I built a Gaming PC for my Nephew on AliExpress

one of my nephews is in need of a new gaming piece C so on the table next to me are the parts that I picked out for him this is going to be a 1080p high performance but as low buck as possible build so we spent a total of $418 on all of the parts here plus a case which is too big to fit next to me come along for the ride today's video is brought to you by ant audio and their full lineup of audio gear and accessories gaming headsets are a combination of two items headphones and microphones but they often forget one important thing make the microphone good just because you don't have to listen to your own crappy microphone doesn't mean your teammates should suffer with antline you can skip the expensive RGB and overprocessed audio the mod Mike Wireless allows you to equip a broadcast quality mic onto any set of headphones like my Audio Technica M50 x's and since the mic transmits over appex it has latency that's five times faster than Bluetooth for those that prefer inar monitors to Studio cans the allnew Cima imem are a combo rivaled only by putting Stouts into bourbon barrels available in either single or dual driver models the handcrafted resin in ear monitors deliver audio file approved sound to your ears while the flexible microphone captures broadcast quality recordings don't believe me this entire ad was recorded on the cura check out the full lineup of gear from ant lion audio by following the links down in the video description and again a huge thanks to ant audio for sponsoring today's video Welcome Back to craft Computing everyone as always I'm Jeff like I said the goal for this build is to be as low buck as possible but not leave too many things on the table we want the system to look good and perform well but still potentially leave some upgrade options in the future and so these are the parts that we came up with now I know what most of you will be expecting out of a build like this considering I have multiple trays worth of x79 and x99 compatible zons to choose from the problem is start to consider power to Performance levels and where the modern CPUs are starting to land most of these CPUs are 115 or even 135 watt TDP chips that's a lot of power to SN into a gaming system instead we're going to go with a more modern platform in the AMD b450 chip set and go with a much more modern CPU in a ryzen 3 3300x this is a 7 NM zen2 based CPU with only a 65 wat TDP best of all even at that lower wattage it straight up Beats any Zeon on this table by a solid 50% don't believe me I've benchmarked literally every single one of these CPUs and the best single-threaded cinebench R15 score I've ever gotten out of one is 142 this one got a 199 with no tweaks whatsoever is this going to lose in multi-threaded performance sure but this is a 1080p gaming system we're not exactly going to be rendering video and we're not necessarily concerned with multi-threaded performance right now to give the CPU all of the memory bandwidth it could ever handle we're going with a 16 GB kit of patriot Viper 3600 ddr4 this should be a fantastic match for our quadcore CPU now while I did score the CPU used on AliExpress for only 50 bucks we're going brand new with the memory the motherboard and the storage the memory you can pick up on Amazon right now for $38 and if you wanted to save an extra 7 or eight bucks you can get a 3200 MTS set for about $30 brand new right now the motherboard might be a little bit of a controversial choice but I wanted a brand new motherboard not a used one and every single dollar counts on this system so for just $62 on AliExpress I picked up an Oda B 450s microatx motherboard it's got pretty much every amenity that I need in a build like this a PCI Express x16 slot nvme gen 4 compatibility if we really wanted to stress this thing out although we're going with a gen 3 drive as well as a pair of ddr4 dim slots keeping our 65 wat CPU nice and cool is probably the most extravagant choice on this system but it does give it a little bit of RGB flare and that's in the thermal R ax 120 67 mm cooler this is a top- down cooler which will help keep the motherboard and vrm cool as well and the CPU Cooler was only $31 again if you wanted to save a good amount of money you could probably pick up an AMD stock cooler for just $10 and save yourself the extra cash for storage we're going with the trid and true silicon power a60 1 tby gen 3x4 mvme drive with 1 tab of space you get plenty of storage for all of the modern titles that take upwards of 120 to 150 GB per installation seriously guys start going with some compression in your game installs and secondly at just about $35 to $40 on Amazon you get all of that store storage at a fairly reasonable price for graphics cards there's not a lot of options to fit inside of a $ 400ish budget unless you go with a brand new RX 6400 or you can go with a refurbished remanufactured rx580 however there is another option popping up on AliExpress lately for under $130 and that is the RX 5700 XT this is far and above a better option than the RX 580 based on Polaris and best of all this card was just $108 $108 for an rx5700 XT with a GB of vram that's a win in my book now I will say I am cheating ever so slightly when it comes to keeping this system in budget especially when it comes to the power supply you see I picked up this Corsair cx430m power supply from a local electronics recycler for about $5 Now power supplies like this come up all the time at my local facility for about that same price point but the price savings on the power supply allowed me to spring for the ax 120 and give this build a little bit extra flare inside of it you could just as easily pick up a 400 or 500 wat power supply on Amazon for between $30 and $40 and go with an AMD stock cooler like I mentioned earlier since this is a gaming PC I didn't want to skimp at all when it came to RGB and Aesthetics so I picked up a full set of antech 120 mm RGB fans for just $31 on Amazon so that is all of the gear that we're going to use but what case do we put all of this in and keep it looking good that comes down to a blue gears b pelus side I think is how you pronounce that Micro ATX case with tempered glass front panels and side panels and I was able to pick this up on Amazon for just $56 those are the parts that's the build and now you know the objective let's go ahead and get this thing [Music] together [Music] [Music] and welcome back the build is all together it is fully benchmarked and I definitely have some thoughts both on the performance of the system and on the parts that I selected for this and I think we'll start there the difference between the content that I produce on my Channel versus other Tech channels this is not calling anyone out specifically it's just a difference in philosophy I like to experiment with different components obviously I most famous for a lot of my Chinese x79 and x99 builds but I like to see if something can work not necessarily presenting my videos as a 100% follow this guide I'm more trying to get my audience to think critically about if different combinations of components can still get a good result and sometimes you win those and sometimes you lose those and this is one situation where I can't fully stand behind all of the parts that I put into the system let me explain let's start with the part that I really should have seen coming and that is the power supply I used a Corsair 430 W power supply in here but during testing the system Drew in excess of 380 Watts measured from the wall and in my opinion that's just flying a little bit too close to the Sun so I think before I deliver the system I am going to swap that out for probably at least a 500 wat power supply just to make sure it doesn't randomly explode on him secondly let's talk about the motherboard in this case the odna b450 S now obviously this selection was made because it was the cheapest brand new b450 board that I could find on either Amazon or AliExpress and it cost me just $62 now I've worked with Chinese motherboards in the past and had some pretty good success with them so long as you keep their limitations and feature sets in mind you should be able to work around almost anything that comes your way except with this one let's start off with what it got right the odna B 450s is an am4 socket motherboard and it does do accept CPUs from either the Zen 1 Zen plus Zen 2 or Zen 3 families and they all seem to work out of the box with no issues obviously you need to keep your CPU expectations tempered what I mean by that is I don't think this motherboard is going to survive putting in something like a 550x 16 core CPU which draws almost 200 Watts through the socket the vrm just isn't going to handle that well but using a CPU like I did here in the 3300x or even stepping up to a 3300g or even a 5700 G I think this motherboard would handle that just fine through the vrm the board also has rebar support enabled from the factory as well as PCI Express 4.0 so your x16 Lane is going to get the full bandwidth if you wanted to step up your video card selection from something more than a 5700 XT but now let's talk about the issues and there's a lot of them now one of the standard complaints of a lot of these Chinese market motherboards is the fan headers in use here typically there's only one maybe two regulated fan headers what I mean by that is controllable in the Bios that can ramp up and down with CPU temperature loads this one only has a single regulated fan header it's a pwm plug which is awesome but I had to use a five-way splitter with another two-way Jack coming out of that to power all six fans in here to keep the RGB fans from running at just 100% all the time off that second header that means I have all six fans in this system plugged into the single CPU fan header and this isn't an ancillary powered fan splitter either they're all being powered off that CPU header so far it's worked just fine but I don't think I would trust that as a long-term solution and in fact I'm probably going to get a powered Fan Hub before I pass this system along next up let's talk memory support or rather the complete lack thereof when it comes to this motherboard you see see ddr4 memory in its official spec is designed to run at 2133 MHz anything above that is considered an overclock now most motherboards for the last 15 years have come with an auto overclock feature for your memory Intel calls it XMP AMD has a couple of different names for it but the long and short of it is that your memory is able to overclock to your memory's rated speed with ddr4 it could be anything from 2666 to even 4,000 or 4400 MHz with a Zen 2 CPU like the 3300x the recommended speed to run your memory is 3600 MHz which is the kit that I bought and have installed here unfortunately this motherboard has absolutely no automatic memory overclocking support now it will allow you to manually tune your memory but that means manually defining every single last varying spec that your memory needs to know to run at a certain speed unfortunately memory overclocking is not as simple as just setting it to 3600 MHz and defining your voltage and calling it a day you have to actually go in and Define every last bit of latency stepping and timing inside of the memory chips themselves and that is an exhaustive list and often these aren't just laid out for you on data sheets they're pre-programmed into the XMP profiles of the memory itself there's not an easy way to extract those except by plugging in that memory kit to another motherboard recording all of the values that that motherboard set it to and then defining those protocols and values on this motherboard I didn't go through all of those steps because I didn't feel like troubleshooting when it didn't work so the memory in the system is running at 2133 MHz and likely that's where I'm going to leave it if this was going to be my PC I think I'd be a little bit more apt to define those memory protocols myself go through all of the list of timing and steppings and everything else but I'm giving this system to a kid who just wants to game at 1080P and honestly while there would be a performance bump from getting 2666 or 3,000 or even 3600 MHz out of this memory I don't think it's worth risking instability giving it to a kid who has no idea how to actually manually overclock memory if you're seeking a project this is definitely one you could tackle but it's not one I'm going to tackle lastly talking about the motherboard there's some features that this motherboard is just missing when it comes to what a lot of people would expect out of a modern motherboard especially one costing only1 or $15 less than mainstream board offerings uh in this case one thing I really miss this board not having is RGB you see love it or hate it RGB has become a Mainstay and staple feature of modern motherboards and most motherboards do include headers for either RGB 12vt which is the single color or addressable RGB in a 5vt variant this motherboard hasn't neither and because I bought this fan kit expecting to be able to just daisy chain these fans together and be able to control the lights and software I had to spend an additional $10 on an RGB controller to make the lighting work inside of the system do you know where I would rather have spent $10 on this system that's right in a motherboard that would support actual XMP overclocking have more than a single fan header for controlling the six fans in the system and had RGB headers on it just spending an extra 10 or $15 on this board would have alleviated all of the problems that I've had with this system so sometimes you buy cheap because it's a fantastic value and other times you can definitely get burned because of the features that cheaper part doesn't have overall I think I am very happy with the way the system system turned out the cooler keeps the CPU at a fairly reasonable 62° wind gaming uh a little bit higher than that when you're trying to really push it with something like cinch or AVX workloads but I don't think the system is going to be used that way so for a $30 cooler I think it's a fantastic option this case looks incredible especially with the panoramic tempered glass front and side panels here it has some drawbacks though it's a very thin material it's not something that's overly sturdy so I wouldn't buy this and call it a a land gaming rig this is not something you should be transporting a rig in but it does hold everything fairly nicely it has absolutely Jack all when it comes to Cable Management though the RGB fan headers and everything is just kind of bundled and zip tied into here there's no actual cable traces or tie off points to manage your cables so the back of this looks like a Rat's Nest despite my best efforts for $55 I think it's a a fantastic looking case but you're never going to get a showcase quality PC unless you do custom cabling but you're not going to do custom cabling inside of a $55 case either I think it's fine so with the build and Aesthetics out of the way let's go ahead and talk performance and there's definitely some things to talk about this PC is aimed at 1080 60 maybe even 1080 90 FPS gaming and I think for a $420 PC we absolutely knocked it out of the park let's go ahead and start our benchmarks off with Fallout 4 now Fallout 4 is a vsync title it is locked at a maximum of 60 frames per second so your average should be 60 frames per second and that's exactly what we got here with an average of 59.8 that was at ultra settings with FXAA anti-aliasing enabled we also got a 1% low of 41.6 and a. 1% low of 23.1 now that might be a little bit of a large variance and I'm not necessarily happy with the 0.1% low but overall this is still a fantastically playable game especially at ultra settings but Fallout 4 is far from the most demanding title on the market today for that we're going to have to jump up our game a little bit so let's jump into Red Dead Redemption 2 with those settings we wound up with an average of 98.8 frames per second a 1% low of 70.2 and a. 1% low of 63.3 which means even in the worst case scenarios we still say above 60 frames per second not too shabby for a system that cost less than an Xbox series X keep in mind while we were using the RTX edition of Red Dead Redemption 2 we did not have any dlss or FSR enabled in this title so that was pure rasterization at its finest Tina's wonderlands we ran at high settings at 1080P and got an average of 125.5 frames per second with a 1% low of 49.9 now those that know the games that run in the Borderlands engine like Borderlands 3 and Tiny Tina's wonderlands know that when you're switching from hipfire to scope fire there can be a little bit of latency during that process and we certainly still see that here with a. 1% low of 13.2 but as I mentioned with pretty much every review of this game it never really impacts game performance unless your 1% low also drops down with it in this case our 1% low stayed at 50 frames per second which in my book is just fine there was a time not that long ago that recfest was one of the most demanding games out there but I think modern graphics cards have since put that period to bed at ultra settings and 1080p we see an average of 155.5 frames per second with a 1% low of 94 and a. 1% low of 85 wow just wow and finally we come to crisis for I mean Starfield which is pretty much the most demanding game that has ever been made and released on the PC now I'm not expecting the world of this game and as long as the system's able to run it at all I'm going to ch Lo that up as a win for testing today we ran at 1080p medium settings and left FSR 2.0 enabled just to show what is capable if you don't mind the occasional graphical anomaly now Starfield as diverse of a game as it is you really can't just give it one set of Benchmark numbers and call it a day you really need to test multiple scenarios and give those scenarios their own Benchmark results and that's what I've done here now obviously one of the most demanding areas of the game is the new Atlanta space Port where we see an average of just 45.8 frames per second a 1% low of 24 and a. 1% low of 7 now luckily no action of any consequence ever really happens in the new Atlanta Spaceport so as long as you can muster through with a 1% low of 7 frames per second the game is still perfectly playable blasting off into space and flying around some debris fields we see an average of 68.5 frames per second a 1% low of 54 and a. 1% low of 43 with which is a much more reasonable frame rate to play this game at it's not exactly a twitch shooter most of the space combat relies on a lot of Auto targeting and simply lining up your shot so this frame rate is perfectly playable here and finally Planet Side in a typical explorable environment we see an average of 83.3 frames per second a 1% low of 47 and a .1% low of 35 there was a little bit of latency especially during gun combat that I would like to see bump up just a little bit higher but again we were running at medium settings and we could lower some of those settings and some of the eye candy and make this game a little bit better but overall I think for the budget that we put into the system it is more than playable as is and so this is my most recent attempt at a sub $500 gaming PC and it's certainly much better performance than I've gotten in previous years especially now that graphics cards and motherboards have come back down in price now there's still a number of tweaks that I need to do to the system before I send it off to my nephew first off I am going to replace the ram kit cuz there's no sense in giving him a 3600 MHz kit when the system can only run it at 2133 I'm also going to replace the power supply with something that won't burn up with the 380 watts of power this is requiring from the wall but overall I think I'm more than happy with the way the system turned out as usual if you're interested in any of the parts from today's build I will have Amazon and AliExpress affili links down in the video description go give those a look on your way down there make sure to drop this video a like And subscribe to craft Computing if you haven't done so already also don't forget to head on over to craftmore grab some of my merch and start drinking like a pro that's going to do it for me in this one thank you all so much for watching and as always I will see you in the next video cheers guys I need some more coffee po

Channel: Craft Computing

Views: 43,116

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Id: Kl8vcMiIvqk

Length: 24min 2sec (1442 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 02 2023