targeted GTX 1070 4K, 60,
like it's locked in,
and not VSync,
it's just at like anywhere from 59 to 65, all right.
- [Collin] I do think the detail looks a little higher
on the Xbox.
- Here's our hallway,
can you stop being so biased?
- [Collin] I'm not being biased.
- For one second, Collin,
can you stop-- - I'm being objective.
- Can you stop being an X-bot?
Oh, it's really hard to tell,
because this has got the proper contrast,
I'd say in terms of texture quality,
it's darn close,
but we can have a look at level of detail
on things like the gun,
and our little robot friend here,
I'd say that's real similar.
I mean, if I can't tell,
flipping back and forth between them like this,
I think it's fair to call it a wash.
Now, in terms of frame rate,
obviously, we don't have an FPS counter
on the Xbox version,
while on the PC we do,
but having played a number of games in my day,
I can tell you guys this is a pretty darn locked 60 FPS.
Now, when the action gets a little bit more intense,
we can see if it holds it,
but I mean, I've played around with Doom Eternal enough,
that I already know the answer to that,
it's gonna hold it just fine.
This gaming experience is not markedly different so far.
I was expecting,
I don't know what I was expecting,
I was not expecting the 1070 to hold up quite so well,
the game looks good,
it's running smooth,
I am blown away by how similar these ended up being
in terms of performance.
Of course, neither rocket league nor Doom Eternal,
got Xbox Series specific optimizations,
whereas Forza Horizon four,
looks flipping amazing
on the new gen Xboxes, Xbox-I?
Xboxes?
Even sitting best close to it,
it's just like, man,
this is a good looking game.
Is that a Lego car?
Was it Lego?
- [Collin] I don't know.
- It is, it's made of Lego.
I didn't imagine it,
were you messing with me?
Did you know it was Lego the whole time?
- [Collin] I couldn't tell.
- That tearing, though.
- [Collin] Yeah, that's pretty teary.
- (croaks).
- [Collin] I mean, we're holding 55.
- [Linus] Yeah, I think
that's why I'm getting so much tearing, though.
All right, we're not able to do ultra quality,
oh, well we could turn on dynamic...
Wait, what?
Okay?
- [Collin] Hey, Xbox gets dynamic rendering update.
- Did they have dynamic optimization on?
- I would assuming
that's what the whole design for Xbox thing is.
- Let's see,
okay, so now we're at a locked 60,
and that tearing issue is mostly gone,
oh, still some ugly tearing.
Yeah, yeah,
okay, okay,
hold on, though,
hold on.
Does Nvidia do G-Sync over HDMI?
I think you would have to have one of the new cards
with HDMI variable refresh rate.
Okay, oh, oh.
- [Collin] Well, that's point Xbox.
- Yeah, little bit.
Okay, why don't we try turning VSync on you.
Okay, yeah,
it's definitely a little more jello-y on the inputs,
that's what happens when you have VSync on,
but now that it's running smoothly,
image quality, huh?
Maybe a touch more aliasing in the road lines,
but it looks darn good, don't it?
That actually went way better than I expected,
that cocky tone at the beginning of the video,
I was just messing with you guys,
I thought this was going to be an absolute bloodbath,
but Collin,
and actually with some help from Anthony,
those two put together a pretty darn compelling system,
like it kept up way better than I expected,
and it's a PC, right?
So you can still browse the web,
edit video, or run emulators,
without rebooting into a funky developer mode,
and all that good stuff.
With that said,
it would be irresponsible of me,
to declare this some kind of PC master race victory.
A, we cheated on the price,
B, we made all kinds of compromises to the config,
like the single channel memory,
oh, a quarter of the amount of storage,
the lack of a Blu-ray drive (coughs),
didn't mention that before,
the crummy controller,
and the numerous other compromises.
We don't have any meaningful warranty whatsoever,
we ended up spending a fortune on shipping,
not just the items coming to us in the first place,
but also returning things
that ultimately weren't compatible,
and, of course,
the complete lack of any modern features like HDMI 2.1,
and ray tracing support,
so, no it wasn't a victory,
but dammit, it was my lack of victory,
and we definitely had some fun,
seeing just how much performance we could scrape
out of a $500 budget,
and it turns out it's more than I expected,
just like this video has more sponsors than I expected.
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If you guys enjoyed this video,
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