I Bought a $300 Amazon Gaming PC!
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 26 ก.พ. 2024
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I bought an affordable $300 gaming PC from Skytech Global (not to be confused with Skytech Gaming) on Amazon! Is it any good? Let's take it apart, discuss component choice, and put it through a small mix of games to assess its viability in today's tech market!
Check out this STG gaming PC: geni.us/yiZh
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This is close to my current computer. I have an i5 2400 and a gtx 1650 (the non 6 pin card) along with 8 gigs of ddr3 ram. Runs fine but is diagnosed with asbestos
It’s way more powerful though.
Mine is i7 2600 and a gtx 750 ti with 8 gigs and still really good at running games at the moment
@@iamarabicandiloveamericanp7137I mean I'm pretty shocked what can be run on pretty piss poor graphics cards, you can still game on a GTX 780m laptop pretty good, I think anything lower though starts skipping so many VRAM, Vulkan API, and Dx problems, but ultimately there's basically little sense in getting something less good than an RX 580. Which is still perfectly fine btw, Like I don't get people's upgrade priorities, I seen some people replace whole systems including the CPU and board, this guy got a 2600 to 7600x rather than a 5600x and then went form 5700xt to 6750xt for instance. Then you got people like this guy who still on a 750ti for some reason. I mean, don't get me wrong when you're going as close to "it was Free" as you possibly can a 750ti is fine. Won't run tons of shit, but you'd be shocked what it'll still do at 1080p. But the thing is it gets to a point where like a GTX 980 is under 100 bucks, a RX 580 is like $80, you can more or less get a new graphics card for a day of flipping burgers or waiting tables at that point it's seriously a huge absolutely massive upgrade. For you like a 580 or used 5500xt or 1650s or GTX 980 or something to that effect would go from having framedrops on really old games, like 30-44fps on Witcher 3, to being able to play The Division 2 online.
@@iamarabicandiloveamericanp7137
i take my hat off to that 750ti, HOLY SMOKES that little fella refuses to die
i have my i7 3770 overclocked to 4.1ghz(no not the 'k' variant) with 32gb ram and a rx 580 and im happy with it
Any pc at this price that can play games at a playable fps is a win
I recently sold a 3770/1650 build for $350 and it didn't have any crappy stick on RGB. But a random GPU tossed in a random old workstation with some random sticks of RAM by someone who is moving large volume is a great way to get a crappy worn out old system. I doubt they spent several hours benchmark and stress testing this PC. So caveat emptor. you don't wanna see what an old Xeon does when it has been running constantly for years in a workstation with insufficient cooling. It isn't pretty.
This is probably a B or C grade machine with a cheap remanufactured GPU. I want to know if it will run on stock drivers. I bet it is a frankencard with a mobile chip.
ewaste peripherals are for people who hate the environment. Just cancels out any good that comes from repurposing an old workstation.
Especially if you got kids. It's perfect
oem ones uhhh
That technically a win in my book, I see pcs like this alot. It's a soso base to start on, lots of *cough* room to grow
room to grow how? What better CPU can that mobo support? what kind of RAM can it support?
14:50 Greg even says that criticism points out there is no upgrade path
15:10 greg says you shouldn't prioritize an upgrade path
@@soccerguy2433 WOOOOOOOSH
Grabbing an i7 Haswell/Devil’s canyon will greatly improve the performance. Friend of mine is still rocking 4790 and a 1070, all he needs for 1080p 75Hz
4770 and 4790 are great chips. Plenty of cheap cooler upgrades over the OEM ones.
but i7s are fare more expensive just for that i7 badge only. Just get Xeon instead. Same or even better performance for a fraction of a price.
Yup, just recently I have build PC with i7-4770 and GTX 1660S + 16GB 2400Mhz RAM and it's rocking. But - gtx 1660S is probabvly like the best GPU that this CPU can handle
@@subbookkeeperi7 4790s are usually $30 on eBay. That shouldn’t be too bad
THIS ! and the mobo can handle 32 GB
If $300 is all you can afford this is tough to beat. It gives you something you can really play games with plus do actual work, which you can't do on a console.
I would say get a console unless you need to work like you said otherwise yeah this build is fine
Doing work on this would be a terrible idea
@@sol-hb8zgdoing work on this would be terrible
@@oneshot1kill158 If you are just using Office apps and browsing the web it would do fine.
How? It’s more than powerful enough for browsing, Microsoft office, even video editing wouldn’t be too bad due to the gpu doing the encoding work
The best RGB is shoehorned RGB.
4:30 - Great placement of the sticker, blocking 90% of the exhaust port.
That does not exhaust anything. It is not a turbine video card.
@@dizy82 Some air will come out there, if you notice the aluminum heatsink at minute 3:45 some aluminum fins are directed towards the GPU backplate. On a 1660 ti it may not make any difference, but if it were a more powerful GPU it could add a few degrees.
Figured most would know to remove such trivial stickers prior to first boot :-)
This PC takes the $15 E5 1240 v3. Worth buying and selling the i5 for an equivalent amount.
E3-1240 V3, it also has an ATX psu and can be upgraded with an inexpensive adapter cable.
I'd grab a used i7-4790k and throw it in there and it would be a way better pairing for that 1660ti.
i am aslo thinking the same thing
Thanks Greg ... this video was really well done and I appreciate the fact you kept referencing that this a budget gaming PC that just gets the job done for the money.
Please, Crystal Mark disinfo or something similar so we can see the amount of hours used on that hard drive and any smart errors.
That HGST Ultrastar is an enterprise drive so it likely has a lot of hours
Will do for future videos!
Thank you for covering stuff like this Greg, always interesting, and always a pleasure.
A cheap Xeon E3-1230 v3 upgrade would balance this old PC out quite nicely.
That being said I literally picked up that HP without the GPU with a Xeon E3-1271v3 for £70, and has a 256GB M.2. SSD and 1TB HDD.
You know its a good video when Greg buys a PC from amazon.
Here we go again down the old rabbit hole of pc lol
I enjoy these videos for the nostalgia element. There was a time when I had to "Budget" my computer setups like this one. They did the job as needed. Glad I am much more fortunate now but know a lot of people can't afford custom systems. Happy people have a place that is affordable to jump into my passion for PC's. If all you have is $300, why not?
Enjoy the content keep it coming Greg!
I have done this multiple times and came out on top BIG TIME. No issues what so ever in any components. I need to do something like these videos.
Nice video Greg great value for your money.
This is a good find. You did it again.
Nice video. Nice performance for the level of machine this is.
Nice crunch sound from the mouse. 11/10, would run over it again.
Also the pc is pretty nice. for 300 dollars, thats still alot of pc to make use of.
Looking forward to the next video.
Thanks for watching! :-)
Really enjoy these videos. I thought I was getting a great deal when I was getting a desktop for around $200 until I started to play games. Keep up the great work and thanks.
Glad you like them!
It absolutely has an upgrade path. You could put a Xeon of i7 strength, probably go up to 32gb RAM, definitely newer storage, a 1080ti will run most anything you can throw at it. 4th gen is shockingly solid still, today.
I mean at that rate what good is 32 gigs lol. I mean yeah if you can avoid the CPU bottleneck on old enough hardware that becomes a serious issue, a 1080ti is freaking amazing you can literally play the newest games at 1080p. Not sure how DDR3 is gonna do it for yah, I mean DDR3 is fine, what I meant is 32gb isn't that important for what you're doing.
4th gen CPU will bottleneck a 1080 Ti so much
don't waste your money on 32gb of ddr3 there is zero point. you'll max out any cpu of that age gaming before you run out of ram lmao. and a 1650 is more a match for this rig as you could see the CPU bottlenecking the 1660 ti
Sure 4th gen was still used when the 1080ti came out but I don't care what argument you have it will bottleneck a 1080ti like no tomorrow unless the game is 99 percent GPU dependent and Windows isn't checking for updates
@@mitsuhh I have that same setup and it sure doesn't.
Explain how I got massive framerate boosts going from a Ryzen 5950X to a 12700K with a 1080 Ti.
Lies.@@thedungeondelver
Hi Greg! I appreciate videos like this not just because it's better to re-use older equipment when possible but also because most people looking for something to game on are on a budget. I mean, my son is happy running roblox and minecraft and something like this would be perfect for those titles.
Good video. The computer was better than expected.
I actually really like the hp prebuilds. My girl games on an elitedesk that came with that cpu.
Got it local for super cheap. Does really well for what it is
I bought one a year ago. Mine had a i7 4770, 16Gb ddr3, 1660 Super, 256SSD, and 3TB HDD for $330 + Tax. As long as you know what you're getting it's fine. I'm primarily using mine as an HTPC. I added a Blu-ray drive and 4TB of SSD storage...and I swapped out the OEM PSU. No complaints.
I own a bunch of those HGST drives. I use them in my NAS. Good drives, just loud.
Thr bad frame rates could also be a result of mixed ram speeds. Just one ram chip being slower even by just a few mhz could also give you the stutter you experienced
I use to have a PC like that as my gaming rig. Got an old optiplex from Free Geek with i7 4770 in it for around $200 then slapped a GPU in it. Was good to go. I've upgraded far and away since then and converted it into my home server till the motherboard finally died.
I feel like Greg really wanted to show us his truck.
This is like a slightly upscaled Optiplex refurbish.
Not sure why, c but did NOT expect Greg to be driving as TRX RAM lol Nice truck, dude!
I watched a free Greg Salazar video.
It was great!
Hey Greg, I love the channel and content! I guess you can talk about upgrade paths although from a prebuilt perspective, check out the Lenovo P520's preowned if you don't know about them already. There is at least some upgrading available. There is a little configuration needed but well worth the price. I had come across this and picked mine up off online for $212 w/o HD, GPU or OS. It was manufactured in 2020. It is Windows 11 compatible as well. It's a Xeon W-2135 6 core 3.7ghz - 4.5 processor with quad channel memory support with a 900 watt platinum power supply. It supports M.2 and PCIE 3.0. I was able to get 32GB ECC DDR4 2666 ram in quad channel included. This was a few months ago so keep this in mind. I paired a Samsung 980 M.2 1TB,$50 on sale and Zotac 1080 card $50 off of online. I know this is a tad over the $300 mark, but worth noting. This is just something to think about that can run AAA titles. If you can or have the means, I would love to see this thing benchmarked with a 4070. Keep up the great content!
also consider that if you have a quest 2 and a link cable, you can do some more in depth VR stuff, like VRChat not in quest mode. (more worlds/avatars full game access )
I have a similar setup , "prodesk G1 hp" same case and motherboard but a I5 4670 and i have 1050ti, still does what i need, but leaves alot to be desired . CPU and the slow ram is a big hit I feel, and yeah 100% you really would have to replace everything, to get into a newer platform. maybe save some sata ssd 's ? or if you have any like usb hub/audio cards installed those can be some what use full in newer systems depending.
awesome video, felt like it was aimed at me and my dumpster fire pc.
thanks greg
Best youtube tech chan so under rated
Nice truck Greg
Honestly this is dollar for dollar better then my first PC was as a teen if inflation is taken into account. For a teen or someone on a budget looking for a decent rig this is not a bad choice.
Its usable in newer titles with some graphics fiddleing and will still rock older titles beside. For $300 you would be hard pressed to find any gaming system console or otherwise on par.
Bout the only thing id be leery of is the HDD as that sounded like it was pretty close to going kerdead. And seeing as you can get a brand new 3TB drive for around $40 they shpuld have just upped the system price $20 and done that.
Did i get ripped off......probably. i love it man. Great videos.
I'm still using one of my HDDs from around 2013 in my current build as a data sink, and it is doing perfectly fine, showing no signs of nearing the end of its life.
Could you maybe include a bios settings check to see if any improvement is possible in future videos of this type
Can you guys do a video of budget game controllers for PCs? (Currently I'm looking at one called Fantech gp13 pro but I don't know if it's good or bad. PS I've never had a PS or a Xbox this will be my first time using a controller)
Those prebuilt computers are awesome for surfing the net, watching videos, downloading and storing drivers for other builds, email, retro games, going to not so secure sites etc. Just never enter important data and burn a disc with all the drivers for simple restoration when needed. I have some hard drives that are 20 plus years old that are still running. Just back up data on optical media or thumb drives. build one for the kids and let them play and learn the ends and outs of pc building, maintenance, etc.
I really enjoy these cheap purchase videos.
I would be curious to how viable this is to target for extra gaming computers, such as for a family, how do you target the ones you do, include the EBay or Amazon process would be good information.
I had a GTX970 in a Medion prebuild that also didn't have MSI branding but it did show up in hardware info as MSi (SuperTechGroup)or something like that.
I guess it's pretty common to find hardware that's none descriptive and yet still mysterious when you dig deeper.
The mouse crush was satisfying 🙏🏽
I think he improved it 😉
I have something similar, but with an i7. Currently running all my homelab docker containers.
That RGB on the first start up had me blown away.
3:45 Did a bit of searching online and the 1660ti seems to be an oem lenovo model.
I laugh so loud when the video switch to you getting in your truck 😂
With such a powerful video card you really need some kind of frame-limiting to help keep frame pacing in check. These older games were not run back in the day with draw distance so far or at such high resolutions, so you need a really fast load/decompress to get the assets in quick enough. You may see best results in future by running on Proton/Vulkan/Gamescope because a lot of work is done to get frame pacing even. You know this is the way because with ARC Intel is supporting DX12 native, and then translating everything else to DX12. And it makes a ton of sense, it's way more compatible and much less work.
There are 3D-printed universal I/O shields for motherboards that you can buy, mainly from eBay.
Takes a while to snip the holes for ports, but at least you have something there rather than nothing, and the cost is a price of coffee (maybe 2 coffees, the second one for you to drink while snipping)
Nice PC for the price. V-sync is must have option for systems like this. I use it even in my RTX 3060 Ryzen 5 5600 build. FPS is SO stable.
Nice work Greg. These project can be a real gateway to hobbyist pc work. Learn to fix these old pre-builts, realize there's a good cheap market of 115X parts and systems out there, collect and build and tinker. Oh! ddr3, that's gonna be the hard part soon unfortunately.
i still own a pc from 2015, still going strong. HP Envy 700 Series with an Intel Core i7 4790, RTX 2060 Super, and 12gb RAM. made some minor upgrades to it and still happy with it
The drive is probably loud because its a data center enterprise type drive, not really meant for desktops.
I have a slightly newer 4TB HGST Ultrastar and it is very loud indeed. It's fast and has been very reliable, but loud.
You're curiosity just saved someone's $300 Greg you're a hero!
main upgrade for this would be a matching 16GB kit vs the random sticks they tossed in, and dropping in a 4770/4790 would open some things up. In all if that's what you have in budget, it's not that bad to get started as a jumping off point.
SWBF2 really requires 4 cores 8 threads or more, so not surprised
Not a bad deal especially of an e-sports gamer or a younger kid wanting to play Roblox or Minecraft. Will be able to do those tasks for a few years, and it's still a pc to get work done for a job or school. Overall, not terrible maybe replace the hard drive.
Fun video. I personally don't love it for $300. Would rather suck it up and throw a bit more cash at it if I were in such a position. I feel like once you start explaining limitations and showing some performance that the joy of getting a PC is sort of sucked out of the situation.
Adding xeon with 8 threads to this build may do ressurection.
Those old HP systems are surprisingly stable and play games well. I have an HP 800 G1 SFF that I swapped into a new case with a larger PSU and a GT1030 (GDDR5) and I am very happy with the operation. I probably would not have swapped into another case but picked up a very nice AZZA case for $30 (tempered glass) which was a bargain.
tip for anyone who buys something this cheap
load nvidia control panel go to manage 3d settings go down to max frame rate turn on and limit it to 60FPS.
no matter the game you will not see over 60fps and as you seen in the GTA test it will help a lot.
some game's do not have vsync or a fps cap and my way will limit them games as well including minecraft.
I have my i9 12900k rtx 3080 limited to 144fps the same way because my monitor is 144hz so anymore than that is useless.
i have my games hard limited to 160 fps with gsync on because my monitor tends to get gsync flicker if i go above 160hz. In games like minecraft though, i like to keep my frames unlimited because having the game locked at 160 gives me frame time spikes when i would usually have a buttery smooth 500-600 fps with no latency or spikes
my default settings in most games are vsync off but using gsync to hard cap to 160
All that needs is a cpu it takes with hyper threading and i,d bet that utilisation would come down alot on the cpu and let the gpu run slightly better...
I have an i7 2600k and a gtx 1050 , i mainly play e sports titles don't see myself upgrading and only use pc for those games and nothing else and they run pretty good ngl
Greg is the motherboard able to handle a little better cpu? I mean for like another $40 maybe bump to a higher one in that family?
Sick truck
I wonder what the bios settings (if any) are. Granted, I wouldn't expect much.
As far as dead platforms go everyone loves AM4, I went the 2nd hand Intel B560 route and got an i3 10100, an Aurous B560M Pro AX motherboard, EVGA 600GQ, 64GB (32GB x2) DDR4 3600 Patriot Viper, Silverstone NAS case, and a couple of Optane SSD on fire sale, Oh and don't forget the ARC A380 LP from ASRock, A beast of a server/NAS for quite cheap. Even got a google TPU in the wifi slot.
For Storage I went with high capacity CMR HDD's, high-capacity consumer SSDs, and mid capacity HET enterprise SSD's along with an industrial SSD, a 32GB m10 Optane and a 118GB P1600X Optane.
I bought all slowly when everything was on sale or second hand/ EOL products. I can upgrade to 10 cores on the same Skylake architecture, or I can upgrade to Rocketlake with gen4 PCIE + extra lanes and AVX 512 support. Not bad for a dead platform.
Man... I'm selling an Optiplex right now with a 1660 Super, i5 6600 and 16GB of DDR4 for $250 that I can't get any movement on. Just shoe horned some RGB in it to see if it will get some interest. Maybe I should start selling them on Amazon. And I run a surface scan on the HDD's, as well as benchmark them and check the SMART status. Unless they have some absurd amount of power on hours, I just tell the buyer not to store any information they can't afford to lose. I generally tell them to use it for games storage. But yeah... that drive isn't sounding good.
As for this system, it's a 4th Gen i5. The power supply is good quality. I worked for HP around this time as a field tech, and in the four years I worked there, I replaced less than 10 power supplies in these things. Considering the cost of sending someone like me out versus not using a trash PSU, just using a decent PSU costs them less money.
does it have a m.2 slot?
@@nocturnalmayhem0 way too old
@nalmayhem0 Yep. Gen3x4. All Optiplex systems from the 40 series on up have m.2 slots. It is worth nothing that the 3040 did not. The pads are there, but they didn't solder the connector in. The 3050 did include the m.2 connector though. If you're asking if the 800 G1 in the video does, nope. You're not going to find an OEM system with an m.2 slot from the 4th Generation.
6th gen intel is not 4th gen. m2 slots on desktops for storage were effectively non existent at this time, and wouldn't be part of a prebuilt
@@TheCatherineCC Um... yeah, obviously. Where did I say 6th Gen was 4th Gen? As for m.2, I never brought it up. Someone asked me if the system I'm trying to sell has m.2, and yes it does. All Optiplex systems from the 40 series on up have m.2 slots, save for the 3040. No, the 4th Gen systems, outside of the Micro systems, did not.
In fact, do a Google image search of the 7040 MT motherboard. Take a look between the memory slots and the front I/O. That is an m.2 Gen3x4 slot. So, before you make a comment that's so confidently wrong, perhaps you should fact check yourself first.
@GregSalazar
I think you nailed the conclusion. Spot on in my personal and professional opinion. Although, I will say, in this particular case, that HP does have a few upgrade options. For example an i7-4770 is not expensive and would give a reasonable boost to performance. Also, even though this system is very CPU bottlenecked, an RTX card like a 2070 or 3060, would be doable as the workload would mostly be on the GPU. A bigger and faster SSD and HDD would be possible too. Each of these upgrades could be done over time and would be inexpensive. Last point, that HDD is fine. Many of the HGST line up sound like that. They work fine. I have a 6TB model that "sounds" even worse. Been running it for years, no issues.
8:20 bro's just casually flexing his TRX 😂
I have bought a similar PC but it had a GTX 1030 instead of a 1660. Worked great and was an amazing place holder until I was able to get my current PC running.
If there's a pos 1030 or, god help you, gt710 in it, that's completely different. Like iirc a 1050 is at the point of a RX 550, that card is a piece of shit, even at $100 in 2019 it was overpriced. I mean it was better than the nvidia counterpart that ain't sayin much. It just irritates me the 1030 scam you can make more margin without needing to stoop lower, I wish they put 980's in these.
As to what Greg said I have a soft spot for ass builds that are so potato but still show the power of computing, the little gamedevs had to work with back in the day that like some really cool games were literally using 8800GT's in SLI would be overkill, so you can't do the newest AAA shit but who cares, Plague Requiem sucked tbh, I really loved Cyberpunk but a huge number of modern games are sorta trash, when you dig deep into the oldies and niche you'll find better titles than modern $70 console games. I don't think you need an upgrade path at that point, anyway what greg was saying my point would be that once you get sufficiently sub-$500 you had to already cut costs and shave so many corners off your builld that like the VRMs alone on the board won't handle a really nice CPU anyway. Like the more you cheap out the problem becomes that a shitty inferior enough board can't be upgraded, you'll not be able to overclock and the cooling alone would be like 20% your entire budget, fast RAM don't mean shit basically just the cheapest SATA SSD boot drive imaginable, dodgy RAM, dodgier board, cheap ass used GPU. Like if you went with a newer board down under Steve absolutely roasted ASRock, I love their high end boards but I seen some real turds on modern prebuilts, like the cheapest near OEM shit imaginable and the stupid thing costs like $130. Meanwhile the board alone make me question it can handle anything better than a x400f or R5. In many cases you buy the shitty i3 and find out the rest of your system can't do much than i5 anyway, it really depends.
I've talked about this a lot, it's really tough because you can end up spending more money for newer shit and wind up with not much better peformance and still no real upgrade path because all you bought was pieces of shit that need to fully replace like literally every single other component in the system even to upgrade your graphics card. I actually hit that limit at one point in an old rig where I realize simply trying to replace one part meant I'd need to build a new rig anyway, it was saddled on DDR3 and while I could maximize it to play modern games that 3770k still couldn't even be overclocked, I was obviously not gonna do DDR4 on the thing, I replaced the PSU out of sheer paranoia (I smoked, it was a dusty fire hazard idk 8 year Dell PSUs soaked in dust make me unreasonably nervous) which is just as well iirc the power plugs didn't even work for a GTX 980 and it only had like one ribbon of SATA cables with no fan headers. And I mean NO fan headers like the shitty Dell mobo literally had one CPU fan, and one 80mm exhaust fan, no ability to point case fans so the entire case was literally ventilated by a blower cooler and the top mounted PSU.
So while it can be nice to be building on a new PC, like you gotta ask am I really getting that much better performance because my 10100f rig on the cheapest shitboard imaginable is also likely going to be EOL. Like if you're gonna buy an R3 or i3 that's old it's questionable what's the best it can do later, I built my newer system to get the best CPU possible and overclock it after an upgrade, but that's a midrangeish type system, when you're on a super budget and it's most bang for buck what you'll find is a lot of those features that'd normally make for an upgrade path be cut off for you. Like, I'm talking some boards have freaking 4pin CPU power, I'm talking zero VRM cooling with a few layers of PCB, the kind of shit that looks fine but causes massive headaches later when you try and do anything.
Imo while it is possible to just get a like 10300f, or get an R3 or R5, get a 3200g or even a 1600x, hope and pray your shitty b350 can work something good later let's face it at that point you're already going down the used part OEM build path, otherwise if you're making new enough parts it'll cost a bunch of money and you're not sticking a 13700k with a sizeable overclock upgrade on something that cost you $300 to build with "new" parts I tell you that right now.
It's some serious nerd hobby stuff, like I mean you have to actually enjoy Owlcat's games and actually take pleasure in the character sheets of Pathfinder games to be looking for just that best obscure combo of parts that'll still game like a champ and can reasonably be "upgraded" without costing money.
Of course the absolute cheapest thing you can do is find some junk office PC like these amazon sellers do, try and get it for free or like fifty bucks, slot in a RX 580 or something $100 tops, 1650s or 1060 or GTX 980 or RX 5500XT something in that ballpark, and get a cheap $50 SSD boot drive. If you're lucky it came with a hard drive for added mp4 and older game installs, more likely the HDD got sent though a shredder though.
Greg, did you SMART test the hdd to see how many hours and how many power cycles it had on it?
Probably a lot of hours (likely 40k+) but not many power cycles since it's an enterprise drive
Kingfast makes okay-ish ssd:s. I've ordered a few from aliexpress and they're a fine, low cost option for testbenches. IDK about the 512gb one, but the 250gb can often be found for around 13€
Even with AM4 (in Canada) a ATX board and cpu bundle is around $200. Then RAM, case, and video card and you're well over $700.
Definitely a WIN baby! $300! Incredible. Pretty clean system too. Love seeing these retro's come back to life again!
We all know what HP stands for, Hope and Pray. I love the way the PSU is mounted high in the case and swings outware. You don't need to worry about your apps crashing as this case will crash before that happens.
HP power supplies ARE top lol. Great vid 👍
My son is using this model of pc but it has an i7-4771 cpu and a zotac 1650 that runs off just the bus power. He plays minecraft and roblox so not very demanding. I swapped out the hard drive for a ssd and he's been content with it.
I have one upgrade which would make a pretty significant impact in gaming performance. Chuck that i5 and spend $40 or so one an i7-4770, or even better a 4790. It will have slightly higher clocks out of the gate, and the added hyperthreading can make a pretty big difference in CPU performance when gaming. It also has I created L3 cache (8MB vs 6MB). I did something similar in two of my older Haswell systems and it gave them new life. 4 cores without hyperthreading just does not as not cut it anymore.
I agree you shouldn't think about an upgrade path too much at this price point. But I would try to avoid systems that use proprietary components. Even being able to reuse a case would help in the future. Admittedly at that price point you probably stuck with a pre built from Dell or HP or something similar.
Your only other option is to buy used stuff.
Might be fun to see you try to put together a budget system from ebay/facebook marketplace. A lot could be learned from it.
I did this essentially on my own. I got an old hp workstation from her company, bumped up the cpu to an i7-6700k, Radeon rx 580 and switched the hard disk to ssd. Thing basically runs everything I throw at it. Paid about 280 bucks for everything.
I'm pretty sure it's follow up also had DDR3 but with 6th gen cpu's and the next two versions had 6th and 7th gen cpu'd with either 2133 MHz DDR4 or 2400 MHz DDR4.
that GPU has the power plug facing to the front! Some weird company no one ever heard of before gets it correct while the big players still put the plug facing towards the side panel...
What was the SMART info using crystal disk info for the HDD?
Easy upgrade path for this: upgrade platform entirely but keep the 1660TI, then upgrade the GPU later to accommodate the platform upgrade, simple as that.
I upgraded a Dell Optiplex SFF 7010 to be a modest gaming system like this one performance wise. I'm not worried about an upgrade path. It plays my Steam library and that's all I care about.
This one interested me specifically because I'm in the market to replace an old Inspiron 660. Knowing support for Win 10 will be ending in 2025 makes a Win 11 system the must buy in my mind. Got any opinions or feedback on that, Greg?
Upgrade path, 32gb of ram, better psu as this is an ATX and only needs a $20 adapter cable, it will boot off a Nvme in the pci slot using clover boot and it also will run Xeons so you can get 4 cores ,8 threads and 4ghz on turbo boost.Solid and reliable.
There is an upgrade path - a 4c/8th xeon, and an Aliexpress RTX A2000 with the frankendrivers.
That 1660 is one that Lenovo manufactures, I have the same one.
Honestly, I thought the front RGB was really charming. It's not sleek and modern but that wouldn't fit the rig anyway. The way the front panel diffuses it almost looks like it was made for it, I agree it was a good choice. They didn't just chuck an RGB bar somewhere on the case and call it a day, some actual thought went into it.
My "rig" is an Asus G551JM laptop turning 10 this year. It has an i7-4710HQ and a GTX 860M, I upgraded it from 8GB of RAM to 16GB a while ago. 128GB SSD boot drive and 1TB HDD. I think it cost over 1000€ new, but it has served me well for many years. When it started slowing down I opened it up to dust it and reinstalled Windows, started running almost good as new. I've since learned more about computers and intend to actually take apart the cooler and clean it properly and reapply new thermal paste to see if that might help it more. But I have still been regularly gaming on this, Warframe runs pretty smooth at 60fps and it does actually run BG3 on low graphics averaging around 35fps (sometimes even going up to the 75fps limit of my monitor), which I think is pretty impressive given its age. (Though in act 3 it drops to 11fps at times, but act 3 seems to have performance issues in general.) My only real gripe now is it being a laptop since the RAM and harddrive are about the only things I can upgrade, but a laptop is what I needed when I got it.
All this to say, you shouldn't discount older rigs for gaming, they might surprise you. If you just want a computer that is able to run games and won't break the bank, something like this could work just fine. For $300 this is not bad at all.
Thanks!
3 of my sons got cheap optiplex systems, upgraded their PSU (with some mods) and added GPU. All have i7 4790 with 1080 Ti, and play pretty much anything they want. Maybe $300 in on each machine.
Wonder what kind of performance uplift you'd get from spending another $20-$40 on Ebay for a 4770 or 4790. Same TDP, both have hyper-threading so 4 core/8 thread, and the L3 cache is boosted from 6mb to 8mb?
Could do a whole nother video...................