The "Found an SFF RX 640 4GB for ~USD50 Build" | Best budget gaming build at this time

[HolyNoob]

So it all started when I was browsing PC parts forum and saw a guy selling a bunch of Dell refurb RX 640 4GB that were single slot, half-height cards for MYR230 (~USD50) with shipping. To the uninitiated the RX 640 is a rebranded RX 550. At the current market, this ain't a bad price for an RX 550 equivalent 4GB card.

 

I also wanted to build something for my wheelchair-bound neighbour, since the lockdown life has been rough. And I kinda owe him my very identity because he was the one that gave me a copy of Warcraft 3 when I was a kid almost 20 years ago and it's PC gaming for life. Right now he's still using the very same Pentium 4 with Nvidia chipset on-board graphics PC he had all these years.

 

So i bought it in a heartbeat (which was the right decision cause moments after it was all gone). It arrived 2 days later and lo and behold it is exactly as shyt as I expected it to be. PERFECT  

 

It only comes with DP and mini-DP but I can manage with a HDMI adapter since I bought a brand new Lenovo L24i-30 Freesync 1080p 75Hz monitor for my neighbour as well.

 

The first thing that cane to mind was cheapo Dell SFF Optiplex that are available everywhere. I settled on the cheapest 2nd/3rd gen Intel one I could find since they are significantly cheaper than 4th gen and above in my region. I bought one with an i3 3240, 4GB DDR3 and 250GB RAM for MYR300 which I will all change out later.

 

Now I went ahead and bought two sticks of 4GB DDR3 RAM for MYR100, then proceeded to sell the included 2 x 2GB DIMMS for MYR50 online. I also added in a Crucial BX500 480GB SSD (Which I regret not getting the 1TB later) for ~MYR250 and sold the 250GB HDD for MYR20. As a bonus I also bought a USB 3.0 half-height PCIE card for ~MYR40 which I will need to transfer all the games I want him to experience that he missed out for the past 20 years.

 

Alright, now things are coming together. The insides are so compact and tight, let's see how're the thermals. 

 

 

Well, as expected the thermals are horrible. CPU is fine but GPU idles at 60°C, watching YouTube jumps to 70 °C and shoots to 94°C when gaming. I guess this is what happens when you cram an RX 550 into a wire mess SFF case with a dinky little 80mm intake and a single slot, half-height cooler. Let's try changing the fan to an Arctic P8 and see if we can get better thermals. 

 

Oh great, Dell even makes their fan header a 5-pin proprietary design. Guess I'll need to buy the fan adapter off Taobao and wait a week. Cost of the fan was MYR35, adapter with shipping was MYR8.

 

In the meantime I decided to upgrade the i3 to an i5 3570S that I found for MYR160 with shipping, and I sold the i3 for MYR80. Cool

 

I'll also repaste the GPU and add some thermal pads for the VRAM while I'm at it.

 

 

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Well a week has passed and my adapters are here, the Arctic P8 fit in snuggly and the adapter works. Buuuuuut, it was turning super slowly in stock config. Good thing I used Google and found that people use HWINFO to control fanspeed on Dells. HWINFO reports the Arctic P8 to be spinning at 7000rpm lol, I guess this is why it was spinning so slowly, the embedded controller was trying hard to slow it down. I guess Dell even has proprietary OWM singals. So I manually adjusted the fan profile, set HWINFO to start minimised with fan control on startup, voilà. 

 

 

Thermals are much more acceptable now. 50°C idle and 89 °C when gaming. Not like amazing but at least it ain't throttling. 

 

I loaded some of my favourite single player games:

- DOOM 2016

-Quake Enhanced

- Warcraft 3

- Homeworld Remastered

- MGS V The Phantom Pain

- RE2 Remake

- Yakuza 0

- Starcraft 2 Trilogy

- XCOM Enemy Unknown

- Civ VI

- Skyrin Special Edition

 

This is where I regret not getting the 1TB model cause there were so many more games that I wanted to load on for him to enjoy. Oh well, this is what I'm sticking with.

 

All in all I'm quite pleased with this build, it costed quite cheap during the PC parts shortage. DOOM was running at 50fps at 1080p; RE2, Yakuza 0 and The Phantom Pain at high 60fps+

 

Not bad at all

 

Parts list:

- Dell Optiplex - MYR300

- RX 640 4GB - MYR230

- i5 3570S - MYR160

- 2 x 4GB DDR3 - MYR100

- Crucial BX500 480GB with 3.5" cage - MYR250

- Arctic P8 with adapter - MYR43

- SFF USB 3.0 card - MYR40

Sold i3 for MYR80

Sold 2 x 2GB for MYR50

Sold 250GB HDD for MYR20 

 

Total system cost ~MYR975 = USD235

 

Monitor was another ~MYR500 = ~USD120

 

I had some unopened bundled Dell keyboard and mice lying around to be gifted with this rig as well.

[Caconym]

That's really wholesome. I don't think there's much more you could have done for cooling, the PSU cables can't really be tucked anywhere else. Nice build.