@@MilerGamer69 It's intended for handheld for now but it is still using Linux and has a desktop environment of it's own. It can work on a regular PC if they want it to. A substitute that I am using right now is Linux Mint though, works great. Though if Steam OS does comes to PC, I'd return the nVidia card my dad gave me back to him or give it to my brother so I can go get a Radeon.
Love this. I bought an Optiplex 7010 Small Form Factor for $125 a few weeks ago. Came with I7 3770, 16GB of RAM and a 128gb Samsung SSD. The graphics card was a GT 1030, but I wanted a bit more power. So I bought an RX 6400 like you did and it's awesome! Temps are a little high but I put an expansion bay fan that exhausts the air out from under the graphics card and it lowered temps by 15 degrees Celsius. I mainly play city builders/survival sims. Just waiting on my 1TB SSD for games to arrive and I'm set!
I did (almost) exactly what you did, except I got a MT rather than the SFF model of the 7010. It's much more room with more upgrade potential and hardware possibilities. Mine did not include the GPU but I paid $120, and dropped in a 550 watt PSU, and a GTX 970 (barely fit, had to be the EVGA brand, and not MSI). Next I'm upping the ram to 32Gs.
@@rockrecordreport7136 are you using holoiso or another one? im trying to figure out which one to install. Im leaning towards Bazzite rn, but idk. Any advice?
I always love seeing SteamOS 3 on various systems you review, even if it is just HoloISO. I think getting more people to see and appreciate the performance and compatibility of Linux is awesome, not to mention advocating for people to spend less and buy older hardware to reduce waste.
Problem is, as I see it, a lot of people often don't even understand that this actually "just another linux distro". I seen people argue, that it's not good for desktop, because "it's closed and created for console", they thinking, that smth similar to OS on Nintendo Switch when in reality, it's just Arch Linux with locked / directory and slapped gamescope on top of it.
If there's a spare PCIe slot you can typically put a cheap PCIe to M.2 adapter card in to use an NVME SSD. Although boot support may not be present, depending on the BIOS.
These Dell Optiplex computers have been my secret weapon for servers and spare desktops around my house. Decent i-7 processors on the cheap. Worth mentioning those are meant for business-use, the USB ports and I/O are very high quality from my experience
@@EhurtAfy yeah, these business machines have also had good I/O in my personal experience as well. good multi monitor support and modern input supports are thankfully a priority in the business space haha
Ive seen some really slick paint job on some of these optiplex's. My favorite has been painting the metalpart blue, i thought id hate it untill i saw it, sheer chef's kiss worthy
I ran this exact computer with a 1650 for 2 years or so. It was startling how well it worked, although the 1650 pulled >60 watts and sounded like a jet engine.
Earlier this week I finished off my smallest ITX build yet and put steam os in it. I haven't played much on it yet and was worried about performance and then you make a video with the exact specs as my build. Thank you.
These kinds of videos have me excited to finally build something like this, even with steam os the emulation potential seems amazing, definitely going to reference this when I'm ready to finally build something like this! Great video as always!
if your wanting build something like this i would start with a HP Z440 with a E5 1650 V4 ,(performs close to a new Ryzen 4500 and better than 7th gen I7 7700) its going cost a bit more(150 to 200$) to build but you will have PC that will play anything very well, im interested in the steam deck OP but this pc is a waist of money that could have put to something worth while, and a 6400 on this bus gen is a terrible thing to portray in a positive light , just look on ebay for the PC and know the smallest power supply is 525 watt 85 plus gold rated power supply with 2, 6 pin power connectors, an 8 pin adapter is 10$ if you wanted to go with a 1660 super (140$)or rx 5700(180$) used , but used 75$ rx 570 has single 6 pin, or new 120$ (rx 580 sp) its just new built 570 that has a 580 name, and has proper AMD support as a 570, the older Polaris GPU out perform the 6400 by quite bit even on a 4th gen pcie bus, and the 6400 looses 30% of it performance on a 3rd gen bus . The HP Z440 was top of the line in its day and has quad channel RAM support something really longer found even in most modern high end PCs and has a performance air cooling system stock
Video's go out of date very quickly for this type of stuff, your best bet is to google it when you're ready. This is what I always do when modding my systems, so the same logic applies.
Neat little machine. I bought one for my father so that he has something to occasionally play newer games on and with a low profile GTX 1650 it is quite capable. The graphics card gets a bit warm and runs up to the thermal limit, but it can be somewhat mitigated by adjusting the fan curve using MSI Afterburner or a similar program.
Still using an old Mini ITX Server I put together as my steambox after watching these videos. The R6400 really does keep up. Upgrading the parts is so cheap on this thing now. It worked fine with 8gb for most games, but eventually bumped it to 16gb with some ram off ebay. Best low cost build for the living room. Nice to have when waiting for the family to get together instead of hiding away in the game room. Genuinely surprised how this 10 year old Intel CPU with the RX6400 can even manage 4k on some games. Usually performance trade offs, age of game, etc. Still it makes me interested in building a more powerful ryzen setup with the next generation of low profile gpu's. Assuming I'll even need one with these APU's. Really too bad Holo ISO doesn't support Geforce and Arc.
Personally I like that the Steam Deck has made leaps and bounds in Linux gaming support and also AMD for making driver-based upscaling of FSR to really get the most out of older hardware so they don't go to landfill which is really great. Get rid of the dell case for something a little more stylish and you can have a pretty good modern steam machine.
yep not only would I build one, but my teenage kids would be in on it too. The eldest boy has made his laptop into an emulation machine, and is helping his mates do the same. I've always liked your SBC content and am really enjoying your emulation builds and testing content too.
I have learned how to do so many cool tech things on my tiiiiiny budget on this channel and I want to thank you for that. This is really cool and would be a lot better than my current computer. I wish I trusted myself not to screw up ordering the right bits. Or that I could afford it without saving up for 5 or 6 months. I gotta make some friends who are good with this kinda stuff so they can help me when I am ready. I used to have a friend like that who helped me put together my current pc but I lost him during the pandemic.
Cyberpunk..... that's all I mainly want a PC for..... thank you SO much for playing that game first! Like my gosh this is FAR more in my reach. No less and extra stuff. And it has a disc drive?! Definitely going this path for sure!
Yeah, I'm getting one of these soon it's gonna come in the mail soon, I'm excited for it especially since my gaming PC finally broke it was 8 years old.
Mate I'm so glad I seen this build I was looking at the rx 6400 as an option as I have just bought one of these your video has just confirmed it for me this is the way to go so thankyou
Wow, umm, kind of amazing, I JUST finished putting together a very similar project last night with an EliteDesk 800 G3 and an RX 550! I guess glad I got all my stuff before this video spikes the prices, lol!
I'm surprised you haven't taken a look at ChimeraOS yet... It's basically a Linux build with the steam big picture mode and has a web interface for the backend. It boots straight into big picture and is built solely as an OS for a console type PC.
@@shadowtheimpure The new UI is available on ChimeraOS, you just need to change from old big picture to the new one. There is also a Desktop mode available.
@@shadowtheimpure Yeah, it's in there, but the steam deck interface is still not great... Big picture is better because it actually works with something other than an amd gpu. Chimera just runs the steam application as supplied by valve, so valve is who is responsible for adding it to the general steam release. And I don't see valve fixing the issues with it working on a non AMD GPU anytime soon.
@@evileyevirtue That is not on the valve, That is on Nvidia. Nvidia support for linux has been notoriously bad for quite a while and it's just now starting to get to the point where it can start to be folded in, they use proprietary drivers and with devs being locked out of changes they make, that can and will break things. They only support x11 window manager ATM and their working on Wayland, but it's been 9 months andddd still nada. X11 is ok, but it's fairly heavy compared to Wayland.... Also some desktop environments can not work with x11
I like to see this. in the coming era of degrowth - voluntary or otherwise - the pc gaming hobby is going to need to transition away from prioritizing power at any cost and towards maintaining as much performance as possible while prioritizing price & energy efficiency. builds like this highlight what's possible.
Crypto mining has absolutely destroyed the second-hand PC part market. Buying cheap OEM business PCs like this and turning them into decent gaming rigs is far more economical than dropping $2K for a PC that can max settings. What's crazy is that even circa 2014-2015, you could still build a PC that would play everything at max for like $1200~. Now, your GPU will cost that if you buy it new, which is insane.
With a little extra tinkering you could go for an i3 system and then swap in a xeon. I got the E3-1246V3 which benches out to about the same as the 4790.
he hit a million !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! congrats man you work the hard always watch your vids can't wait to see what you make next
Great Video... Always Love the the SFF budget builds... would really like to see a follow up with this PC and the A2000 in a Linux/Windows gaming PC... Thanks so much and I look forward to all your videos...
Thx for these vids ETA. First off this REALLY works. Built one with a 7020. One thing to note, the 3020 does not support pcie3.0 -- so be aware of that. Also no wifi on these older units, get a usb dongle -- but best to hardline anyway. Its still doable as ETA demonstrates. I also recommend going with a 2.4ghz dongled controller -- no bluetooth mayhem.
Great Guide! I had an Orange warning. "BATTERY LOW. RESTARTING." Ended up downloading the nightly update, and it fixed that issue. I now have Valve up and running. I ended up spending $85 for the 9020, $140 for a new LP Single slot 6400 GPU, 512Gig $24 SSD, got another $16 stick of 8Gig (DDR works better dual stick?) and 16meg is always better. I also bought a $28 Wifi6/BT PCIe mini Card with an $5 "external USB header". Had an older Monitor with built in USB Hub, mechanical keyboard, cheap mouse, a USB Headset and Mic. I ended up buying a BT Premium KingKong2 Pro Controller. In the end, $300 and some old parts and should have a decent game "console". I mounted the Monitor, KB/M/Controller "cubby" to the PC and attached a T-Handle. So it all can be picked up as one unit. though it's far from "portable", it is "totable" and takes up very little desk space and can be played in similar to ways you can play a console.
I think it’s only a matter of time that once Steam OS is fleshed out enough and enough developers bring their games to it(either with proton or native versions) that Valve is going to launch their own steam machine/ game console.
@@Jordan-zk2rf no I’m talking about something like the Xbox and PlayStation. Like what Valve tried to do before with the Steam Machines. But without all the different and expensive hardware configurations.
It's absolutely headed that way. Manufacturers have slowly been pushing us towards the all in one, must rebuy an entire unit to upgrade path for a while now. The software makers are happy to follow suite and create their various walled gardens to keep people in.
Another option is to install Batocera and get Steam installed on that so you can run your games and emulators on a more stable os with a controller-friendly interface and Nvidia is an option. Instead of using a hacked recovery image. I do that on my arcade machine and it works great. The performance here for the money is great though!
I’m super impressed with stuff like this. It is well worth looking to see what is available locally. You could get more computer for less money than eBay, not that there’s anything wrong with eBay.
I've built a fair few of these for my younger cousins for birthdays and such. Super cheap and there are so many steam os games they never run out of content. Much better than a console and more useful since you can use it like a normal pc too for most common tasks like web and streaming.
This performance is insane for $180, most of these games didnt even hit these fps counts on PS4Pro or One X. Have absolutely 0 need for yet another PC but tempted to do this just because its possible and the performance is incredible at the price point.
This is pretty nifty. Though that lack of an iso does give me pause. If they compiled that os into an iso for easy install, I'd be alot more sanguine about running one of these.
I was using a 4770K (my friend ran it from 2013-2017) and he gave me the motherboard and CPU because he upgraded. He had 16GB of G.Skill sniper 1866MHz RAM as well. Prior to that, I was running an FX-8350. I used that 4770K all the way up to 2022, upgraded at the end of last year to a second-hand 9700K and a motherboard that my friend gave me. Honestly, I'm impressed the 4770K lasted that long. I didn't have to even question whether or not a game would run. Everything, including newer titles ran perfectly fine. It's crazy how good it just works.
@@husky3g Yes, I have a 4790K I built in 2014. Still use it today as my productivity/internet system, I do all my gaming on a CometLake 10700K system. The trick is to buy i7 though, not i5. Old i5's are pretty much useless nowadays while the hyperthreading in the i7's lets them soldier on.
Steam big picture mode is now using the new steam deck UI on the stable release! So if you don't want to install holo os just use windows with big picture mode :D
Honestly if you on budget you can get SATAIII SSD 512gb on Newegg for $25 usd or 1tb for as low as $40. A lot of HD on these used office systems are 6+ year old and suffering bit rot so are even slower than a new HD.
I wish there was a way to custom build a handheld pc in a similar manner. Obviously options would be more limited but it would be cool to choose ur hardware, shell, screen, controls, etc to ur liking.
I'm sure it CAN be done but it definitely would require a LOT of custom work. If a company would just make the controller/Mobo PCB portion - a barebones kit with no RAM, no CPU/GPU would be incredible. All they'd have to do is wire it up to be used with a newer AMD APU, make it a little bigger than the Steam Deck and use an M.2 SSD and it would be fantastic. Problem is, even with the technology we have today, a Steam Deck would still probably be cheaper. It's insane how cheap Valve was able to make the Steam Deck.
Great! I have the very same model but with 4790T cpu, 16gb ram and 480ssd, but I'm rocking a GT1030 for the moment... Will defnetly upgrading it to an AMD card and converting it into a Steam OS gaming machine! Cheers!
I wonder if we will finally see the rise of Gaming Linux Computers, with prebuilt PCs that shed the cost for windows for slightly better performance at a low price?
I’m having a lot of congestion myself over in South Raleigh and Cary, I think I caught this bug maybe Friday always waking up nose stopped up 🤦♂️ GGs get well now 🦅
Great video. I’d love to see you do a video on using this (and also your higher end steam deck OS builds) as the host for streaming through steam link to iPads, G Cloud and even a steam deck. I’m a bit curious about it as I have a few uses cases for this but think it will be fun to try as well. Thx!
The Spider-Man games gave me a lot of trouble, but I saw on the internet that the game plays a lot better with Hyper Threading disabled on the BIOS, it worked for me at least.
i brought a Xbox series X for my son but there are some PC games he wants to play and I think this would be a cool setup for him to play with and introduce him to PC building.
Oh yeah the price performance is epic. And technically it could be made even better. For about the same price. I'm a fan of that slim floor factor as well. Promotes airflow.
You will get simlar performance with low profile 1650 GDDR6 at half the cost . A2000 has alot more cuda cores but they are designed for computing not gaming . It make absoletly no financial sense in using workstation/server gpu in gaming . You are paying for ECC memory and computing cuda cores that you will not use LMAO
One thing I love in this build is the fact of when this i7 4790 was produced, the most powerful cards on the market were the GTX 780 Ti and R9 290X, and this RX 6400 today has the same horsepower as these cards with a fraction of power consumption and a tenth of the size...Technology evolution just amaze me every time.
Can’t find the parts for the price you got them for at the moment, but this is an interesting idea. Seems to perform about as well as my Series S, maybe even better. And I’ve been looking to switch over to a Steam machine for a while now, due to having a much larger library (since both Xbox and PS exclusives are available there). I want to see how well this performs on Windows though. I know how to make the Steam Deck UI launch on Windows, so maybe it would be a better option performance wise.
I have the same gpu in HP Prodesk 600 G2 works great.I bought i7-6700 and added ram and Rx 6400 (I paid 190 euros for mine tho :( ) Slapped in 2 kingston 480gb ssd and sawed away pci-e 1x slot back to smack in nvme ssd adapter for faster ssd to boot from, yes i know 1x slot limits the ssd but it still works great. Didnt have a single issue apart from windows 11 audio crashing and the problem with that was replacing some dll. Apart from that all running great
Thanks for the video and I think should've waited for this vid to come out instead of purchasing a budget mini pc that has lesser clock speed and boost speed even if I try to add an eGPU , next time I will try this thanks.
I built a very similar system, but with a more up to date 7070 SFF, ninth gen I think it is, specifically for a portable standy by for some of the reasonably graphics intensive work I do. Frankly it's not a great deal different to the Ryzen/2080 primary desktop set up. There's a really decent performance/cash ratio in second user systems.
I've got a couple of these sff pc's just waiting to be cracked opened and a gpu added like this one for my daughter and I for her first project. Mod a pre-built and then work towards a custom full build in a few years for her.
Videos like this are the reason I even have a PC right now when I think back on it, so I'm always partial to a build like this. I'd also add that I personally went with an i5 HP and I eventually upgraded to an i7 4790k (but a 4790 is probably enough for most people if you're running this method.) I learned under Windows, the UBS3 ports on the old HP Elitedesk G1s are kinda hobbled by a bug no one cares to fix so you may or may not get full speed on them, but it might be better with this without the offending Windows drivers. Another thing is I was a huge Vsync addict, because I had learned to HATE screen tearing with a passion, but I didn't realize until recently how much it hurt performance if you really don't need it. Turn it off to get the frame rates ETA is getting and only turn it on if the tearing becomes an issue.
a 4790k is very similar to a 4790 in stock clocks since a hp wont support overclocking (it is faster, but barely) so considering that you have to spend so much money on a new cpu i think the very tiny performance improvement just isnt worth it. plus you have to update the bios also about tearing, if you have a monitor that supports amd freesync then you won't get screen tearing issues without vsync so long as you have an rx 6400 for instance
The only downside to this generation of OptiPlex is how power is routed through the mother board. So when the PSU fails is fails it blows everything attached I had 3 of this generation and each failed differently 1 the PSU fried the HDD and SSDs the other the board wont turn on half the time with its power button lol. The third is a ticking time bomb. I replaced the 2 with OptiPlex 7040 which can be found on eBay or locally for 80 to 100 depending on configuration and also support m.2 SSDs. Later dells did away with the weird power connector for sata power.
Im planning on building a similar pc. Buying a used Dell Precision 5820 or 7820 and adding a gtx 1080. Got a whole bunch of ECC Ram to go with it plus several spare m.2 and 2.5sata drives i can install. Should make for a nice gaming pc for cheap. Eventually i might turn it into a test bench/ home plex server.
The problem I had with the RX 6400 is that it ran super hot. The cooling fans are pretty terrible and putting any sort of serious load on the GPU the temps would climb up in to the higher 80’s. I know these little SSF cases were part of the culprit as they retain a lot of heat and have no ventilation or any space for additional fans which would not aid in the card staying cool.
I have an NVMe drive for all Steam games in the PCIe x4 slot. Can't boot from it but great for games. This has 1x PCIe x 16 and a second slot for the NVMe
hey man been watching you for years and i just noticed we all don't know how you look have you ever done a face reveal or a video where we can see you talking to us all !!
The only thing you didn’t mention is the noise of the machine itself. I have done exact upgrade here on Optiplex 7060 + RX6400LP and it’s like a vacuum cleaner with its noise.
SteamOS is a million times better than trying to game on Linux a decade ago. I think I had about 100 Steam games back then and only 5-10 had any sort of Linux functionality. Now, I have over 1000 Steam games and most of them work perfect on SteamOS
i just noticed this but it seems like valve recently switched the big picture mode to same as what steam deck has. it kinda lags for me but it seems to function. 🙂
Wow, you're right. I've been waiting for Valve to make that switch since my main PC is exclusively connected to a large OLED TV in a home theater setup. I'd rarely use old Big Picture mode because it was clunky and the store front rarely worked either.
The moment that Steam OS is supported on desktops and accepts nvidia cards, I am changing all systems to it.
I Don't know that is going to happen because SteamOS is for gameHandled consoles
@@MilerGamer69 it is yet
@@MilerGamer69 It's intended for handheld for now but it is still using Linux and has a desktop environment of it's own. It can work on a regular PC if they want it to. A substitute that I am using right now is Linux Mint though, works great.
Though if Steam OS does comes to PC, I'd return the nVidia card my dad gave me back to him or give it to my brother so I can go get a Radeon.
Love this. I bought an Optiplex 7010 Small Form Factor for $125 a few weeks ago. Came with I7 3770, 16GB of RAM and a 128gb Samsung SSD. The graphics card was a GT 1030, but I wanted a bit more power. So I bought an RX 6400 like you did and it's awesome! Temps are a little high but I put an expansion bay fan that exhausts the air out from under the graphics card and it lowered temps by 15 degrees Celsius. I mainly play city builders/survival sims. Just waiting on my 1TB SSD for games to arrive and I'm set!
Omg this bundle for 125$ is epic
I did (almost) exactly what you did, except I got a MT rather than the SFF model of the 7010. It's much more room with more upgrade potential and hardware possibilities. Mine did not include the GPU but I paid $120, and dropped in a 550 watt PSU, and a GTX 970 (barely fit, had to be the EVGA brand, and not MSI). Next I'm upping the ram to 32Gs.
Can you give me a link to the expansion bay fan?
@@rockrecordreport7136 are you using holoiso or another one? im trying to figure out which one to install. Im leaning towards Bazzite rn, but idk. Any advice?
I always love seeing SteamOS 3 on various systems you review, even if it is just HoloISO. I think getting more people to see and appreciate the performance and compatibility of Linux is awesome, not to mention advocating for people to spend less and buy older hardware to reduce waste.
Problem is, as I see it, a lot of people often don't even understand that this actually "just another linux distro". I seen people argue, that it's not good for desktop, because "it's closed and created for console", they thinking, that smth similar to OS on Nintendo Switch when in reality, it's just Arch Linux with locked / directory and slapped gamescope on top of it.
If there's a spare PCIe slot you can typically put a cheap PCIe to M.2 adapter card in to use an NVME SSD. Although boot support may not be present, depending on the BIOS.
I honestly like how these dell chassis look - the perforated metal front looks cool and I like the perforated rear as well for ventilation
Yeah me also, I really like the sleek understated industrial look.
These Dell Optiplex computers have been my secret weapon for servers and spare desktops around my house. Decent i-7 processors on the cheap. Worth mentioning those are meant for business-use, the USB ports and I/O are very high quality from my experience
@@EhurtAfy yeah, these business machines have also had good I/O in my personal experience as well. good multi monitor support and modern input supports are thankfully a priority in the business space haha
Ive seen some really slick paint job on some of these optiplex's. My favorite has been painting the metalpart blue, i thought id hate it untill i saw it, sheer chef's kiss worthy
I have to agree. Things get really interesting after motherboard swaps.
I ran this exact computer with a 1650 for 2 years or so. It was startling how well it worked, although the 1650 pulled >60 watts and sounded like a jet engine.
I also got a pc with 1650, does it perform better than windows??
What were you running gms at low settings? What fps?
Earlier this week I finished off my smallest ITX build yet and put steam os in it. I haven't played much on it yet and was worried about performance and then you make a video with the exact specs as my build. Thank you.
These kinds of videos have me excited to finally build something like this, even with steam os the emulation potential seems amazing, definitely going to reference this when I'm ready to finally build something like this! Great video as always!
if your wanting build something like this i would start with a HP Z440 with a E5 1650 V4 ,(performs close to a new Ryzen 4500 and better than 7th gen I7 7700) its going cost a bit more(150 to 200$) to build but you will have PC that will play anything very well, im interested in the steam deck OP but this pc is a waist of money that could have put to something worth while, and a 6400 on this bus gen is a terrible thing to portray in a positive light , just look on ebay for the PC and know the smallest power supply is 525 watt 85 plus gold rated power supply with 2, 6 pin power connectors, an 8 pin adapter is 10$ if you wanted to go with a 1660 super (140$)or rx 5700(180$) used , but used 75$ rx 570 has single 6 pin, or new 120$ (rx 580 sp) its just new built 570 that has a 580 name, and has proper AMD support as a 570, the older Polaris GPU out perform the 6400 by quite bit even on a 4th gen pcie bus, and the 6400 looses 30% of it performance on a 3rd gen bus . The HP Z440 was top of the line in its day and has quad channel RAM support something really longer found even in most modern high end PCs and has a performance air cooling system stock
Video's go out of date very quickly for this type of stuff, your best bet is to google it when you're ready. This is what I always do when modding my systems, so the same logic applies.
Neat little machine. I bought one for my father so that he has something to occasionally play newer games on and with a low profile GTX 1650 it is quite capable. The graphics card gets a bit warm and runs up to the thermal limit, but it can be somewhat mitigated by adjusting the fan curve using MSI Afterburner or a similar program.
Great build, just a shame the RX 6400 is so expensive outside the US.
139€ in europe
@@SweatyFeetGirl Cheapest I can find it in the uk is £140 (157 euros) for a low profile version
@@bulletpunch9317 it's 140$ in SEA
180$ in Türkiye. Absolutely a no for that price in here.
yeah the low profile ones are ~160€ in germany with nobody selling them used
The intro with the robot gaming with the rain in background is why I come to these videos all the time
Still using an old Mini ITX Server I put together as my steambox after watching these videos. The R6400 really does keep up. Upgrading the parts is so cheap on this thing now. It worked fine with 8gb for most games, but eventually bumped it to 16gb with some ram off ebay. Best low cost build for the living room. Nice to have when waiting for the family to get together instead of hiding away in the game room. Genuinely surprised how this 10 year old Intel CPU with the RX6400 can even manage 4k on some games. Usually performance trade offs, age of game, etc. Still it makes me interested in building a more powerful ryzen setup with the next generation of low profile gpu's. Assuming I'll even need one with these APU's. Really too bad Holo ISO doesn't support Geforce and Arc.
Personally I like that the Steam Deck has made leaps and bounds in Linux gaming support and also AMD for making driver-based upscaling of FSR to really get the most out of older hardware so they don't go to landfill which is really great. Get rid of the dell case for something a little more stylish and you can have a pretty good modern steam machine.
yep not only would I build one, but my teenage kids would be in on it too. The eldest boy has made his laptop into an emulation machine, and is helping his mates do the same. I've always liked your SBC content and am really enjoying your emulation builds and testing content too.
That's a great idea! I never considered SteamOS for a PC to just play a few games and watching movies or TV.
I hope game developers start to release native linux games so it eliminates the need for a translation layer.
I have learned how to do so many cool tech things on my tiiiiiny budget on this channel and I want to thank you for that.
This is really cool and would be a lot better than my current computer. I wish I trusted myself not to screw up ordering the right bits. Or that I could afford it without saving up for 5 or 6 months.
I gotta make some friends who are good with this kinda stuff so they can help me when I am ready. I used to have a friend like that who helped me put together my current pc but I lost him during the pandemic.
Sorry for your loss.
Cyberpunk..... that's all I mainly want a PC for..... thank you SO much for playing that game first! Like my gosh this is FAR more in my reach. No less and extra stuff. And it has a disc drive?! Definitely going this path for sure!
Dang performance better than xb1/ps4 and i can play Sony and Microsoft, Gonna get me one of these I have a spare 1060 collecting dust.
Yeah, I'm getting one of these soon it's gonna come in the mail soon, I'm excited for it especially since my gaming PC finally broke it was 8 years old.
Mate I'm so glad I seen this build I was looking at the rx 6400 as an option as I have just bought one of these your video has just confirmed it for me this is the way to go so thankyou
Wow, umm, kind of amazing, I JUST finished putting together a very similar project last night with an EliteDesk 800 G3 and an RX 550! I guess glad I got all my stuff before this video spikes the prices, lol!
Soo this is basically a Steam Machine like Valve imagined all those years ago haha
Steam Deck really changed the whole Budget/PC Gaming market :D
I'm surprised you haven't taken a look at ChimeraOS yet... It's basically a Linux build with the steam big picture mode and has a web interface for the backend. It boots straight into big picture and is built solely as an OS for a console type PC.
The question is has Chimera migrated over to the new UI? The old 'big picture mode' kinda sucked.
@@shadowtheimpure The new UI is available on ChimeraOS, you just need to change from old big picture to the new one. There is also a Desktop mode available.
@@shadowtheimpure Yeah, it's in there, but the steam deck interface is still not great... Big picture is better because it actually works with something other than an amd gpu.
Chimera just runs the steam application as supplied by valve, so valve is who is responsible for adding it to the general steam release. And I don't see valve fixing the issues with it working on a non AMD GPU anytime soon.
@@evileyevirtue You're thinking of HoloISO. You can use SteamUI with WINDOWS as your underlying OS if you want to.
@@evileyevirtue That is not on the valve, That is on Nvidia.
Nvidia support for linux has been notoriously bad for quite a while and it's just now starting to get to the point where it can start to be folded in, they use proprietary drivers and with devs being locked out of changes they make, that can and will break things.
They only support x11 window manager ATM and their working on Wayland, but it's been 9 months andddd still nada. X11 is ok, but it's fairly heavy compared to Wayland.... Also some desktop environments can not work with x11
I like to see this. in the coming era of degrowth - voluntary or otherwise - the pc gaming hobby is going to need to transition away from prioritizing power at any cost and towards maintaining as much performance as possible while prioritizing price & energy efficiency. builds like this highlight what's possible.
This! Windows has been driving the gradual increase of hardware performance for little improvement to the end user. Linux is helping break the cycle.
Crypto mining has absolutely destroyed the second-hand PC part market. Buying cheap OEM business PCs like this and turning them into decent gaming rigs is far more economical than dropping $2K for a PC that can max settings.
What's crazy is that even circa 2014-2015, you could still build a PC that would play everything at max for like $1200~. Now, your GPU will cost that if you buy it new, which is insane.
With a little extra tinkering you could go for an i3 system and then swap in a xeon.
I got the E3-1246V3 which benches out to about the same as the 4790.
just an update on the bios for most needed for that swap i believe :)
why would you do that ? LMAO
@@dannyt1705 really cheap
he hit a million !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! congrats man you work the hard always watch your vids can't wait to see what you make next
Great Video... Always Love the the SFF budget builds... would really like to see a follow up with this PC and the A2000 in a Linux/Windows gaming PC... Thanks so much and I look forward to all your videos...
Is it possible? A2000 looks to be a 2 slot card. This one only has 1 for the pci-e slot.
This reminds me of back when I was younger when people would make budget gaming pc build guide videos when parts where actually a reasonable price
Thx for these vids ETA. First off this REALLY works. Built one with a 7020. One thing to note, the 3020 does not support pcie3.0 -- so be aware of that. Also no wifi on these older units, get a usb dongle -- but best to hardline anyway. Its still doable as ETA demonstrates. I also recommend going with a 2.4ghz dongled controller -- no bluetooth mayhem.
Great Guide! I had an Orange warning. "BATTERY LOW. RESTARTING." Ended up downloading the nightly update, and it fixed that issue. I now have Valve up and running. I ended up spending $85 for the 9020, $140 for a new LP Single slot 6400 GPU, 512Gig $24 SSD, got another $16 stick of 8Gig (DDR works better dual stick?) and 16meg is always better. I also bought a $28 Wifi6/BT PCIe mini Card with an $5 "external USB header". Had an older Monitor with built in USB Hub, mechanical keyboard, cheap mouse, a USB Headset and Mic. I ended up buying a BT Premium KingKong2 Pro Controller. In the end, $300 and some old parts and should have a decent game "console". I mounted the Monitor, KB/M/Controller "cubby" to the PC and attached a T-Handle. So it all can be picked up as one unit. though it's far from "portable", it is "totable" and takes up very little desk space and can be played in similar to ways you can play a console.
Great vid and excellent idea to reuse old PC instead of buying micro ATX's one ☺️
Thanks for this video. I am now seriously considering building this.
I think it’s only a matter of time that once Steam OS is fleshed out enough and enough developers bring their games to it(either with proton or native versions) that Valve is going to launch their own steam machine/ game console.
like the steam deck?
@@Jordan-zk2rf no I’m talking about something like the Xbox and PlayStation. Like what Valve tried to do before with the Steam Machines. But without all the different and expensive hardware configurations.
It's absolutely headed that way. Manufacturers have slowly been pushing us towards the all in one, must rebuy an entire unit to upgrade path for a while now. The software makers are happy to follow suite and create their various walled gardens to keep people in.
I have an Rx580 inside a dell xps 8700 its running great and agree this is a great price for the build.
I had an old system i5-4690k with an GTX 970, upgraded the RAM to 16GB DDR3 CL10, i7-5775C and an Arc A770. Quite cool.
Such a cool project! I would love to build a budget PC like this
Another option is to install Batocera and get Steam installed on that so you can run your games and emulators on a more stable os with a controller-friendly interface and Nvidia is an option. Instead of using a hacked recovery image. I do that on my arcade machine and it works great. The performance here for the money is great though!
Thanks for the tip !!
This is pretty fucking cool man shocked at how well it performs
35.5 hrs of cyberpunk 2077b, thats one of the reasons i love u
i7 6700+ is what I recommend. Especially with today's, and tomorrow's, games.
Yep . I wont deal with anything older then Skylake on core and Haswell on Xeon
I’m super impressed with stuff like this. It is well worth looking to see what is available locally. You could get more computer for less money than eBay, not that there’s anything wrong with eBay.
I've built a fair few of these for my younger cousins for birthdays and such. Super cheap and there are so many steam os games they never run out of content. Much better than a console and more useful since you can use it like a normal pc too for most common tasks like web and streaming.
This performance is insane for $180, most of these games didnt even hit these fps counts on PS4Pro or One X.
Have absolutely 0 need for yet another PC but tempted to do this just because its possible and the performance is incredible at the price point.
Fascinating. For the very affordable price I might purchase this just for the back up.
I use Ubuntu with Steam and the beta version comes with the steam deck interface in big picture. One advantage you can install Nvidia drivers.
This is pretty nifty. Though that lack of an iso does give me pause. If they compiled that os into an iso for easy install, I'd be alot more sanguine about running one of these.
Haswell was a great CPU architecture in its time and it still holds up well today in budget builds like this.
I was using a 4770K (my friend ran it from 2013-2017) and he gave me the motherboard and CPU because he upgraded. He had 16GB of G.Skill sniper 1866MHz RAM as well. Prior to that, I was running an FX-8350. I used that 4770K all the way up to 2022, upgraded at the end of last year to a second-hand 9700K and a motherboard that my friend gave me.
Honestly, I'm impressed the 4770K lasted that long. I didn't have to even question whether or not a game would run. Everything, including newer titles ran perfectly fine. It's crazy how good it just works.
@@husky3g Yes, I have a 4790K I built in 2014. Still use it today as my productivity/internet system, I do all my gaming on a CometLake 10700K system.
The trick is to buy i7 though, not i5. Old i5's are pretty much useless nowadays while the hyperthreading in the i7's lets them soldier on.
Thanks for promoting the use of old computers!
Dude, thank you so much for this. I'm saving this video as a reference for later. You're awesome
jeeze FSR putting in work.
THIS MAN COOKED AND ITS AMAZING
What setups like this tell me most is aiming for bleeding edge performance is pretty silly.
low money pc more can working,very happy
Steam big picture mode is now using the new steam deck UI on the stable release!
So if you don't want to install holo os just use windows with big picture mode :D
I did all thing and tips you give mr eta,
Now i can have gaming on really cheap and mac workstation for e-commerce.
For 920$ bucks😩👍
Honestly if you on budget you can get SATAIII SSD 512gb on Newegg for $25 usd or 1tb for as low as $40. A lot of HD on these used office systems are 6+ year old and suffering bit rot so are even slower than a new HD.
I wish there was a way to custom build a handheld pc in a similar manner. Obviously options would be more limited but it would be cool to choose ur hardware, shell, screen, controls, etc to ur liking.
I'm sure it CAN be done but it definitely would require a LOT of custom work. If a company would just make the controller/Mobo PCB portion - a barebones kit with no RAM, no CPU/GPU would be incredible. All they'd have to do is wire it up to be used with a newer AMD APU, make it a little bigger than the Steam Deck and use an M.2 SSD and it would be fantastic. Problem is, even with the technology we have today, a Steam Deck would still probably be cheaper. It's insane how cheap Valve was able to make the Steam Deck.
Great! I have the very same model but with 4790T cpu, 16gb ram and 480ssd, but I'm rocking a GT1030 for the moment... Will defnetly upgrading it to an AMD card and converting it into a Steam OS gaming machine! Cheers!
I wonder if we will finally see the rise of Gaming Linux Computers, with prebuilt PCs that shed the cost for windows for slightly better performance at a low price?
I’m having a lot of congestion myself over in South Raleigh and Cary, I think I caught this bug maybe Friday always waking up nose stopped up 🤦♂️
GGs get well now 🦅
Thank you, the weather where I am has been crazy, hot one day, the next its freezing temps. Really messes me up
congrats for 1M subs
Wow it's awesome my pc is also dell small form factor and I am going to buy a graphics card, amazing job!
Great video. I’d love to see you do a video on using this (and also your higher end steam deck OS builds) as the host for streaming through steam link to iPads, G Cloud and even a steam deck. I’m a bit curious about it as I have a few uses cases for this but think it will be fun to try as well. Thx!
The Spider-Man games gave me a lot of trouble, but I saw on the internet that the game plays a lot better with Hyper Threading disabled on the BIOS, it worked for me at least.
i have the exact same specs, optiplex 3020 with i7 4790 and rx 6400 low profile sapphire
Powerful again. Damn you love that word
i brought a Xbox series X for my son but there are some PC games he wants to play and I think this would be a cool setup for him to play with and introduce him to PC building.
Oh yeah the price performance is epic. And technically it could be made even better. For about the same price. I'm a fan of that slim floor factor as well. Promotes airflow.
recently threw a RTX A2000 in my Optiplex 9020 SFF, it has handled most games I've thrown at it with grace
You will get simlar performance with low profile 1650 GDDR6 at half the cost . A2000 has alot more cuda cores but they are designed for computing not gaming . It make absoletly no financial sense in using workstation/server gpu in gaming . You are paying for ECC memory and computing cuda cores that you will not use LMAO
me: oh wow i got windows 10 on the steam deck
also me: oh wow i got steam os on another computer.
That is way nicer available to you than you had 2-3 years ago in that price range wow.
One thing I love in this build is the fact of when this i7 4790 was produced, the most powerful cards on the market were the GTX 780 Ti and R9 290X, and this RX 6400 today has the same horsepower as these cards with a fraction of power consumption and a tenth of the size...Technology evolution just amaze me every time.
Can’t find the parts for the price you got them for at the moment, but this is an interesting idea. Seems to perform about as well as my Series S, maybe even better. And I’ve been looking to switch over to a Steam machine for a while now, due to having a much larger library (since both Xbox and PS exclusives are available there). I want to see how well this performs on Windows though. I know how to make the Steam Deck UI launch on Windows, so maybe it would be a better option performance wise.
In canada this card is like 250$
I would build this for a diy pinball cab just wondering how many monitors will it run...
crazy performance for this price
I have the same gpu in HP Prodesk 600 G2 works great.I bought i7-6700 and added ram and Rx 6400 (I paid 190 euros for mine tho :( ) Slapped in 2 kingston 480gb ssd and sawed away pci-e 1x slot back to smack in nvme ssd adapter for faster ssd to boot from, yes i know 1x slot limits the ssd but it still works great. Didnt have a single issue apart from windows 11 audio crashing and the problem with that was replacing some dll. Apart from that all running great
Thanks for the video and I think should've waited for this vid to come out instead of purchasing a budget mini pc that has lesser clock speed and boost speed even if I try to add an eGPU , next time I will try this thanks.
I built a very similar system, but with a more up to date 7070 SFF, ninth gen I think it is, specifically for a portable standy by for some of the reasonably graphics intensive work I do. Frankly it's not a great deal different to the Ryzen/2080 primary desktop set up.
There's a really decent performance/cash ratio in second user systems.
My legacy gaming pc has a 4790k with 32gb of ram and a RX590, so this video made a lot of sense to me in order to ditch windows and install holo Iso,
my thoughts: I am impressed.
I've got a couple of these sff pc's just waiting to be cracked opened and a gpu added like this one for my daughter and I for her first project. Mod a pre-built and then work towards a custom full build in a few years for her.
Make sure to check the PCIE specs before using the RX6400 in them. Choose one with PCIE3.0, not 2.0 like what is in the 3020
Great video, kind of wanna build one myself at this point 😂, but I still think I may need a steam
Deck itself . Keep up the work
Videos like this are the reason I even have a PC right now when I think back on it, so I'm always partial to a build like this. I'd also add that I personally went with an i5 HP and I eventually upgraded to an i7 4790k (but a 4790 is probably enough for most people if you're running this method.) I learned under Windows, the UBS3 ports on the old HP Elitedesk G1s are kinda hobbled by a bug no one cares to fix so you may or may not get full speed on them, but it might be better with this without the offending Windows drivers. Another thing is I was a huge Vsync addict, because I had learned to HATE screen tearing with a passion, but I didn't realize until recently how much it hurt performance if you really don't need it. Turn it off to get the frame rates ETA is getting and only turn it on if the tearing becomes an issue.
a 4790k is very similar to a 4790 in stock clocks since a hp wont support overclocking (it is faster, but barely) so considering that you have to spend so much money on a new cpu i think the very tiny performance improvement just isnt worth it. plus you have to update the bios
also about tearing, if you have a monitor that supports amd freesync then you won't get screen tearing issues without vsync so long as you have an rx 6400 for instance
Always use vsync for the smoothest gaming experience possible. Much better to have vsync 60fps than 100fps aren't smooth when panning the camera.
The only downside to this generation of OptiPlex is how power is routed through the mother board. So when the PSU fails is fails it blows everything attached I had 3 of this generation and each failed differently 1 the PSU fried the HDD and SSDs the other the board wont turn on half the time with its power button lol. The third is a ticking time bomb. I replaced the 2 with OptiPlex 7040 which can be found on eBay or locally for 80 to 100 depending on configuration and also support m.2 SSDs. Later dells did away with the weird power connector for sata power.
Im planning on building a similar pc. Buying a used Dell Precision 5820 or 7820 and adding a gtx 1080.
Got a whole bunch of ECC Ram to go with it plus several spare m.2 and 2.5sata drives i can install. Should make for a nice gaming pc for cheap. Eventually i might turn it into a test bench/ home plex server.
The problem I had with the RX 6400 is that it ran super hot. The cooling fans are pretty terrible and putting any sort of serious load on the GPU the temps would climb up in to the higher 80’s. I know these little SSF cases were part of the culprit as they retain a lot of heat and have no ventilation or any space for additional fans which would not aid in the card staying cool.
Heat's always gonna be a issue with sff PC's. That's why I went with the larger mid size version over the sff.
Thats really awesome! Blows my mind how far tech has come in just 10 years. Insane.
Man, this is really cool. 😃
I have an NVMe drive for all Steam games in the PCIe x4 slot. Can't boot from it but great for games. This has 1x PCIe x 16 and a second slot for the NVMe
loved the performance it was nice.
How about showing what this can do emulation wise - looking forward to seeing the performance, thanks Prime ;)
hey man been watching you for years and i just noticed we all don't know how you look have you ever done a face reveal or a video where we can see you talking to us all !!
"Old" 4790 CPU...
And here I'm still running a i7 4790k @4.6ghz in my main PC @4k@60fps...
Hey, make an emulation video with this build!
The only thing you didn’t mention is the noise of the machine itself. I have done exact upgrade here on Optiplex 7060 + RX6400LP and it’s like a vacuum cleaner with its noise.
I love these builds, too bad they aren't as accessible in Brazil as they are in the US
I guess you don't have a bunch of organizations leasing these systems then dumping them every few years.
SteamOS is a million times better than trying to game on Linux a decade ago. I think I had about 100 Steam games back then and only 5-10 had any sort of Linux functionality. Now, I have over 1000 Steam games and most of them work perfect on SteamOS
Get an optiplex 7020 or 9020 with PCIE3.0 instead of the 3020, it only has PCIE2.0 and the RX6400 has only 4 lanes of bandwidth.
The RX6400 is a pci4 card but those low end office Pc's have at best PCI3.. How much performance are you leaving on the table with that set up?
iOptiplex 3020 is PCIE2.0 which is very bad for performance on the 4 lanes the RX6400 has instead of x16, 7020 or 9020 are PCIE3.0 and it’s not bad.
i just noticed this but it seems like valve recently switched the big picture mode to same as what steam deck has. it kinda lags for me but it seems to function. 🙂
Wow, you're right. I've been waiting for Valve to make that switch since my main PC is exclusively connected to a large OLED TV in a home theater setup. I'd rarely use old Big Picture mode because it was clunky and the store front rarely worked either.
Thanks i didn't know that they finally got rid of the old Big Picture mode in favor the Steam Deck UI :)