Building a Budget-Friendly Gaming PC with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050

We've got a great build coming together here, and it's time to take a closer look at how it all comes together. As we were assembling this system, one of our team members jokingly mentioned that it looked nice if you wanted to give it a go, and we could take that out, pop the GPU in, and then pop the cover back on to stop our GPU from going anywhere. This was actually a great idea, as it really helped us secure the graphics card in place.

Another screw proved useful in fixing around here and really making sure the GPU wasn't going to move. We also decided to add an extra screw just to be safe, as you never know when something might need a little extra stability. Once we had our graphics card securely fastened, it was time to power up the system.

We were able to get all of our components powered without any issues, and everything seemed to be working smoothly. The micro-ATX case was perfectly proportioned for what we were dealing with here, and so far, so good. We also made sure that our graphics card had enough power by popping in a Cooler Master MWE 500 power supply unit. This PSU is 80 PLUS certified, which means it's efficient and should provide us with plenty of power.

The MWE 500 was easy to install, and we were able to slide the PSU into the bottom zone of our case without any issues. We then screwed the PSU into place, making sure it was secure. The process was simple, but it's always good to have a few extra screws just in case. Once everything was powered up, we were ready to move on to the next step.

We plugged in the CPU power cable to the top left corner of the motherboard, one to the right-hand side, and one to the GPU, which is also located in the bottom right corner of the system. We then connected a few front panel cables to our USB ports, HDMI port, and audio jacks. These cables are what allow us to connect peripherals to our PC.

Our team member noted that the HD audio connection was similar to the USB 2.0 port but looked very different, so be careful when connecting these cables. Once we had all of our front panel cables connected correctly, we were ready to boot up the system and check out its performance.

First things first, let's take a look at how good this system looks in action. As you can see, it's really starting to shape up to be a very nice-looking build. The micro-ATX case is well-proportioned for our setup here, and everything seems to be working smoothly. Now that we've seen how good this system looks, let's move on to checking out its performance.

We'll be diving into detailed benchmark runs for a number of titles, including Battlefield 2042, Cod Vanguard, Apex Legends, and Fortnite. These games will give us an idea of just how well our system performs across the board. We'll also be looking at frame rates in each game and comparing them to other PCs that are similar in build configuration.

Battlefield 2042 was one of the first games we tested, and it showed that our system is capable of delivering high frame rates. At 1080p High with DLSS enabled, we pulled in an average of 93 frames per second. This is a great result, especially considering that this is a budget-friendly GPU. The game looked awesome visually stunning as well.

Next up was Cod Vanguard, which also showed strong performance. At 1080p High settings with DLSS enabled, we managed to achieve 125 frames per second on average. This is an excellent result, and the game looked great once again. We then moved on to Apex Legends and Fortnite, both of which performed similarly.

In Apex Legends at 1080p Competitive Settings, we achieved an average frame rate of 166 frames per second. This is a remarkable result, especially considering that this is a budget-friendly GPU. The game looked amazing, and the performance was consistent throughout. We also tested Fortnite in competitive settings and managed to achieve 166 frames per second on average.

These results show that our system is capable of delivering high frame rates across a number of popular games. This is a testament to the performance of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050, which punches above its weight in terms of performance. We're excited to see how our system performs in other games and applications.

For more detailed benchmarking results, including 1080p Low, 1440p, and 4K resolutions, please check out our Benchmarking YouTube channel. We'll be posting a series of videos featuring in-depth testing of this budget-friendly gaming PC.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enin this video i'm going to be building the best budget gaming pc you can put together right now if you're looking for a build that can smash through all the latest titles at 1080p high settings 60fps and above without exceptions this is the video for you for just a 700 budget this build punches well above its weight and i'll be showing you what parts make it possible how you can put them together to make this awesome looking gaming pc i'm taking you through detailed performance benchmarks later so that you know what i'm telling you isn't cap that looks awful cuts really aren't for me oh no no no no oh fine all fine right here we go the cooler master gm 27 fqs comes equipped with a 27-inch quad hd panel 165 hertz refresh rate and a customizable argb stand with a super fast ips panel you aren't sacrificing image quality for response time wall support for freesync premium and nvidia g-sync make it a great all-rounder learn more about this awesome panel at the first link in the description below and a big thanks to cornermaster for making this video possible let's kick things off by taking a look at the cpu and the motherboard choice for this system now you see here i have gone team amd and that might sound weird when in so many videos i've been recommending intel's pretty unbeatable core i3 12100f now the intel cpus are better than amd chips however the motherboards are a good chunk more expensive that makes an amd platform still the cheaper option you can pick a motherboard like this up for anywhere between 50 and 75 the latest pricing and availability will be down in the description below while the processors themselves clock in for under 150 that makes a 200 cpu and motherboard combo very feasible plus the story gets better because the included amd stock cooler is that tad more impressive than intel's version once again saving your money on an aftermarket cooler which we now no longer need i'll be installing our ryzen 5 3600 into the motherboard today with six scores 12 threads and some decent clock speeds boosted up to 4.2 gigahertz on a single core this thing is going to be absolutely fine for what we need it won't bottleneck our graphics card or even a couple of gpus higher to be honest allowing for future upgrade paths as well once the cpu is in add a drop of thermal paste on and then screw in your cpu cooler tighten the screws up in a cross pattern to make sure you're not putting any uneven pressure on a single corner and that's basically it the cpu and cpu cooler are all nicely installed into the motherboard the next component on our proverbial hit list is the memory otherwise known as your ram now this right here is a corsair vengeance kit it's their rgb rs of course with this being a ryzen 5000 or 3000 build we will be using ddr4 not the newer ddr5 memory you can learn over on our website what the difference is between the two and you can also take a look at some of our recommendations for our favorite ddr4 and ddr5 kits the website's been doing super well recently we're into the tens of thousands of users a week territory which is crazy so thanks for all the support over there it's worth a read we're putting a lot of time and money into the website so i hope it goes well shameless plug right what we're gonna do to install the ram is we're gonna pull back the clips on a couple of our ram dim slots to be precise the second and fourth ones we can then slide our ram into place like so apply some pressure hey and then our memory should all be into place nicely done we've got a couple of slots spare two while two randoms also gives us dual channel performance which in short you should care about because it means more bandwidth for our processor and ultimately more performance and of course more frame rate and once your memory's in there's only one more component left to go for the motherboard and then we can take a look at the case and gpu and all the exciting parts a bit later now for this stage of the process you'll need to take your big large screwdriver throw this one out and pick yourself up a teeny tiny one a little something like this for 200 000 subscribers i'm making it official we're going to release an official geekawatt teeny tiny screwdriver with a few little tricks up its sleeves so keep your eyes peeled for that and make sure to get subscribed if you'd like to see the launch of the geekop td tiny screwdriver we're going to use the td tiny screwdriver to take off our m.2 heatsink shield over here and we're also going to remove the m.2 standoff screw as well this is going to free up our whole m.2 slot for the installation of an ssd in particular this the samsung ssd 980. this drive right here is a more budget-oriented let's try that again this drive right here is a more budget-oriented version of the 980 pro rather than being gen 4 let's try that one for the third time rather than it being gen 4 it's gen 3 you get speeds about 3 gigabytes a second on your read slightly less on your right but it's going to do an awesome job and not break the bank modern graphics cards nowadays do need decent storage otherwise that can be a bottleneck and restrict your frame rates to keep your eyes peeled and check the speeds of your drive are of course sufficient slide the drive in at sort of a 45 degree angle and then push it down onto your standoff use the teeny tiny screwdriver to add back in your m.2 retention screw that's gonna go on nice and easily and you could then leave it like that or you could take things up a level and add back on your m.2 heat shield that came included with our motherboard pop that on the thermal pad will pop of course onto the top of the ssd and we can add the screw in to be all good nice work at this stage of proceedings you want to go ahead and grab the pc case you've gone and selected once again we've done lots of content about just how to pick out the right case at the right price point with the right features but for this build i've gone for co-link's sighted out se now this is a really really nice budget case for a few reasons not only does it have a tempered glass side panel which actually swings open as a door really really convenient but it's also of the frontier got a full mesh panel it doesn't come with rgb fans as standard so i've gone ahead and added some of our own in a little bit earlier to make it look that bit nicer but the whole thing is awesome and i picked this up for around about 38 pounds or the equivalent of 45 over in the states so a budget case around this price point is going to be great you can't really go too far wrong on a case just make sure the reviews are good it's got a decent i o and it's got a mesh front panel with a glass side panel that allows to show off your system that mesh is really important because it will keep temperatures down and allow all your components to run at full speed super important for a project like this lay the case down flat and pop in the io shield this is the bit of sharp rectangular metal that comes included in your motherboard's box and then slide the motherboard into place typically at this stage you'd want to check that all the standoff holes on the motherboard line up with those in the case but it's an m80x case and an m80x board so it's gonna be fine drop in the three screws at the top three along the middle and two down the bottom that we need make sure they're nice and tight but don't force them and our motherboard is installed into the case while we're here and the pc is on the table we might as well also we might as well also go ahead and install the graphics card i'm so tired i'm dropping everything today i'm so sorry this right here though is an rtx 3050 specifically msi's double fan gaming x version there's a few rtx 3050s that we love and recommend these include stuff like the asus jewel design zotac have got a really really nice twin edge cooler design and this msi gaming x card is also a great show a lot of the prices on 3050s have kind of normalized now here in the uk you can absolutely pick one of these things up for msrp i'm hearing it's a similar story in the states and over in canada too and i hope the rest of the world you guys are having a bit more luck when it comes to gpus latest pricing and availability as always though is linked below now the 3050 is an awesome card for 1080p gaming is it a little bit of a rebadged 1660 super i mean sort of but you have got dlss and raytracing the latter of which is perhaps less important but dlss very very useful indeed it's a great budget card though blowing any of amd's options right out the water and making for an awesome choice the only card really this competes with is amd's 6500 xt which you shouldn't buy an nvidia's 3060 which is good but quite a bit more expensive we're gonna push back the clip on our pcie slot just here and slide the gpu into place it's nearly installed but by the looks of it we just need to take off this rear vertical gpu mount which we're not going to be using in this build it's just a bit better for airflow if we avoid it but it doesn't look nice if you want to give it a go we can take that out then pop the gpu in and then pop the cover back on and that's going to stop our gpu really from going anywhere another screw also to fix around here and really make sure the gpu isn't going to move will be useful and then we can power it up when we deal with the power supply in just a second otherwise though that's starting to shape up to be a really really nice looking build the micro atx case is perfectly well proportioned for what we're dealing with here and so far so good so good dude so good i gotta do to give our graphics card and all of our other components for that matter power we're gonna pop in one of these it's a cooler master mwe 500. now the 3050 is pretty efficient with only a single six or eight pin power connection depending on the 30 50 card you pick up this one's on eight pins a bit more beefy but that's absolutely a-okay this power supply is 80 plus certified as well making sure of course we've got nice efficient power and we can go ahead and slide the unit just into the bottom zone of our case a little something like so if we spin the case around we can then go ahead and screw the psu in corner by corner there's one and there is two third one next of all in the top right corner little something like so and the fourth one for good measure i mean two screws here is probably going to be enough the thing's not exactly going to go and fall out anytime soon but pop all four in just to be safe then it's a really simple case of plugging one up to the cpu in the top left corner of the motherboard one to the motherboard on the right hand side and one to the gpu and of course our graphics card after those we have got a few front panel cables too these are the power connections for all of our ports and buttons at the top of the case our usb 3 is first it's the largest it's notched and it only goes in one way around we've also got our usb2 there's only one usb 2 port on this case and that goes to the bottom center of the motherboard hd audio is next it looks very similar to usb2 but it's different so be careful that goes to the very bottom left and our jfp one aka our fiddly front panel cables goes to the bottom right use the diagram on your screen now to help you get these things the right way round and once that's done we're ready to boot the system up check out the performance but first see how good it looks in the only way we know how i'll see in a sec for the performance but first roll that montage awesome stuff now that we've seen how good this really frankly budget oriented system looks it's time to make sure that the performance stacks up equally as well we'll be diving into detailed benchmark runs for a number of titles but before then is sort of a summary of everything that we managed to achieve here putting all the frame rates on the screen now is hopefully going to give you an idea of how this system performs across the board all of the full benchmark runs can be found on our benchmarking youtube channel which is actually closing in on a thousand subscribers linked in the cards now taking a look at battlefield 2042 first of all 1080p high with dlss enabled we pulled in 93 frames per second on average the game looked awesome visually stunning as well on this 3050 which managed to punch well and truly above its weight in the frame rate department it was a similarly positive story in cod vanguard where at 1080p high settings with dlss once again enabled we clocked in at nearly 125 frames per second 90 and 99 percentile results were strong with our frame rate data being pulled from both nvidia frame view and msi afterburners river tuner simultaneously moving on to apex legends next up 1080p high settings here we saw a slightly lower frame rate on average but still over 100 fps with 112 to be precise strong 90 and 99 percentile results rounded off a very nice set here and the game looked absolutely awesome once again the good results kept on rolling in in fortnight where here we tested at 1080p competitive settings we managed to achieve 166 frames per second on average with 90 and 99 percentile results in the region of 152 and 135 with the game looking awesome competitive settings by the way is when you set everything to low except the render distance which you set so far to maximize your frame rate the 3050 is a card that punches well and truly above its weight with around 100 or 120 frames per second at 1080p high basically across the boardin this video i'm going to be building the best budget gaming pc you can put together right now if you're looking for a build that can smash through all the latest titles at 1080p high settings 60fps and above without exceptions this is the video for you for just a 700 budget this build punches well above its weight and i'll be showing you what parts make it possible how you can put them together to make this awesome looking gaming pc i'm taking you through detailed performance benchmarks later so that you know what i'm telling you isn't cap that looks awful cuts really aren't for me oh no no no no oh fine all fine right here we go the cooler master gm 27 fqs comes equipped with a 27-inch quad hd panel 165 hertz refresh rate and a customizable argb stand with a super fast ips panel you aren't sacrificing image quality for response time wall support for freesync premium and nvidia g-sync make it a great all-rounder learn more about this awesome panel at the first link in the description below and a big thanks to cornermaster for making this video possible let's kick things off by taking a look at the cpu and the motherboard choice for this system now you see here i have gone team amd and that might sound weird when in so many videos i've been recommending intel's pretty unbeatable core i3 12100f now the intel cpus are better than amd chips however the motherboards are a good chunk more expensive that makes an amd platform still the cheaper option you can pick a motherboard like this up for anywhere between 50 and 75 the latest pricing and availability will be down in the description below while the processors themselves clock in for under 150 that makes a 200 cpu and motherboard combo very feasible plus the story gets better because the included amd stock cooler is that tad more impressive than intel's version once again saving your money on an aftermarket cooler which we now no longer need i'll be installing our ryzen 5 3600 into the motherboard today with six scores 12 threads and some decent clock speeds boosted up to 4.2 gigahertz on a single core this thing is going to be absolutely fine for what we need it won't bottleneck our graphics card or even a couple of gpus higher to be honest allowing for future upgrade paths as well once the cpu is in add a drop of thermal paste on and then screw in your cpu cooler tighten the screws up in a cross pattern to make sure you're not putting any uneven pressure on a single corner and that's basically it the cpu and cpu cooler are all nicely installed into the motherboard the next component on our proverbial hit list is the memory otherwise known as your ram now this right here is a corsair vengeance kit it's their rgb rs of course with this being a ryzen 5000 or 3000 build we will be using ddr4 not the newer ddr5 memory you can learn over on our website what the difference is between the two and you can also take a look at some of our recommendations for our favorite ddr4 and ddr5 kits the website's been doing super well recently we're into the tens of thousands of users a week territory which is crazy so thanks for all the support over there it's worth a read we're putting a lot of time and money into the website so i hope it goes well shameless plug right what we're gonna do to install the ram is we're gonna pull back the clips on a couple of our ram dim slots to be precise the second and fourth ones we can then slide our ram into place like so apply some pressure hey and then our memory should all be into place nicely done we've got a couple of slots spare two while two randoms also gives us dual channel performance which in short you should care about because it means more bandwidth for our processor and ultimately more performance and of course more frame rate and once your memory's in there's only one more component left to go for the motherboard and then we can take a look at the case and gpu and all the exciting parts a bit later now for this stage of the process you'll need to take your big large screwdriver throw this one out and pick yourself up a teeny tiny one a little something like this for 200 000 subscribers i'm making it official we're going to release an official geekawatt teeny tiny screwdriver with a few little tricks up its sleeves so keep your eyes peeled for that and make sure to get subscribed if you'd like to see the launch of the geekop td tiny screwdriver we're going to use the td tiny screwdriver to take off our m.2 heatsink shield over here and we're also going to remove the m.2 standoff screw as well this is going to free up our whole m.2 slot for the installation of an ssd in particular this the samsung ssd 980. this drive right here is a more budget-oriented let's try that again this drive right here is a more budget-oriented version of the 980 pro rather than being gen 4 let's try that one for the third time rather than it being gen 4 it's gen 3 you get speeds about 3 gigabytes a second on your read slightly less on your right but it's going to do an awesome job and not break the bank modern graphics cards nowadays do need decent storage otherwise that can be a bottleneck and restrict your frame rates to keep your eyes peeled and check the speeds of your drive are of course sufficient slide the drive in at sort of a 45 degree angle and then push it down onto your standoff use the teeny tiny screwdriver to add back in your m.2 retention screw that's gonna go on nice and easily and you could then leave it like that or you could take things up a level and add back on your m.2 heat shield that came included with our motherboard pop that on the thermal pad will pop of course onto the top of the ssd and we can add the screw in to be all good nice work at this stage of proceedings you want to go ahead and grab the pc case you've gone and selected once again we've done lots of content about just how to pick out the right case at the right price point with the right features but for this build i've gone for co-link's sighted out se now this is a really really nice budget case for a few reasons not only does it have a tempered glass side panel which actually swings open as a door really really convenient but it's also of the frontier got a full mesh panel it doesn't come with rgb fans as standard so i've gone ahead and added some of our own in a little bit earlier to make it look that bit nicer but the whole thing is awesome and i picked this up for around about 38 pounds or the equivalent of 45 over in the states so a budget case around this price point is going to be great you can't really go too far wrong on a case just make sure the reviews are good it's got a decent i o and it's got a mesh front panel with a glass side panel that allows to show off your system that mesh is really important because it will keep temperatures down and allow all your components to run at full speed super important for a project like this lay the case down flat and pop in the io shield this is the bit of sharp rectangular metal that comes included in your motherboard's box and then slide the motherboard into place typically at this stage you'd want to check that all the standoff holes on the motherboard line up with those in the case but it's an m80x case and an m80x board so it's gonna be fine drop in the three screws at the top three along the middle and two down the bottom that we need make sure they're nice and tight but don't force them and our motherboard is installed into the case while we're here and the pc is on the table we might as well also we might as well also go ahead and install the graphics card i'm so tired i'm dropping everything today i'm so sorry this right here though is an rtx 3050 specifically msi's double fan gaming x version there's a few rtx 3050s that we love and recommend these include stuff like the asus jewel design zotac have got a really really nice twin edge cooler design and this msi gaming x card is also a great show a lot of the prices on 3050s have kind of normalized now here in the uk you can absolutely pick one of these things up for msrp i'm hearing it's a similar story in the states and over in canada too and i hope the rest of the world you guys are having a bit more luck when it comes to gpus latest pricing and availability as always though is linked below now the 3050 is an awesome card for 1080p gaming is it a little bit of a rebadged 1660 super i mean sort of but you have got dlss and raytracing the latter of which is perhaps less important but dlss very very useful indeed it's a great budget card though blowing any of amd's options right out the water and making for an awesome choice the only card really this competes with is amd's 6500 xt which you shouldn't buy an nvidia's 3060 which is good but quite a bit more expensive we're gonna push back the clip on our pcie slot just here and slide the gpu into place it's nearly installed but by the looks of it we just need to take off this rear vertical gpu mount which we're not going to be using in this build it's just a bit better for airflow if we avoid it but it doesn't look nice if you want to give it a go we can take that out then pop the gpu in and then pop the cover back on and that's going to stop our gpu really from going anywhere another screw also to fix around here and really make sure the gpu isn't going to move will be useful and then we can power it up when we deal with the power supply in just a second otherwise though that's starting to shape up to be a really really nice looking build the micro atx case is perfectly well proportioned for what we're dealing with here and so far so good so good dude so good i gotta do to give our graphics card and all of our other components for that matter power we're gonna pop in one of these it's a cooler master mwe 500. now the 3050 is pretty efficient with only a single six or eight pin power connection depending on the 30 50 card you pick up this one's on eight pins a bit more beefy but that's absolutely a-okay this power supply is 80 plus certified as well making sure of course we've got nice efficient power and we can go ahead and slide the unit just into the bottom zone of our case a little something like so if we spin the case around we can then go ahead and screw the psu in corner by corner there's one and there is two third one next of all in the top right corner little something like so and the fourth one for good measure i mean two screws here is probably going to be enough the thing's not exactly going to go and fall out anytime soon but pop all four in just to be safe then it's a really simple case of plugging one up to the cpu in the top left corner of the motherboard one to the motherboard on the right hand side and one to the gpu and of course our graphics card after those we have got a few front panel cables too these are the power connections for all of our ports and buttons at the top of the case our usb 3 is first it's the largest it's notched and it only goes in one way around we've also got our usb2 there's only one usb 2 port on this case and that goes to the bottom center of the motherboard hd audio is next it looks very similar to usb2 but it's different so be careful that goes to the very bottom left and our jfp one aka our fiddly front panel cables goes to the bottom right use the diagram on your screen now to help you get these things the right way round and once that's done we're ready to boot the system up check out the performance but first see how good it looks in the only way we know how i'll see in a sec for the performance but first roll that montage awesome stuff now that we've seen how good this really frankly budget oriented system looks it's time to make sure that the performance stacks up equally as well we'll be diving into detailed benchmark runs for a number of titles but before then is sort of a summary of everything that we managed to achieve here putting all the frame rates on the screen now is hopefully going to give you an idea of how this system performs across the board all of the full benchmark runs can be found on our benchmarking youtube channel which is actually closing in on a thousand subscribers linked in the cards now taking a look at battlefield 2042 first of all 1080p high with dlss enabled we pulled in 93 frames per second on average the game looked awesome visually stunning as well on this 3050 which managed to punch well and truly above its weight in the frame rate department it was a similarly positive story in cod vanguard where at 1080p high settings with dlss once again enabled we clocked in at nearly 125 frames per second 90 and 99 percentile results were strong with our frame rate data being pulled from both nvidia frame view and msi afterburners river tuner simultaneously moving on to apex legends next up 1080p high settings here we saw a slightly lower frame rate on average but still over 100 fps with 112 to be precise strong 90 and 99 percentile results rounded off a very nice set here and the game looked absolutely awesome once again the good results kept on rolling in in fortnight where here we tested at 1080p competitive settings we managed to achieve 166 frames per second on average with 90 and 99 percentile results in the region of 152 and 135 with the game looking awesome competitive settings by the way is when you set everything to low except the render distance which you set so far to maximize your frame rate the 3050 is a card that punches well and truly above its weight with around 100 or 120 frames per second at 1080p high basically across the board\n"