**Building a Budget-Friendly Gaming PC**

In this article, we'll explore the process of building a budget-friendly gaming PC that still packs a punch. Our goal was to stay under $250, but due to some unexpected costs and upgrades, our final build ended up costing a bit more. However, we believe it's well worth the investment.

**Power Supply and GPU**

The power supply unit (PSU) is one of the most critical components in any gaming PC. We opted for a 475-watt PSU, which may seem like a lot for a budget build, but it's actually a relatively small unit compared to more powerful systems. The challenge was finding a power supply that would fit our case and meet the power requirements of our GPU. We ended up using an 8-pin adapter to connect the GPU to the power supply, which worked out well.

Our GPU of choice is the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960. This card may not be the most powerful on the market, but it's still a great performer for its price. The GTX 960 uses a single 6-pin connector, and we had to get creative with our power supply setup to accommodate it. We used a molex-to-8pin adapter to connect the GPU to the power supply, which was a bit of a challenge, but ultimately worked out.

**CPU Cooler**

The CPU cooler is another important component in any gaming PC. We opted for a Deepcool AMax 300, which is a single heat pipe cooler that's designed to keep our CPU cool without breaking the bank. This cooler is surprisingly effective, and we were able to achieve temperatures that would be acceptable for most users.

**Case**

The case of our build is the Raid Max Gamma, which is a great value for its price. However, it did present some challenges when it came to fitting our power supply unit (PSU). The Z400 PSU is not a standard ATX size, and we had to get creative with how we installed it in the case. We ended up using extensions to make it fit, and while it's not the prettiest solution, it works well.

**Other Upgrades**

In addition to our GPU and CPU cooler, we also made some other upgrades to enhance the performance of our build. These included a 13-dollar AGA Max 300 sleeve kit, which adds a touch of style to our case, and some additional extensions to make sure all of our cables fit properly.

**Benchmarks**

Finally, let's take a look at some benchmarks for our build. Here are the results:

* 3DMark: 4000

* Unigine Heaven: 70 FPS

* Assassin's Creed IV: 60 FPS

As you can see, our build is capable of delivering great performance for its price. While it may not be as powerful as some of the more expensive systems out there, we believe that it offers great value for money.

**Conclusion**

Building a budget-friendly gaming PC can be a challenge, but with the right components and a bit of creativity, it's definitely possible to create a system that delivers great performance. Our build is just one example of what you can do on a budget, and we hope that it inspires you to build your own gaming PC without breaking the bank.

**Additional Resources**

If you're interested in learning more about building a gaming PC or want to see more detailed information on our build, be sure to check out our video here: [link to video]. We also have a comments section below where you can ask questions and discuss your own builds.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enbudget gaming builds kind of hard to do right now I'm looking at new graphics cards but I got one put together for you guys and under $250 build let's get into it so I set out a while ago to put together another budget computer but this time trying to go a different route than when I did so the original basis I had for this was an HP z 400 and again I already had experience with that and that was for my little brothers under $300 i7 build and that was I'm still going strong today but it changed hands if somebody else has got it and it's got a 6 core in it now really cool that that socket can do that if you guys want to see more on that video to be linked right up here and so let's let's talk about it a little bit I got an HP z 400 use parts ebay that's a good place to go for this sort of stuff not so much for graphics cards is their price through the roof right now but uh eBay got me this HP z 400 with a 250 gig hard drive 8 gigs of ddr3 RAM and with its power supply everything basically an entire ready to go unit for $100 hundred bucks got the system now the processor in it wasn't the greatest processor it was a dual-core xeon whatever it wasn't in hyper threading one kind of weird but from that original build i had taken out the w 3550 the original one i mentioned and that was just collecting dust that's the same as an i7 950 not the most terrible processor so I actually threw that in to this one and added a little bit of RAM against I had some leftover ram from back then and we brought that up to 12 gigs of ram for core 8 thread cpu and had turbos up to about 3.1 gigahertz I think not the greatest but pretty good for budget build now the hard part came looking for a graphics card oh man that was tough and I'm still dealing with the PayPal transaction issue now not because I pay about this because guy tried to scam me for a GTX 960 4 gig for 110 bucks which personally to me I think it's a little a little high for a gtx 960 considering what prices they were going for before the mining craze took over whatever I digress locally I ended up finding a MSI gaming GTX 960 4 gig for the same price that I found it on through the other way and well I did have to make a little bit of a drive for it the person though ended up being a bit late and my original offer to him with 100 bucks he came back down to that as a way to make up for I had to wait half an hour for him wasn't that big a deal honestly but really nice of him to do that for me and I think that's a decent deal on gtx 960 and the reason i went with the 960 instead of like a 770 for example which i could find around the same price maybe lower was that this I'm I'm gonna keep using the power supply that came with the z400 because then I wouldn't have to make the adapter that I talked about in that video and saved myself a lot of time but a problem there was that it's only 475 watt unit and the 770 is kinda thirsty so a GTX 960 fits much better into the power envelope this one uses a single 8 pen so I used well kind of a weird adapter setup because I haven't had these adapters lying around to molex to a single 6 pin and the power supply already had a single 6 pin on it so then I put those into a 8 pin adapter and well looking like that worked out pretty good so let's roll the benchmarks well there you have it there the benchmarks and the system I had what can I say does pretty good for a budget build right but it was not without its issues now the case that it went and you guys may have seen it in our video that'll be linked right up here that's the raid Max and gamma case thanks again to red max for sending this out it's gonna find a new home and it's gonna be a really good home for it so the raid max gamma has a power supply enclosure that's designed for a standard sized ATX power supply well I found out the hard way that this Z 400 power supply is not a standard sized ATX power supply it's too tall so I had to get creative and I made it fit and it worked out it's not quite the prettiest solution if you look at it from the back but overall it you can't tell and it works great they'd have to use a few extensions as well so if you guys do do this with the z400 and you take it out of the case that it comes with you're gonna need a power supply ATX 24 pin extension and the 4 pin power supply extension as well for the CPU power and with those two you should be okay now depending on how your layout is you might need extensions for all of your cables but fortunately you can get kits with all that they're not all that expensive and if you're gonna do that might as well dress it up with a sleeve kit make it look a little nicer we throw AG a max 300 on there 13 dollars on Amazon I may be going this with going this way as a budget cooler instead of like a hyper 212 or anything like that you know going forward because it seems to do pretty good for this pretty thirsty processor keeps it in check and well I mean it's kidding it has a blue Fanta if you guys are after a blue themed pretty common the fan will go with that believe the fan is also available in red so again that's a deep cooled a max 300 if you want to check that out I'll have a link in the description below to it's an intuitive Amazon page $13 is not terrible for a three heat pipe cooler and it's really easy to mount so the Intel to it doesn't have a backplate or anything like that you just put the clips you put the little plates on it to have the clips and you push them through it's a little push pin one so some people like that some people but at least it makes it really easy and if you wanted to do an in-place upgrade with this cooler you just throw it in there you don't have to take the motherboard out put a back plate or whatever the case is you just click it right in and that's only if you're going to be taking the z400 motherboard out of its case so so there's that so there are a few other things that if you do this with a z400 that you have to do in order to get it to boot properly and that's the jump a certain USB header that's to make sure you have a PWM fan connected to the rear fan rear four pin header and to ground out the fifth pin on the CPU header and it's all pretty simple stuff to do at least once you know what you're doing with it and it's a lot more straightforward if you're not having to make an adapter for the PSU if you guys want more details on all that sense the sense pin stuff and bypassing all that stuff make sure you check out that video I mentioned before because there's a lot of info there in the description and the comments stuff like that that's it this is a budget build kept it under 250 bucks ideally was trying to stay at $200 but a few adapters here and there having to upgrade the cooler things like that drove the price up just a bit but I think it's a lot of bang for your buck on this one gtx 960 it's an honestly like thermos i one that looks great it looks way better than then what its performance is sure but it's it looks good in the build I gotta say so if you guys liked this video click that like button subscribe we already got more coming and we'll see you guys in the next one peace outbudget gaming builds kind of hard to do right now I'm looking at new graphics cards but I got one put together for you guys and under $250 build let's get into it so I set out a while ago to put together another budget computer but this time trying to go a different route than when I did so the original basis I had for this was an HP z 400 and again I already had experience with that and that was for my little brothers under $300 i7 build and that was I'm still going strong today but it changed hands if somebody else has got it and it's got a 6 core in it now really cool that that socket can do that if you guys want to see more on that video to be linked right up here and so let's let's talk about it a little bit I got an HP z 400 use parts ebay that's a good place to go for this sort of stuff not so much for graphics cards is their price through the roof right now but uh eBay got me this HP z 400 with a 250 gig hard drive 8 gigs of ddr3 RAM and with its power supply everything basically an entire ready to go unit for $100 hundred bucks got the system now the processor in it wasn't the greatest processor it was a dual-core xeon whatever it wasn't in hyper threading one kind of weird but from that original build i had taken out the w 3550 the original one i mentioned and that was just collecting dust that's the same as an i7 950 not the most terrible processor so I actually threw that in to this one and added a little bit of RAM against I had some leftover ram from back then and we brought that up to 12 gigs of ram for core 8 thread cpu and had turbos up to about 3.1 gigahertz I think not the greatest but pretty good for budget build now the hard part came looking for a graphics card oh man that was tough and I'm still dealing with the PayPal transaction issue now not because I pay about this because guy tried to scam me for a GTX 960 4 gig for 110 bucks which personally to me I think it's a little a little high for a gtx 960 considering what prices they were going for before the mining craze took over whatever I digress locally I ended up finding a MSI gaming GTX 960 4 gig for the same price that I found it on through the other way and well I did have to make a little bit of a drive for it the person though ended up being a bit late and my original offer to him with 100 bucks he came back down to that as a way to make up for I had to wait half an hour for him wasn't that big a deal honestly but really nice of him to do that for me and I think that's a decent deal on gtx 960 and the reason i went with the 960 instead of like a 770 for example which i could find around the same price maybe lower was that this I'm I'm gonna keep using the power supply that came with the z400 because then I wouldn't have to make the adapter that I talked about in that video and saved myself a lot of time but a problem there was that it's only 475 watt unit and the 770 is kinda thirsty so a GTX 960 fits much better into the power envelope this one uses a single 8 pen so I used well kind of a weird adapter setup because I haven't had these adapters lying around to molex to a single 6 pin and the power supply already had a single 6 pin on it so then I put those into a 8 pin adapter and well looking like that worked out pretty good so let's roll the benchmarks well there you have it there the benchmarks and the system I had what can I say does pretty good for a budget build right but it was not without its issues now the case that it went and you guys may have seen it in our video that'll be linked right up here that's the raid Max and gamma case thanks again to red max for sending this out it's gonna find a new home and it's gonna be a really good home for it so the raid max gamma has a power supply enclosure that's designed for a standard sized ATX power supply well I found out the hard way that this Z 400 power supply is not a standard sized ATX power supply it's too tall so I had to get creative and I made it fit and it worked out it's not quite the prettiest solution if you look at it from the back but overall it you can't tell and it works great they'd have to use a few extensions as well so if you guys do do this with the z400 and you take it out of the case that it comes with you're gonna need a power supply ATX 24 pin extension and the 4 pin power supply extension as well for the CPU power and with those two you should be okay now depending on how your layout is you might need extensions for all of your cables but fortunately you can get kits with all that they're not all that expensive and if you're gonna do that might as well dress it up with a sleeve kit make it look a little nicer we throw AG a max 300 on there 13 dollars on Amazon I may be going this with going this way as a budget cooler instead of like a hyper 212 or anything like that you know going forward because it seems to do pretty good for this pretty thirsty processor keeps it in check and well I mean it's kidding it has a blue Fanta if you guys are after a blue themed pretty common the fan will go with that believe the fan is also available in red so again that's a deep cooled a max 300 if you want to check that out I'll have a link in the description below to it's an intuitive Amazon page $13 is not terrible for a three heat pipe cooler and it's really easy to mount so the Intel to it doesn't have a backplate or anything like that you just put the clips you put the little plates on it to have the clips and you push them through it's a little push pin one so some people like that some people but at least it makes it really easy and if you wanted to do an in-place upgrade with this cooler you just throw it in there you don't have to take the motherboard out put a back plate or whatever the case is you just click it right in and that's only if you're going to be taking the z400 motherboard out of its case so so there's that so there are a few other things that if you do this with a z400 that you have to do in order to get it to boot properly and that's the jump a certain USB header that's to make sure you have a PWM fan connected to the rear fan rear four pin header and to ground out the fifth pin on the CPU header and it's all pretty simple stuff to do at least once you know what you're doing with it and it's a lot more straightforward if you're not having to make an adapter for the PSU if you guys want more details on all that sense the sense pin stuff and bypassing all that stuff make sure you check out that video I mentioned before because there's a lot of info there in the description and the comments stuff like that that's it this is a budget build kept it under 250 bucks ideally was trying to stay at $200 but a few adapters here and there having to upgrade the cooler things like that drove the price up just a bit but I think it's a lot of bang for your buck on this one gtx 960 it's an honestly like thermos i one that looks great it looks way better than then what its performance is sure but it's it looks good in the build I gotta say so if you guys liked this video click that like button subscribe we already got more coming and we'll see you guys in the next one peace out\n"