The best way to game for under 300 bucks imho

[sirbuzzkill]

Quick backstory; long time tech enthusiast, but never really migrated into the pc space until early this year. Got into racing sims on the ps4, needed something more. Wanted to get into Iracing. I wanted to get a good-great 1080p experience. Without knowing if iracing was going to be what i was hoping it would be, I made the decision to not invest a lot of money. I set my sights on a 300 dollar budget.  This is what i did, and imho it's the best and most cost effective way for someone with a budget and who is willing to look on the used market to come out ahead something decent. You don't need the newest shiniest bit of kit to have a great experience

.

I found a used Dell Optiplex 7020 , 40 bucks. It happened to have a q87 mobo with an LGA1150 socket.  Got a used 4670k for 60 bucks, a used gtx 1060 mini 6gb for 110, threw in a 240 gig ssd that i had from an old project, and a HD, 16 gigs of ddr3 that i got from crucial for 70 bucks and i was off to the races. Literally, On iracing specifically running all settings on high using a ultrawide 32 inch @ 2560 x 1080 monitor I am getting anywhere between 95-125 fps during a live, filled up race. Alone on track i can get around 150 fps and up. I have less than 300 bucks invested and i couldn't be happier, i had a friend fab me a side panel and i wired in some rgb and its more than enough for me. I just wanted to put this out there because i feel like so many people, including myself initially get swept up in what is the newest, fastest, better than last years thing. When i think it's fair to say the majority of people just want to have a good experience with the game they want to play. Obviously this isn't everyone. I know there are people with a way bigger budget, people that want a system they can show off. But in a weird way i'm just as proud of this as i would be a top tier set up. This was my first build and i made mistakes and struggled at times. But it does exactly what i set out to accomplish. 

 

TLDR; I'm cheap but i'm having fun 

[mariushm]

Misleading title .... it's not really $300 if you "found" a dell optiplex that's otherwise probably 100-150$ refurbished.

Also, dell machine probably had one of those bioses without uefi support and that means it won't allow RX or RTX cards to work ... a used 80-100$ RX570/RX580 card would have been a much better deal.

 

When you take that into account ...

50-60$ for a ryzen 1200-1400 ... or 50-ish bucks for a new ryzen 3000g

40-50$ for a A320 motherboard (open box, or from ebay/craigslist/facebook), 55-60$ new, ~75$ for new b450

30$ on a psu

a cardboard box for a case or 10-20$ on ebay/craigslist/facebook

20$ for 8 GB of memory

a 80-100$ rx 570 / rx 580

20$ for a ssd

... you're at 350-400$

[VeganJoy]

damn crucial sold you ddr3 for the same price as ddr4? f

 

nice build though, love buying used stuff lol

[starry]

I have to agree. 

You have a nice dell there, I like the window mod, brings me back to the early days of case modding. Good job.

Here is mine, specs in signature.

[starry]

5 minutes ago, mariushm said:

Misleading title .... it's not really $300 if you "found" a dell optiplex that's otherwise probably 100-150$ refurbished.

Also, dell machine probably had one of those bioses without uefi support and that means it won't allow RX or RTX cards to work ... a used 80-100$ RX570/RX580 card would have been a much better deal.

 

When you take that into account ...

50-60$ for a ryzen 1200-1400 ... or 50-ish bucks for a new ryzen 3000g

40-50$ for a A320 motherboard (open box, or from ebay/craigslist/facebook), 55-60$ new, ~75$ for new b450

30$ on a psu

a cardboard box for a case or 10-20$ on ebay/craigslist/facebook

20$ for 8 GB of memory

a 80-100$ rx 570 / rx 580

20$ for a ssd

... you're at 350-400$

It does not have a bios without UEFI support.

Also this is a really cool post, please calm down. They were trying to share their experience in a very casual manner, and you basically went "hah, clickbait, just do this for $50-100 more 4head"

Another thing to consider is that people who do things like this, generally dont have that extra 50-100, even if going a little higher is a better value, that doesnt mean they have that money at all. So being able to do something like this is what allows them to have a decent gaming computer in the first place.

[sirbuzzkill]

Just to clarify, i didn't mean that these parts are the best parts, or that i did something better than someone else. It was just an example of whats out there and i to be honest i'm proud of it considering i legit didn't know how to install a cpu 45 days ago. That's all man 

 

Also it does have uefi and your comment about used dells is not accurate. They are everywhere, i even saw one for 15 bucks at one point with an older socket

[sirbuzzkill]

7 minutes ago, seapriestess said:

I have to agree. 

You have a nice dell there, I like the window mod, brings me back to the early days of case modding. Good job.

Here is mine, specs in signature.

Love it man! Looks great! I'll add a better photo of mine tomorrow sometime and thank you!

[thrasher_565]

1 hour ago, sirbuzzkill said:

Quick backstory; long time tech enthusiast, but never really migrated into the pc space until early this year. Got into racing sims on the ps4, needed something more. Wanted to get into Iracing. I wanted to get a good-great 1080p experience. Without knowing if iracing was going to be what i was hoping it would be, I made the decision to not invest a lot of money. I set my sights on a 300 dollar budget.  This is what i did, and imho it's the best and most cost effective way for someone with a budget and who is willing to look on the used market to come out ahead something decent. You don't need the newest shiniest bit of kit to have a great experience

.

I found a used Dell Optiplex 7020 , 40 bucks. It happened to have a q87 mobo with an LGA1150 socket.  Got a used 4670k for 60 bucks, a used gtx 1060 mini 6gb for 110, threw in a 240 gig ssd that i had from an old project, and a HD, 16 gigs of ddr3 that i got from crucial for 70 bucks and i was off to the races. Literally, On iracing specifically running all settings on high using a ultrawide 32 inch @ 2560 x 1080 monitor I am getting anywhere between 95-125 fps during a live, filled up race. Alone on track i can get around 150 fps and up. I have less than 300 bucks invested and i couldn't be happier, i had a friend fab me a side panel and i wired in some rgb and its more than enough for me. I just wanted to put this out there because i feel like so many people, including myself initially get swept up in what is the newest, fastest, better than last years thing. When i think it's fair to say the majority of people just want to have a good experience with the game they want to play. Obviously this isn't everyone. I know there are people with a way bigger budget, people that want a system they can show off. But in a weird way i'm just as proud of this as i would be a top tier set up. This was my first build and i made mistakes and struggled at times. But it does exactly what i set out to accomplish. 

 

TLDR; I'm cheap but i'm having fun 

how did you get the gtx 1060 mining working? did you have to do some stuff with the drivers?

[sirbuzzkill]

5 hours ago, thrasher_565 said:

how did you get the gtx 1060 mining working? did you have to do some stuff with the drivers?

Hey man i'm sorry i'm not sure what you're asking, it isn't a "mining" card. It's the Zotac GTX 1060 Mini 6 GB. It's called a mini because of the smaller form factor.  Mines the single 90 mm variant.  I just installed it into my rig, downloaded the Nvidia drivers and i was done. Did that clarify anything for you?

[RogerCanuck]

Cool story, bro!

 

Do you have one of those steering-wheel controller thingies, and if so, what kind?

[sirbuzzkill]

49 minutes ago, RogerCanuck said:

Cool story, bro!

 

Do you have one of those steering-wheel controller thingies, and if so, what kind?

lol i do have a wheel thingy. That's another good story as far as i'm concerned. I found a used Thrustmaster T150 for 100 bucks about an hour away from me. So i snagged that, the stock pedals that come with it are a dumpster fire, so i upgraded to the T3PA pedals, again used, this time it was 5 hours away but even with shipping i only paid 85 bucks. Which i then did a brake pedal mod on to improve braking resolution. Super happy with it for now. Eventually i will want to upgrade. But it's excellent to get started and to plant your roots.

[thrasher_565]

6 hours ago, sirbuzzkill said:

Hey man i'm sorry i'm not sure what you're asking, it isn't a "mining" card. It's the Zotac GTX 1060 Mini 6 GB. It's called a mini because of the smaller form factor.  Mines the single 90 mm variant.  I just installed it into my rig, downloaded the Nvidia drivers and i was done. Did that clarify anything for you?

oh my bad haha sory thought it was a mining cared.

[sirbuzzkill]

10 minutes ago, thrasher_565 said:

oh my bad haha sory thought it was a mining cared.

Lol i kinda figured no big deal man

[sirbuzzkill]

8 hours ago, rrubberr said:

Yeah he won’t even be able to slot a $800 RTX card into his $300 build. He’s really missing out... Hardcore toxicposting like this is why I haven’t interacted much with tech forums in a long time. Why reply if you’ve got nothing to add but being rude? Sometimes people put together a PC with what they can find, it doesn’t have to be the best, that’s what they’ve got.

 

More on topic with the thread, personally I owned four Z800 workstations at “peak” saturation, I believe they go for $300-350 now depending on the processors. Instead of gaming I had them networked together for long renders and animations, it was pretty quick for the money at the time. The main issue for me was the multi rail power supply (Dell proprietary workstation power supplies were also multi rail at the time) which made the systems incompatible with high wattage GPUs. Might be a good option for people who need more threads in a cheap

system!

First of all i really appreciate what you said in the first section. I legitimately don't understand why people go out of their way to comment things that are unconstructive and doesn't add anything to the conversation. It is what it is. Second, that seems like a pretty good idea, im sure you saved a small fortune by going that route. Were you able to get the speeds you were hoping for out of the setup?  

[sirbuzzkill]

1 hour ago, rrubberr said:

Certainly I was able to get plenty of speed at the time, however the relevance of Westmere EP processors (like the Xeon X5650 and X5690) has decreased over the years. That is to say, 270 watts of processor today will get you much higher performance than it did in 2010 when the processors were released.

 

Recently what I’ve been doing has been using Engineering Sample (ES) processors to save money. For example, my current server uses two 28 core Xeons similar to the Xeon Scalable Platinum 8176. While that processor was/is $7,000+ the Engineering Sample versions were only $320. Between buying used and buying Engineering Sample parts, I’ve been able to save 80+% over an equivalent new system.

I've seen other people using high end chip set engineering samples to save some cash while getting the top of the line goodness. Where do you typically find reliable samples? Ebay?

[thrasher_565]

14 hours ago, rrubberr said:

Yeah he won’t even be able to slot a $800 RTX card into his $300 build. He’s really missing out... Hardcore toxicposting like this is why I haven’t interacted much with tech forums in a long time. Why reply if you’ve got nothing to add but being rude? Sometimes people put together a PC with what they can find, it doesn’t have to be the best, that’s what they’ve got.

 

More on topic with the thread, personally I owned four Z800 workstations at “peak” saturation, I believe they go for $300-350 now depending on the processors. Instead of gaming I had them networked together for long renders and animations, it was pretty quick for the money at the time. The main issue for me was the multi rail power supply (Dell proprietary workstation power supplies were also multi rail at the time) which made the systems incompatible with high wattage GPUs. Might be a good option for people who need more threads in a cheap

system!

the dell t3500 from what ive been told can have a 525w psu or an 800+ wat psu or you can replace it with a new atx psu (no adapter required.)

i only got the 800+ wat psu from a dell t5500 thow. ebay listing don't normally say what psu in there or what heasink in there.

[sirbuzzkill]

i appreciate everyone's engagement on my thread. I was hoping to get more positive stories from people that have followed a similar path. Unfortunately i got more unkind messages than positive ones but i guess that just says a lot about the tech community as a whole, I was involved on the mobile side of computing for 8 years and it isn't any different on that side. But for every turd there is a decent person out there. Thanks again for the replies!

[thrasher_565]

9 hours ago, sirbuzzkill said:

i appreciate everyone's engagement on my thread. I was hoping to get more positive stories from people that have followed a similar path. Unfortunately i got more unkind messages than positive ones but i guess that just says a lot about the tech community as a whole, I was involved on the mobile side of computing for 8 years and it isn't any different on that side. But for every turd there is a decent person out there. Thanks again for the replies!

 

nice build.

Edited August 23, 2020 by thrasher_565

[thrasher_565]

5 hours ago, rrubberr said:

You know you don't have to be toxic, right? You can just let him be happy with his PC build? It's that easy  

ya your right my bad. the build is nice and the mods done to it like the window is nice wounder what other mods are done to it.

 

thow sff builds on the other hand....haha i just need to learn not to commit on them...