Building a PC from Scratch: A Budget-Friendly Option

When it comes to building a PC on a budget, one option that often comes up is using an old Dell Optiplex as a base. The idea is to upgrade the existing components to make them more modern and efficient, rather than buying new parts. In this article, we'll explore the pros and cons of taking this approach, and whether it's worth considering for your next PC build.

The Old Dell Optiplex Approach: A Cheaper Alternative?

One of the main advantages of using an old Dell Optiplex as a base is that it can be a cost-effective way to get started with building a PC. The system in question is an I5 2320 processor paired with a GTX 960 graphics card, which should provide decent performance for eSports titles and some triple-A games. However, it's worth noting that the Optiplex is an old system, and upgrading it may not be as straightforward as buying new parts from scratch.

In terms of performance, the I5 2320 processor was a relatively capable CPU in its time, but it's now several years out of date. The GTX 960 graphics card is also an older model that won't be able to handle the latest triple-A titles at high settings. However, for eSports games like CS:GO and Fortnite, the system should still provide smooth performance.

CS:GO Performance

When it comes to CS:GO, the system was able to hit high frame rates even with the high settings enabled. The game's auto-selected settings were more than sufficient to keep the framerate above 60 FPS at 1080p. In fact, the system was often able to hit well over 100 FPS in most areas of the map.

Fortnite Performance

The performance of Fortnite was also impressive, with the system able to maintain a high frame rate even with the game's graphics settings cranked up. The only issue was that the framerate would sometimes drop to the mid-to-high forties when moving into busier areas of the game world. However, this was easily mitigated by reducing the graphics settings to medium.

Other Games and Performance

In addition to CS:GO and Fortnite, we also tested other games like Metro Exodus and Battlefield 5. While the system struggled to hit high frame rates in Metro Exodus, it was still able to maintain a smooth experience at low-to-medium settings. However, with the game's graphics set to high, the framerate would drop significantly.

Battlefield 5 ran relatively smoothly on this system, with the low settings allowing for a playable FPS of around 60-70 FPS at 1080p.

Conclusion

In conclusion, building a PC from scratch using an old Dell Optiplex as a base can be a cost-effective way to get started. While the system's performance may not be on par with newer builds, it should still provide smooth gaming experiences for eSports titles like CS:GO and Fortnite. However, if you're looking to play the latest triple-A games at high settings, this system may not be the best choice.

Ultimately, the decision comes down to your budget and what you plan to use the PC for. If you want a reliable system that can handle eSports games and some older titles, then using an old Dell Optiplex as a base might be worth considering. Just keep in mind that it's essential to shop around and find deals on newer parts if you plan to upgrade later on.

Sandra Performance

In a final test, we ran the Sandra benchmarking tool, which provides a comprehensive overview of the system's performance. While the results may not be earth-shattering, they do indicate that the system is still capable of handling some demanding workloads.

Metro Exodus Performance

One surprise was how well Metro Exodus performed on this system. At first glance, it seemed like the game would struggle to hit high frame rates due to its demanding graphics requirements. However, with the settings dialed back to low-to-medium, the framerate remained relatively stable, with occasional dips to the mid-to-high forties.

Battlefield 5 Performance

Finally, we ran Battlefield 5, which was a pleasant surprise in terms of performance. The system was able to maintain a smooth FPS even at high graphics settings, although there were some noticeable drops when moving into busier areas of the game world.

Overall, while this build may not be the most powerful, it should still provide smooth gaming experiences for eSports titles like CS:GO and Fortnite. Just keep in mind that newer triple-A games may struggle to run on this system at high settings.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhello everyone and welcome to another video now in today's one I'm showcasing this my recent cheap and ugly gaming PC build now I didn't really intend to call it that but when I built this PC over the weekend and showed one of my friends that's exactly what he called it so the name has sort of stuck now from the outside it doesn't look all that special but on the inside it's the system comprised of components that should be able to handle all your eSports games with these things like for tonight do you mind pub G and maybe even a triple-a title here in there so let's get into it talk about the components I've used to build this thing and see what it can do when it comes to gaming so I apologize for the lighting why do I look like a ghost it's raining outside I've had to boost the lights a little bit so the contrast is a little bit off but nonetheless let's talk about the specs so the case here is just the cheapest case I could find I cannot remember the name of it it will be probably up here somewhere or down here ah but it's got everything you need to build a basic PC inside off at the front we've got two USB to ports which was essential because the motherboard I've used doesn't have any us three us three B USB three connectors and it's important when picking a case or a motherboard in fact that it matches the connectors on your front panel you don't want a USB three case and a motherboard with no USB three connectors there are adapters available but it's easier if you choose the right case to begin with now for the motherboard you've seen them before I've used them before but it's a good cheap intel-based board this is the DQ 67 oh w it's a socket 1155 board and it supports pretty much every 1155 processor out there this cost me about 15 pounds fifteen sixteen pounds and I'm currently running a Core i5 23:20 a three gigahertz quad-core CPU that is among the cheapest older I fives you can currently buy this cost me twelve pounds and the heat sink fan here came with the motherboard so I didn't have to worry about that now as I say it is a basic I 5 processor but it still seems to do the job it does an ok job of playing games it's a pretty decent CPU for everyday usage things like that and you aren't going to see it much slowdown even when it comes to multitasking it's just a decent cheap CPU that can be picked up for very little money in 2019 for the RAM this cost me a little bit more I've actually got two sticks of this stuff but I can only get one out due to the graphics card this is team elite 1600 megahertz memory we've got 8 gigs in total to 4 gig sticks of this stuff it's pretty good Ram pretty cheap stuff and it works in this ball just fine in fact a lot of people worry too much about where the RAM is going to be compatible with their motherboard but I have to say that every time I've sort of been winging it buying RAM and sticking it in a ddr3 board I've had no compatibility issues of course that's not brilliant advice but always read the manual to see what is and isn't supported just in case now for the piece de resistance piece I didn't take French at school I took Spanish but I don't remember word of that either we have the soos Strix GTX 960 now this cost me 65 pounds cex here in the UK and a thing with cex is that you don't know exactly what you're going to get all they do is list the basic specs of the car for example on the site list just said GTX 960 and so I thought you know I'll go and pick it up at my local store and it turns out to be the Seuss version I could either have a 2gig version or a totally different 4 gig version it wasn't near Susu and it was just a standard in video 1 I believe but nonetheless the difference between the 960 in terms of VRAM is very minimal in order to see a difference you'd have to turn the settings right up to high or ultra and even then there only be a few frames in it of course in 2019 if you turn the settings right up on a GTX 960 you're not going to see playable framerates anyway so the difference between 24 and 26 FPS is going to be sort of and when playing games okay what else what else do we have we've got a blue RGB fan in the back here this case came with a standard black one but I thought you know let's add a little bit of color to this system so I went with the blue one instead cost me about three pounds I think it was a pretty wise investment and in terms of storage we've got a 240 gig SanDisk SSD now when you're building a cheap PC and when it comes to storage my advice would be either buy the biggest SSD you can afford on your budget because you're going to notice a lot of difference in boot up times especially with an older processor it's going to make a nice bit of difference as opposed to a standard hard drive or purchase a small SSD like a 64 gig SSD for the Windows installation or Linux installation alone and then purchase the biggest hard disk drive you can afford alongside it for example get a 64 gig SSD and then a 500 gig hard drive in my opinion I'd opt for the biggest SSD that I could afford I got the 240 gig won on this budget and then later on you can add a hard disk drive should you run out of space you know I keep the windows installation on here as well as a few games because it just makes things run a bit faster and a bit smoother but of course what you do in terms of storage is entirely up to you I nearly forgot the power supply this is a silverstone psu i bought it secondhand on ebay for about 20 pounds never skimp on a psu it's the most important part of any system and if you buy a cheap one it goes boom chances are you could take every other component with it this is a slightly older one now and it seems to be a pretty decent unit and a 500 watts is more than enough to power our i 5 here and our gtx 960 the thing about the i5 as well before we get into the games is that you can upgrade it to say an i7 later down the line because of the support that this motherboard provides all in all it's a pretty cheap system it's not the best looking PC in the world but it should give you pretty decent frame rates when it comes to those eSports titles and can even handle a few triple-a games as well and with all that said let's get into the benchmarks to see what this thing can do okay let me just quickly address what could be an elephant in the room and that is old Dell Optiplex is I could have bought an old I five pre-built Dell unit upgraded the PSU the SSD and added a graphics card but by the time I'd done that it would have cost more or if not a very similar price to building a PC from scratch of course though it's all about saving you money so if where you live doing that buying an optic Plex and upgrading it is the cheaper road to go down then by all means do it so in csgo here we've got the high settings in the game the game auto selected these settings and we're running well above 60 frames per second in fact we're running above 100 frames per second most of the time at 1080p there may be a few instances where the framerate drops here and there but overall it's a very smooth experience and you'll have no trouble playing eSports titles like Counter Strike global Offensive as we move on to fortnight what struck me as quite odd and surprising here was that Faulkner actually maxes out the i5 2320 at 100% usage a lot of the time this doesn't seem to have a significantly adverse effect on framerate but it's just something to bear in mind in 2019 now for Core four threaded processors can struggle in some titles I didn't expect it to do so here but the game is still more than playable and you will still see a higher than 60 frames per second average it's always worth considering all your options if you plan to upgrade later on is it just worth buying something a little bit newer to begin with you know there are plenty of things to consider but if you've got a budget of around 150 to 200 pounds here in the UK all the same in dollars then personally I'd recommend shopping around on that 1155 platform because there are certainly some brilliant bargains to be had pub G surprised me as well with a mixture of low and medium settings we were able to hit 60 frames per second on average there will be a few instances where that framerate dips but all in all it was a pretty decent experience just bear in mind that newer triple-a titles may struggle a little bit I'm not gonna lie to you Metro Exodus probably isn't going to be a game that you'll be able to play on this PC okay I don't know why through San Andreas in here but you'll be surprised to see that even when you turn the settings right up it can be quite demanding like we're only getting about 70 to 80 frames per second and Sandra is just one of those timeless games that is always worth a play and more often than not I think you'll find yourself installing this on your system so I threw it in here anyway it's a fantastic classic probably the greatest game of all time or one of them so yeah I just thought you might want to see how it runs okay let's try a couple of triple-a titles to finalize here fallout 4 has a 60 frames per second cap on it and you'll have no problem in hitting that most of the time with this system and the high settings fallout 4 actually runs very nicely this is the Steam version of the game I didn't uncap it because it can cause some graphical glitches but 60 FPS at 1080p runs just perfectly on the i5 2320 and gtx 960 as you move into busier areas of the wasteland or places with more clutter you may see that framerate drop to the high forties because of that you might want to turn the settings down to medium but I think it's a pretty good result here finally I tried battlefield 5 this ran quite well as well 1080p with the low settings here will get you a reasonably playable FPS so it's nice to see that even new titles like this one can run on this system but to conclude I think it is certainly best suited to those eSports games if you want to put together something that's relatively cheap you just want to play fortnight's csgo things like that then this is a PC that will make you quite happy and with all that said I'm going to leave it there thank you for watching I hope you enjoyed this one if you did leave a like on it leave a dislike if you didn't subscribe to the channel if you haven't done so already and hopefully I'll see you all in the next onehello everyone and welcome to another video now in today's one I'm showcasing this my recent cheap and ugly gaming PC build now I didn't really intend to call it that but when I built this PC over the weekend and showed one of my friends that's exactly what he called it so the name has sort of stuck now from the outside it doesn't look all that special but on the inside it's the system comprised of components that should be able to handle all your eSports games with these things like for tonight do you mind pub G and maybe even a triple-a title here in there so let's get into it talk about the components I've used to build this thing and see what it can do when it comes to gaming so I apologize for the lighting why do I look like a ghost it's raining outside I've had to boost the lights a little bit so the contrast is a little bit off but nonetheless let's talk about the specs so the case here is just the cheapest case I could find I cannot remember the name of it it will be probably up here somewhere or down here ah but it's got everything you need to build a basic PC inside off at the front we've got two USB to ports which was essential because the motherboard I've used doesn't have any us three us three B USB three connectors and it's important when picking a case or a motherboard in fact that it matches the connectors on your front panel you don't want a USB three case and a motherboard with no USB three connectors there are adapters available but it's easier if you choose the right case to begin with now for the motherboard you've seen them before I've used them before but it's a good cheap intel-based board this is the DQ 67 oh w it's a socket 1155 board and it supports pretty much every 1155 processor out there this cost me about 15 pounds fifteen sixteen pounds and I'm currently running a Core i5 23:20 a three gigahertz quad-core CPU that is among the cheapest older I fives you can currently buy this cost me twelve pounds and the heat sink fan here came with the motherboard so I didn't have to worry about that now as I say it is a basic I 5 processor but it still seems to do the job it does an ok job of playing games it's a pretty decent CPU for everyday usage things like that and you aren't going to see it much slowdown even when it comes to multitasking it's just a decent cheap CPU that can be picked up for very little money in 2019 for the RAM this cost me a little bit more I've actually got two sticks of this stuff but I can only get one out due to the graphics card this is team elite 1600 megahertz memory we've got 8 gigs in total to 4 gig sticks of this stuff it's pretty good Ram pretty cheap stuff and it works in this ball just fine in fact a lot of people worry too much about where the RAM is going to be compatible with their motherboard but I have to say that every time I've sort of been winging it buying RAM and sticking it in a ddr3 board I've had no compatibility issues of course that's not brilliant advice but always read the manual to see what is and isn't supported just in case now for the piece de resistance piece I didn't take French at school I took Spanish but I don't remember word of that either we have the soos Strix GTX 960 now this cost me 65 pounds cex here in the UK and a thing with cex is that you don't know exactly what you're going to get all they do is list the basic specs of the car for example on the site list just said GTX 960 and so I thought you know I'll go and pick it up at my local store and it turns out to be the Seuss version I could either have a 2gig version or a totally different 4 gig version it wasn't near Susu and it was just a standard in video 1 I believe but nonetheless the difference between the 960 in terms of VRAM is very minimal in order to see a difference you'd have to turn the settings right up to high or ultra and even then there only be a few frames in it of course in 2019 if you turn the settings right up on a GTX 960 you're not going to see playable framerates anyway so the difference between 24 and 26 FPS is going to be sort of and when playing games okay what else what else do we have we've got a blue RGB fan in the back here this case came with a standard black one but I thought you know let's add a little bit of color to this system so I went with the blue one instead cost me about three pounds I think it was a pretty wise investment and in terms of storage we've got a 240 gig SanDisk SSD now when you're building a cheap PC and when it comes to storage my advice would be either buy the biggest SSD you can afford on your budget because you're going to notice a lot of difference in boot up times especially with an older processor it's going to make a nice bit of difference as opposed to a standard hard drive or purchase a small SSD like a 64 gig SSD for the Windows installation or Linux installation alone and then purchase the biggest hard disk drive you can afford alongside it for example get a 64 gig SSD and then a 500 gig hard drive in my opinion I'd opt for the biggest SSD that I could afford I got the 240 gig won on this budget and then later on you can add a hard disk drive should you run out of space you know I keep the windows installation on here as well as a few games because it just makes things run a bit faster and a bit smoother but of course what you do in terms of storage is entirely up to you I nearly forgot the power supply this is a silverstone psu i bought it secondhand on ebay for about 20 pounds never skimp on a psu it's the most important part of any system and if you buy a cheap one it goes boom chances are you could take every other component with it this is a slightly older one now and it seems to be a pretty decent unit and a 500 watts is more than enough to power our i 5 here and our gtx 960 the thing about the i5 as well before we get into the games is that you can upgrade it to say an i7 later down the line because of the support that this motherboard provides all in all it's a pretty cheap system it's not the best looking PC in the world but it should give you pretty decent frame rates when it comes to those eSports titles and can even handle a few triple-a games as well and with all that said let's get into the benchmarks to see what this thing can do okay let me just quickly address what could be an elephant in the room and that is old Dell Optiplex is I could have bought an old I five pre-built Dell unit upgraded the PSU the SSD and added a graphics card but by the time I'd done that it would have cost more or if not a very similar price to building a PC from scratch of course though it's all about saving you money so if where you live doing that buying an optic Plex and upgrading it is the cheaper road to go down then by all means do it so in csgo here we've got the high settings in the game the game auto selected these settings and we're running well above 60 frames per second in fact we're running above 100 frames per second most of the time at 1080p there may be a few instances where the framerate drops here and there but overall it's a very smooth experience and you'll have no trouble playing eSports titles like Counter Strike global Offensive as we move on to fortnight what struck me as quite odd and surprising here was that Faulkner actually maxes out the i5 2320 at 100% usage a lot of the time this doesn't seem to have a significantly adverse effect on framerate but it's just something to bear in mind in 2019 now for Core four threaded processors can struggle in some titles I didn't expect it to do so here but the game is still more than playable and you will still see a higher than 60 frames per second average it's always worth considering all your options if you plan to upgrade later on is it just worth buying something a little bit newer to begin with you know there are plenty of things to consider but if you've got a budget of around 150 to 200 pounds here in the UK all the same in dollars then personally I'd recommend shopping around on that 1155 platform because there are certainly some brilliant bargains to be had pub G surprised me as well with a mixture of low and medium settings we were able to hit 60 frames per second on average there will be a few instances where that framerate dips but all in all it was a pretty decent experience just bear in mind that newer triple-a titles may struggle a little bit I'm not gonna lie to you Metro Exodus probably isn't going to be a game that you'll be able to play on this PC okay I don't know why through San Andreas in here but you'll be surprised to see that even when you turn the settings right up it can be quite demanding like we're only getting about 70 to 80 frames per second and Sandra is just one of those timeless games that is always worth a play and more often than not I think you'll find yourself installing this on your system so I threw it in here anyway it's a fantastic classic probably the greatest game of all time or one of them so yeah I just thought you might want to see how it runs okay let's try a couple of triple-a titles to finalize here fallout 4 has a 60 frames per second cap on it and you'll have no problem in hitting that most of the time with this system and the high settings fallout 4 actually runs very nicely this is the Steam version of the game I didn't uncap it because it can cause some graphical glitches but 60 FPS at 1080p runs just perfectly on the i5 2320 and gtx 960 as you move into busier areas of the wasteland or places with more clutter you may see that framerate drop to the high forties because of that you might want to turn the settings down to medium but I think it's a pretty good result here finally I tried battlefield 5 this ran quite well as well 1080p with the low settings here will get you a reasonably playable FPS so it's nice to see that even new titles like this one can run on this system but to conclude I think it is certainly best suited to those eSports games if you want to put together something that's relatively cheap you just want to play fortnight's csgo things like that then this is a PC that will make you quite happy and with all that said I'm going to leave it there thank you for watching I hope you enjoyed this one if you did leave a like on it leave a dislike if you didn't subscribe to the channel if you haven't done so already and hopefully I'll see you all in the next one\n"