- Thanks to LastPass for
sponsoring a portion of this video. More from them later. Ladies and gentlemen, we build a lot of high-performance computers around here, but today is gonna be different. We scoured the Internet for the slowest brand new
components that money can buy, and we're gonna build it
right here, right now. Then for comparison, we also grabbed some sort of what I would consider
to be budget components, but sensible ones, to see just how much more
performance you can get if you balance your budget. Is that really the packaging for that? We're gonna get to that
a bit later, though. First, don't worry, the
parts aren't in there. It's already built. Let's roll that intro, tsk. (upbeat music) Of course, my expectations
may end up being subverted, and our slowest possible computer, where's the CPU? (beeping) Maybe this will end up being
an amazing bang for the buck, starting with our AMD Athlon 3000G. So this puppy right here is
a 3.5 gigahertz dual core. That's not real impressive for 2020. And making matters worse, this is based on AMD's
older Zen architecture rather than Zen 2. But hey, for $55, plus it
actually includes a cooler, I guess, you know, it's hard to really, it's hard to really complain, like how is the CPU $50? For our motherboard, we've
gone with MSI's A320M-A PRO. So this is about as entry level as it gets for an AM4 motherboard. You've got just two DIMM slots, although that will be enough
for us to run dual channel, assuming that our budget allows it, which it doesn't 'cause we're building the slowest possible computer. It has a PCI-Express 16X
Gen3 graphics card slot. We will be installing a graphics card. And then you've got onboard video in case you wanna use an APU. Wow! Are those PS2 ports? Dang! No NVMe for us today, folks. We're not even using an SSD. Man, it feels like this should
contribute to it being slow, but honestly, with just two cores, I'm expecting this to do a
pretty decent job of cooling. I feel like I should clarify
that the parts that we picked were not necessarily the
slowest ones that we could find, but rather that we limited ourselves to things that are
currently in production. So the slowest, brand new, and technically modern
parts that you can build. Naturally, no slowest possible build would be complete without a
single stick of DDR4 memory. The CPU does have a
dual-channel memory controller, but, I mean, if we're
looking for the bare minimum to fire up the machine and
get into Windows, tsk, tsk, four gigs of RAM, that's it. Wow, you sure can build a computer quickly when there's not much in it. We're like halfway there already. Between our CPU, motherboard,
and RAM, we've spent $125. That's less than like
a gaming motherboard. But while you guys might think
that I'm impressed by that, I'm actually kinda
worried for the prospects of our slowest possible computer here, because CPU, RAM, and motherboard
on the secondhand market, hoo-wee, lemme tell ya! I could get some better stuff than that. You know, that's what
kinda drives me crazy about this entry-level
hardware, as it gets branded. Really what it is, is in my
opinion, basically E-waste. Because you might say, well you know, not everyone wants to put the work in to putting together something secondhand. But it's not even a ton of work. I mean, we did that video recently where we took an old Dell Optiplex, basically threw a graphics card in it for less than what we're gonna spend on this complete brand-new machine, and lemme tell ya, spoiler alert, this thing is gonna run, what's the opposite of running
circles around something? For our case, we've got a Thermaltake H17, which at the time, was priced the same as the DeepCool MATREXX that
we had originally chosen. So, $35. Point is, that's about
the cheapest you can get unless it's on fire sale for
a brand new computer case. And then for our power supply
we've got a Corsair CV550. This is your entry level, hey, I don't want my computer to blow up, that would be a bad
thing, kinda power supply. You can get power supplies
for $13 or whatever, but even on a system like
this I would not recommend plugging them in. I mean, what's the point of ruining stuff? Oh! Four whole screws to
put in the power supply. Jeepers. (panting) Just need to, oh, rehydrate. (laughs) lttstore.com. So this is cool. Kind of like an SSD except
just with some rubber grommets to just mount your hard drive like that. Should I put in all the screws? I mean, there's really
not that many of them. We had a second fan that we intended to install on this puppy, but I don't think we're
gonna be doing that because there is only a single fan header aside from the CPU fan
header on this motherboard. More simplicity. Boom! Fan installed, cable managed. This is actually pretty
nice for a budget case. Hey, wow, we've got USB 3 on both our case and motherboard. I'm gonna show you guys a little trick. You can just take all of
these little individual pieces and kinda make your own
block of connectors. If you line it up just right, ah! Put it on just like that. Ow, aw, dang it. I stabbed my thumb. I'm good, fine. 24 pin power connector, just like that. You can see, instead of an
eight pin power connector on this board we've got just a four pin. So we're gonna split apart
our eight pin power connector and just pop half of it into there. This is crazy. Like, if I was actually
trying to speed build this I think I could do it
in under five minutes. Now for the piece de la
resistance, our Zotac GT 210. This was a slow graphics card when I was still working at NCIX. That was like, eight years ago. You can still buy them. I don't even get it. - [David] Why? - People who buy a card like this don't care about performance at all, or they get kind of screwed into it because they don't know that
the performance of a $50 card is not half of the
performance of a $100 card. I remember talking to
Zotac about these cards back when I was working at NCIX. I was like, well who the
crap is buying these things? They're like, oh, well Best
Buy is moving through them by the truckload. And I was like, well who... Why are their salespeople
selling this to them? It's a terrible value! Point of clarification,
this is $40 US, not $50, and it's still a bad deal. Yeah, for a $35 US case, I'm liking it. Crazily enough, that was it. By the way, the keen-eyed among you might've noticed that
we had an ATI Radeon fan installed on that graphics card. That's 'cause we weren't
gonna go out and buy another GT 210 just to make this video. It's one that we already had, and it's one that the fan
failed on a long time ago and we just kinda threw whatever on there, as long as it runs cool enough. Time to fire it up. Ah, I miss little whiny GPU fans. Hope it works. That took a hot minute to POST, didn't it? Let's fire up some CS GO, shall we? And while we wait for the game to load 'cause that'll probably take a minute on the mechanical drive, we're gonna go ahead and pull out our better-value gaming PC here. Our slowest PC came in at a
price of just over $300 US, while our step up model
came in at just under $600, which is a pretty substantial increase. We are spending almost twice as much. But we're also getting more
than twice as much computer. So we're going all the
way up to a Ryzen 3100, which happens to be based
on their Zen 2 architecture. That is gonna be a big
performance boost for gaming. We managed to double our RAM, going from four to eight gigs, which also means now it's
running in dual channel mode. We've got a more feature-rich motherboard. And a big amount of our budget was spent on this puppy right here. So we've gone with an RX570, which is maybe last-gen at this point, but still a very, very
respectable budget gaming card if we're running at 1080p. Already just how much faster
it boots up and launches games is a huge difference for this one. But of course, that's what happens when you spend a little
bit of extra on an SSD. And the funny thing about an SSD is that these days it doesn't
actually cost that much extra. If you look for the right deal, we got our FATTYDOVE
Racing 120 gig SSD for $20. 8X antialiasing ain't happening. Let's see if that helps a little bit. Gonna set the settings over here the same. Oh man, this one defaulted to 4K. Oh, Lordy! Why? Is that still loading? Holy crap. 150, 60, 70. 200 FPS. Yep. This feels pretty good. All right. This one's loaded up now. Let's just make sure
the resolutions' right. And this, kids, is why
friends don't let friends buy entry-level graphics cards. We are getting 10 FPS, my ladies and gentlemans. We're charging in, though. We're charging in! We might hit something! I got one! (laughs) 10 FPS gaming, ladies and gentlemen. Oh, come on! Bot Fred's got it out for me. So the lesson we're learning here is that spending twice as much can yield more than just twice
the performance improvement. In this case we're looking at about anywhere from 15X to 20X the performance at the same settings. And I actually missed another thing that is twice as fast about
our higher-end system. It's got USB 3 10 gig instead of five gig, so if you really wanted
to transfer things quickly over USB, you could do that. Oh no, there's a first-time
setup on this one. While we wait for that
one to complete setup, we can go ahead and have a look at what our Rocket League
performance is like. Yes, I'm playing with
a mouse and keyboard. I'm sorry. (vocalizing) Oh, I pressed jump instead of go fast. Well, that's a shame. Okay. So what are we looking at? We're looking at 100 plus
FPS with a minimum of 48 the entire time we've been playing here. And that minimum is
honestly more important to the gamine experience
than that average is. Rocket League. Is this game just not even gonna launch? Nope.
(laughing) New plan, just for the sake
of giving our slowest PC its best possible shot, we actually ripped the graphics card that wasn't letting us launch the game out and we are running off
of the onboard graphics. The problem with that is we're running a single stick of memory because it's a bit of a
misconfigured machine. And now our APU graphics has to share memory
bandwidth with the CPU, which was already half of
what it ideally would be. 15 FPS in the menu. (laughing) - Big oof, Linus. - That's the same
settings as the other one. Oh boy. You know, having the game
run in slow motion like this is actually kinda nice, because it's not an online match so I think the game is
actually running slow. Finally, let's go for a good old-fashioned Cinebench drag race. Are you gonna, are you even trying? Maybe it didn't register. And one, two, three, go. I think we've all seen enough, and I think we've all learned the lesson that we're trying to teach here. Just because something is
brand new off the shelf doesn't mean that it is a viable option for building a system. And you might say, well look, I've only got $50 to spend on a CPU. And that's fine. And that's fair. But your best option at that point is to go back and look for something on the secondhand market that is gonna give you a
better experience than this. Literally a fraction of the
speed of even a value chip like the Ryzen 3 3100, which is really a fantastic
CPU for the money. The other thing is graphics. You know how there's a
point of diminishing returns when you go into the very high end stuff? Well there's a point
of diminishing returns at the low end as well, and it's something people
don't really think about. So I would give the same advice there. In fact, I don't want
you to get discouraged if you've only got $300 to
spend on a new computer. What I want you to do is
head down to the comments where some of our savvy
bargain-hunter viewers are gonna post some great spec lists that they think they can
put together for $300, 'cause I guarantee if you
hit up eBay, Craigslist, and all those kinds of
places, it can be done. Now for the portion of this video that is sponsored by LastPass. LastPass is the password
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sponsoring this video. If you guys enjoy this sort of thing and you're looking to
go a little bit deeper than the comments on this video to build a great value gaming rig, maybe check out our, This Is a Gaming Rig? Where we converted a Dell Optiplex into a very viable gaming solution.
But why though?