A $200 Gaming Rig...

blaize.s · June 7, 2020

So this really isn't a custom PC at all. I would be lying to say that I "built" a PC. It's more of a customization of an OEM PC. But in the end I think this was more just dumb luck than anything to get a good of a PC as I did for the price...

But first the specs:

HP Z240 chasis and motherboard
Intel i7 7700K
32GB DIMM DDR4 (16 x 2) clocked @ 2400 MHz
Samsung PM961 NVMe PCIe M.2 512GB Boot Drive
Seagate ST4000LM024-2AN17V 4TB Data drive
NVIDIA RTX 2060 6GB

I initially found the PC I bought on a Tiger Direct for $194 dollars. It was listed as a PC with the CPU, RAM, and a 500GB HDD in it. Even at the listed specs, it was a an excellent deal. I honestly think it was priced wrong, but I bought it anyways. When it came, it was exactly what was on the ad, except it did have the SSD in it that was not listed on the ad, but it was set up as the data drive, not the boot drive.

It also came with a Quadro P2000 in it. It's a nice card no doubt, but it's not for gaming. It's not going to compare to an RTX card. So I pulled the card and sold it and I got enough to buy a new RTX 2060. With a $7 pigtail to adapt PCIe 1.0 to PCIe 2.0 power, I was able to get the RTX 2060 to work with stock the PSU without having to get another one of those. And I reinstalled the OS on the SSD for the boot drive. I also added in the 4TB HDD over the 500GB HDD because I already owned it.

When I'm not using it, I let Folding@Home run on it, and it cranks out a lot of work with those specs. I'm glad that I'm able to use it for a good cause too.

It's nothing really nice to look at...just a boring HP Z240 Tower. It isn't sexy, but it for the price, I can't complain. In the end, I spent less than $200 bucks on this thing and got a machine that can play most modern titles at moderate settings or even high settings depending on the game.

Here's the UserBenchmark page for my profile of this machine.

https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/29006059