This $500 Budget Gaming PC Is AWESOME

two years it was two years ago to the day the last time we built a 500 gaming pc with an actual freaking gpu unit 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 3090s a thousand dollars 30 70s 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 have thought impossible just a few short weeks ago an rtx 2060 for just 200 bucks impossible like this segway to our sponsor ridge ridge wallet has redefined the traditional wallet with its compact frame and rfid blocking plates keep your wallet bulge down and use our offer code linus to save 10 and get free worldwide shipping at the link down below [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 h610me-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 albeit at gen 3 speeds support for dual channel ddr4 memory and it's even got one of the older style 12-volt non-addressable rgb headers 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 i3 12 100 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 5 and ddr5 like the rest of the 12th gen lineup now there's only four of those cores eight threads total so you're not going to 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 skus intel's basic processors actually come with coolers in the box they're nothing amazing and our particular one seems to receive 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 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 dollars it is cheap as chips it might be pci express gen 3 and it might not have a dram cash but at this kind of price point your only other options are maybe a wd sn570 which is going to be around the same price anyway or a mechanical hard drive which frankly is not what you want to 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 roswell 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 and i took that personally this is a budget build so we won't find any fancy features like built-in i o shields we'll be popping our shield in the old fashioned way oh so hard oh 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 i o shield i accidentally got the little tabs here for grounding uh 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 yeah there's not much cable management yeah 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 3 header off of the motherboard you know 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 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 want to wear a party shirt from lttstore.com yeah [Laughter] we showed up wearing the exact same thing today i swear we didn't coordinate this twins twinsies oh wow this is cable management it's going to be horrible this is just gonna traverse the motherboard like this apparently boom cable managed you can call me the cable guy just kidding my career hasn't sunk that way our power supply was a pretty obvious choice we went with the cv650 from corsair it's non-modular and it's not going to 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 going to 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 cpu8 pin connector before you actually install the power supply there's our 24 pin for cable management the only thing we're going to leave accessible is our pci express 6 plus 2 pin connectors and the rest we can just cram in the five and a quarter inch bays old school style now we paid forty two dollars 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 second hand market probably not lower wattage ones like this but i would expect to see wild deals on 850 000 and 1200 watt units as miners try to divest themselves of 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 2060s which by the way will perform the same sold for as low as 160 dollars 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 dollar range it's a ton of gpu for the money especially in the context of the last two years uh-oh uh this is going to be a little tight oh no it seems fine never mind never mind i lied it's all good it 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 okay you actually probably even have 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 got to make sacrifices are we more focused on cpu 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 going to get any warranty coverage on them so it's a die you got to be tempted to roll i mean i certainly was back in the day don't take my word for it though all we've got to 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 she's nice uh-oh the case is in the way 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 can't actually get a displayport cable in there um um i think i made it worse yeah i think you did no time for another power fist there you go fix that for your rosewill percussive maintenance moment of truth time here we go 16 gigs ram cpu detected m.2 detected boom everything good to go that's a bit of a concern the only front air intake is here and these feet are super low profile it's possible that we're going to need some speed holes to ask you how you are you just have to say that you're i think it'll be okay i think that i'm gonna get prepared to make speed holes don't until we actually test yeah and a third and a 20 60. like i think it'll be fine you heard it here first ploof says thermals will be fine with a solid front panel it's low end hardware it'll be okay it's not a 30-70 or like a 12-700 k i think it'll be okay definitely some minor quality of life challenges um can't get i can't get a plug into this boy there it goes just give it a little bend there can you get it better i'm sure i can get it out yes yes i can get it out oh 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 12 year old game does it feel good wait look hey 300 fps in anything for 500 bucks i'll take it after this last freaking couple of years it's worth noting that even though this is an older esport-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 500-ish dollar price point 12 100 man what a steal oh wait wait where's my knife oh boy i went to press a melee button forgot my game i was playing we're getting halo infinite where's the because you set it to install only this is one area where this cpu is going to hold us back downloading games poor thing we're only at uh 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 that's nice i'd say that's pretty nice but i don't know if we had actually reached peak sure okay sure 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 oh no crap well that was a tactical error ah whoops oh man that was a bit of a fail but what's not a fail is that we're sitting at 90 cp 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 ploof thanks and reminder of course i'm still recording this game okay i want one kill and then i okay and then i'm good to leave get the guy in the coast ah i just got milade 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 where we'll also have our sponsor squarespace if you're building your brand online in 2022 you should absolutely have a website and if you need a tool to help build that brand look no further than squarespace squarespace is the all-in-one platform to help expand your brand online make a beautiful website engage with your audience and sell anything and everything from products to content we love squarespace so much we use it here at lmg its custom templates make it easy to stand out with a beautiful website that fits your needs you can maximize your visibility thanks to a suite of integrated seo features and their analytic insights help you optimize your performance so you can see what's going on as well as what needs a little bit of work so get started today head to squarespace.com forward slash ltt to get 10 off your first purchase 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

Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 2,963,079

Keywords: Budget, PC, Gaming Rig, Gaming PC, Graphics Card, GPU, Computer, Budget Build, Cheap, Inexpensive, Used Market, Crypto Winter, Gamer

Id: fuiAJFf0EJI

Length: 16min 16sec (976 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 05 2022