This $69 Gaming PC is INCREDIBLE

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 a 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 dollars today so by sticking to the same dollar value we're going to 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 me neat the z420 it's a 2012 workstation from HP that for its time was Blazing fast in that considering our budget still blazes to this day it was primarily marketed to Industries like VFX that require fatty processors to optimize their render times which is why its 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 fire Pro 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 that is damn clean for 10 years of dust buildup there's a lot to talk about in here you won't find support for modern features like m.2 and vme 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 3 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 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 is 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 fence tack 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 Signs the back of it what's up Angie I guess this was your worst station there it goes cheese okay there you go got a total of two sticks of ram in here four would have 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 decent 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 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 nope that was there when we got it this was already here I love it this says November 22 22 wait November 2022 what year is it 2023 yeah oh yeah so what is this 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 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 and 20 cents remaining if you're inspired by our thriftiness by the way and you want to 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 chronic of 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 perfect opportunity to sneak in there and make your move it's also not the only old models in the hpz line like the z440 620 820 Etc and Dell and Lenovo also have similar workstations from this period that are worth watching out for like the Precision t3600 and the think station 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 a line of speed 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 Crothers 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 it'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 because there's not a day that goes by where we don't think how can we design or engineer a better reaction if you want to learn more check out IBM's YouTube channel or new creators 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 because 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 1080p 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 seasoned scrapyard War scenario where the seller recognizes us and gives us a deal we had our faceless probationary employee begin scouring local listings to find something legit we found this listing for an r9270x only 30 Canada Federation tokens and it had been up for a month and got an update just over a week ago writer boy even talked him down to 25 loonies 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 going to make the same mistake we did last time sent the email and picked it up hit me good throw conveniently our workstation already has the uh okay tool-less mechanism for installing the 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 8-pin gpus especially from this era actually did come with dual 6-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 two dollars and seven cents hard drive for two dollars and seven cents capable of actually storing games at a speed faster than a turtle covered in molasses no problem check eBay on the one hand this one is two dollars and 250 gigabytes that'll hold four Zone on the other it's a spinning disc and it's from 2008. that's going to be a big fat boatload of nope let's move on five bucks 250 gigs but still spinning discs and somehow this one is even older eight dollars maybe 320 gigs Spinning Disk 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 price as they cost brand new maybe Facebook Marketplace more expensive than new alright we'll head to Amazon I guess the adata su-635 240 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 David seems like the kind of rule bending you would engage in oh yeah 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 for displays what that worth on ebay the price of 19.92 that gives us 21.99 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 going to tuck that in there a little something like that oh gorgeous 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 nine dollars an SSD with a dram cache like the adata Su 760 or maybe you 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 oh uh Escape key for startup menu I mean I'm just curious right like do you wanna do you guys want to see the uvfi application device configuration our Drive shows up cool cool it's how to mode IDE uh that was default back then I guess so you can turn up the idle fan speed well there's really not a lot to change in here you can turn hyper threading on and off though wow me CS go okay this is gonna be awesome I'm stoked because 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 dick did I set it to Deathmatch this isn't even just a little bit usable this is completely absolutely playable 130 140 170 FPS like like what oh I love it I'm being penalized for leaving my last match early wow this is what this is running great what is it controls the alt Z do you not have GeForce 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 I don't know what's happening here man I stepped in his gross blood where'd she go it's a turret I don't know how to play this game wait is this set to high this is running awesome yeah just happened I died but that's okay because damn it I died in style look at this 90 100 FPS we were running at high 1080p uh okay dip 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 him I got him this is pretty look at all good 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 2 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 it in 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 Eldon 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 US dollars is completely within the realm of possibility it's not going to 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

Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 4,020,023

Keywords: Z420, Gaming, Pc, LTT, Linus Tech Tips, HP, IBM, cloud storage, IBM Cloud, IBM Watson, IBM Consulting, IBM Security, IBM Garage, $69 Gaming pc, $69

Id: xTAzwKiQ7Ns

Length: 17min 6sec (1026 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 13 2022