**A $200 Gaming PC: A Cost-Effective Alternative**

When it comes to building a gaming PC, many enthusiasts tend to focus on newer, more expensive models that promise top-notch performance. However, I'm here to tell you that with a bit of creativity and resourcefulness, it's possible to build a gaming PC that punches above its weight class without breaking the bank.

I've always been fascinated by Bare Bones builds, which are essentially stripped-down PCs that use affordable components to deliver impressive results. These types of builds often fly under the radar, but I believe they have a special place in my heart. You see, when I was a young college kid with limited budget, I spent around $500 on a Core i3 GTX 750ti Bare Bones build that I thought was Bare Bones at the time (don't ask me why!). Looking back, I realize that it would have made much more sense to spend around $200 or so on a similar system. That's exactly what we're going to explore in this article.

**A Budget-Friendly Build**

We started with a budget of $200 and set out to find the best components for our build. One option was to look at eBay, where you can often find used hardware at discounted prices. We stumbled upon a system that included an AMD Ryzen 3 CPU, an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 GPU, and an MSI B450M MORTAR motherboard – all of which were relatively affordable. Of course, the build didn't come with any fancy cases or power supplies, but we knew that wasn't necessary to deliver good performance.

We tested our build in 1440p synthetic mode using 3DMark Time Spy, and I was pleasantly surprised by its results. The system scored around 30% better than all submitted results, proving that it was capable of delivering smooth gameplay at high resolutions. This was a great test case for demonstrating the value of a $200 build.

**The Challenges of Building**

One of the biggest challenges we faced when building this PC was getting the graphics card out of its casing. Let's just say it wasn't easy, and I won't bore you with the details (although I do have to admit that it was quite satisfying to finally get it out!). The good news is that most of our build went smoothly, apart from a minor RAM issue in the beginning.

**The Benefits of Used Hardware**

I want to emphasize that building a PC using used or second-hand hardware can be a bit more unpredictable than buying new components. However, I firmly believe that it's an option worth considering for those on a tight budget. With careful planning and research, you can often find great deals on eBay or other online marketplaces that will save you money.

Moreover, building a PC yourself is a fun and rewarding experience that allows you to feel like you've accomplished something tangible. There's nothing quite like the satisfaction of taking apart a box of components and reassembling them into a functional machine – it's a hobby that requires patience, persistence, and a willingness to learn.

**The Future of PC Building**

As we move forward, I believe that we'll see more emphasis on cost-effective builds like ours. With discretionary spending decreasing in the gaming community, there's an opportunity for enthusiasts to get creative with their budgets. Who knows? Maybe we'll even see a resurgence of interest in DIY PC building, as people look for ways to save money and still enjoy high-performance hardware.

In any case, I'm excited to share this build with you, and I hope it inspires you to consider the possibilities of cost-effective gaming PCs. Whether you're looking to build something for yourself or gift to a friend, I believe that $200 is a realistic budget for a capable system. And who knows? You might just be surprised by what you can get for your money!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enokay okay hear me out I think we did pretty good with this eBay special here an HP pre-built it's a proes 400 um you certainly wouldn't want to game with this as is but I only spent 50 bucks on it now I believe this Tower was mislabeled on eBay this is the exact same sell we purchased two previous systems from that were also mislabeled as four parts or defective not working simply because they didn't have a windows partition or a storage drive for that matter attached to the motherboards in question and this screen here reveals that of course there's nothing for this system to boot into because there's no storage Drive attach so it's not really defective or for parts it's working it just needs a drive and that's a very quick fix if you even want to call it a fix we were upfront with the seller about this mistake this mislabeling we told them we would send these systems back to them free of charge since they were quote unquote mislabeled misdiagnosed but they were super cool they just said hey that's our loss your gain that's really cool but I think we're going to be able to turn this into something actually pretty sweet for the price I'm aiming for around a $200 all-in budget we're starting out with 50 bucks here on this thing and uh I think we lucked out depending on how much RAM is in here I'm not sure because the of course description was vague as usual uh we might just be able to swap out the power supply and throw in a pretty decent graphics card for around maybe 100 bucks or so and end up with a $200 barebones gaming PC that'll actually handle some newer titles in 720 and 1080p I don't know worth a shot so without further Ado let's jump into it right after this stay with me if you're sick of seeing that same activate Windows watermark over and over head on over to VIP SCD key where they have Windows 10 and 11 Pro OEM keys at a fraction of the price of retail just see the secure payment method like PayPal enter your product key into your PC settings window and say byebye to the watermark and be sure to use your offer code skgs for That Sweet discount first things first let's see what we're dealing with inside uh yeah about what I expected actually this looks like a a standard matx motherboard it looks like we're going to be able to swap this board out in the future if we so desire maybe a sleeper build in the works it has two uh two of its four dim slots completely removed from the board I I suspect that's like a cost-saving measure and uh well it's green PCB cheap CPU Cooler I mean it's what I'd expect in a pre-built of this caliber looks like this is a uh hold on a second let's flip things upside down there we go a 300 wat power supply and thankfully looks like we're using standard connectors we have a 24 pin here off to the left and a standard four pin for CPU power and check this out we get a rideable disc drive something you don't see too much of anymore now something I'm heavily banking on is this sticker right here I suspect there's a core i5 in here but I'm not entirely sure what generation I5 it is this sticker suggests that it's at least a Skylake I5 which would be a pretty big win maybe an i5 6400 or 6400t that would be pretty sweet I'm hoping it's not a Haswell i5 and I'm definitely hoping it's not an i3 because uh well that sticker would be one big tease first things first I do want to clean it up just a bit this is some dark dust all right well it looks better than it did but it's certainly not deep cleaned my real concern with the large chunks of dust that are no longer in here now let's go ahead and get this thing fired up with our portable monitor just going to add a small discret card here since we don't have dedicated HDMI out from the motherboard that tends to be an oem Trend I'd be fairly shocked if this didn't power on based on our previous good experiences with the seller we've got the power strip now on we have a green light at the back of the power supply that's a good sign and here we go power button uh hello there we go yeah the beeps are usually not a good thing um three red beeps two white beeps think we're going to have to look this one up in the manual cuz uh we're not seeing what the previous owner was seeing at first I thought this had something to do with the discret card we added however it looks like it has something to do with memory we either need a receipt memory or swap dims maybe there's a dead dim or a dead memory Channel maybe we knocked something loose while we were cleaning I doubt it but uh man these are pretty stiff we're going to check these out anyway looks like we get 8 gigs of ddr4 in this rig which is pretty solid for a $50 system Allin although it is a bit odd that these are two separate sticks so one HP 4 gig stick and it looks like another 4 gigs was added this is a crucial dim here maybe one of these is bad a few moments later aha would you look at that so we do get a post with the HP dim now we're going to swap in the The crucial dim here and see if we can't get the same result maybe it doesn't like two different dims at two different frequencies I think they're both 21 33 MHz though o actually this crucial dim here is slower so these just might not like playing ball with each other these oems can be very finicky as well I bet we get a post with just this dim as well inserted and would you look at that no problems at all I've actually tried at this point both dims in both slots separately so we don't have a dim specific issue we don't have a slot issue or a memory Channel issue I just don't think these like playing ball together I'm going to give it one more shot swapping the two dims around from the original slots they were in because it is possible that the system is trying to default the frequency of the first dim which happens to be faster than the second dim uh because of the slot order and sometimes the biosis can do that and it will create instability because the slower dim sometimes can't keep up at the higher frequency that's why they've been the way they are and labeled the way they are and sold the way they are so uh let's swap things around we'll give it one more shot worst case not a big deal I've got some very cheap ddr4 to throw in here it's not going to alter our budget by any major amount of money 12 seconds later pH well it works now I actually had to go back and check the footage to see which dim was in which slot originally turns out we have things exactly the way they were before I just didn't realize it so it was likely just a seating issue simply removing the dims and reating them fixed it telling you computers sometimes so then now that that's taken care of we can now focus on overhauling this build starting first with the power supply it is an absolute necessity to take care of that first so that we have enough power to supply to our discret card which I'll reveal shortly after first we'll need to remove this old unit and recall we have a clip back here to worry about we're going to push back on that I should pop this out I think I've got oh yeah there's a lovely Dust Bunny there waiting for us this 550 W evj BP power supply should do the trick and while it is a taded shorter than the original unit we should need to to rely on the clip at all because more of the weight's going to be situated near the back she went in nice and easy we've got it tightened down now and things have been rewired now I already see a few compromises we'll have to make if we want to fit a larger card in here this USB header for one is in a very crappy spot this board is flipped upside down so the the shroud of the gravic card is going to extend upward which means it's going to hit this because our card's a little bigger so we're going to have to disconnect this if we want to make it work um that's unfortunate but not the end of the world same goes possibly for some of these SATA connects I think these are actually high enough they shouldn't be in the way speaking of graphics card time this is an RX 5600 XT and I stand by this this is one of the best value graphics cards you can currently buy anywhere new or used I think for the performance that you're getting and the money you're spending it just doesn't make any sense to buy anything else if you're content with 1080P or lower gaming the 5600 XT is still a very capable card you'll see that in the benchmarks we show a bit later this isn't an extremely bulky card it's not super power hungry or anything and this particular skew from Asus I think looks pretty darn good I really can't believe cards like this are selling for $100 or less today it will however be a slightly awkward fit since uh we got to kind of wiggle it in around this front frame here um yeah you know I haven't entirely thought this through if you can't already tell see the problem is this piece is riveted in multiple locations and it looks like it is a structure part of the case as well a lot of boring math later I was about to switch cards entirely because I didn't think it would work we actually managed to get it all in here I just had to uh I had to finesse some things I had to remove the uh front panel assembly here to make a bit more room the issue really was that there were just cables in the way where I had to kind of finesse the card I had to get it past where it needed to go first and then rotate it because you can see the clearance between the edge of this card and this Frame is I mean we're talking maybe a centimeter or so so uh very tight tolerances all around but it almost looks like this card was made for this case because the cutout for the eight pin is right where it needs to be without us uh having to press on anything alarming speaking of alarming we need to be very careful with these extra cables we don't want any of them to get snagged in these fans that would uh that would be a bad time also these fans are kind of dirty I thought I clean those all right I think we've got everything wired up now both fans spin without issue we got to be really careful about this uh this is a speaker wire here and that thing keeps hanging down might have to zip tie that somewhere but uh all looks good clearances look okay I think we can put the front panel and the right side panel back on just to prove that it actually is a viable system and then we can power it on I love how sleeper this is just by looking at the exterior you'd have no idea what we're packing on the inside here we go power and also power no beeps oh we got one beep cable detection error USB cable okay it's it's noticing that we disconnected USB 3 that's actually oddly specific and would you look at that loading straight into Windows I didn't mention this but I did connect our SSD from our other OEM videos as well um this uh is which we've been using Intel platforms the whole time I'm not expecting there to be a serious uh driver issue and I don't expect that'll affect performance either in the long run but uh if we were switching between Intel and AMD often flip-flopping back and forth you'll lose some performance because some old drivers remain that can conflict with new ones and that's why I always recommend you reinstall Windows if you're switching between them or if you're upgrading from a very old Intel platform to a very new one etc etc uh that not aside we appear to be staish we're just sitting here on the desktop time to run some benchmarks but first before we gete of ourselves what CPU are we dealing with CPU Z tells us it's a core i56500 so yes a Skylake CPU no not the worst Skylake I5 you could possibly have in here I was thinking it would be a 6400 or even worse a 6 400t which is like a an underclocked version of the 6400 the 6500 is actually not bad it is a slightly higher frequency chip still only has four cores though and only four threads no hyperthreading here as for our first Benchmark you guys know the routine this is 3D Mark time spy a 1440p synthetic dx12 you can see the playback here is actually fairly smooth anywhere between about 40 and 60 FPS 1440p is is kind of on a higher end for a 5600 XT and this car actually seemingly holding its own here but as for the physics test this is going to be CPU intensive you can see things are running extra slow here very low frame rate not good for really any CPU especially one with only four threads I have a feeling this is going to catch up to us at some point in the gaming benchmarks I will say though a score averaging better than 28% of all submitted results is not too shabby for a $200 system 3D mark saying that a budget gaming PC in 2023 is something somewhere around 10,000 on the score chart we're averaging about 6,000 here maybe a little above that and uh well we're not terribly far off from this it could be worse though we could be an office laptop so there's that and if we compare specifically our graphic score to our CPU score you can see that heavy implied bottleneck the CPU is going to be holding us back in a lot of these upcoming tests so at first as usual GTA 5 a much older title I think suits these sorts of builds much better in 2023 unfort Ely in the 1440p high preset we are um having a bit of trouble um the frame rates all over the place you can see it's very stuttery very jittery in fact there are some scenes where I mean we're holding on a single frame for about half a second or so that is not good at all not smooth and you can see our CP utilization across all four threads is often pegged at 100% this is not desirable and I'm actually kind of surprised that it's this bad I I have a feeling that many of the recent updates in this game have been taking their toll used to be four cores was plenty for this game back in 2013 1415 when this came out but it doesn't look like it's enough today and Skylake is definitely showing its age in the architecture department now as things move down to the road this is where um yeah it just it completely falls off a cliff we've got scenes where cars appear to just be floating in midair some scenes where the textures aren't being rendered fully and other scenes where the textures aren't being rendered at all we're just like driving on nothing because it is so bottlenecked on the throughput side for the CPU it just can't process what's being generated by the graphics card quickly enough this is why it's important to eliminate Edie bottleneck if possible but here's where things get interesting if we bump the resolution from 1440p to 2160p effectively 4K for gaming this Smooths things out massively no more serious stuttering no more crazy frame time spikes it actually Smooths out a lot and not at a huge cost of frame rate we're still around 80 90 100 FPS or so on average in the flyby scene which is pretty darn impressive now we're still heavily CPU bottlenecked but the CPU is able to keep up a bit more as the frame rate drops since it doesn't have to make as many calls although I will add that totally goes out the window at the street view again for whatever reason this game just does not like playing well with this 6500 moving on then to f123 just another title I wanted to throw into the mix here this game actually fares quite well in 1440p high preset we do have a bit of anti-aliasing and stuff mixed in as well averaging somewhere around 70 to 75 FPS our CPU though you'll notice is not being fully bottlenecked there is still a bit of a graphics bottleneck I think it's because we still have the high preset running and a bit of anti- aing but uh overall this is a much nicer smoother experience because we don't have a serious bottleneck in either CPU or GPU category and just for the laws I also decided to bump this game to 4K I was curious you know $200 system 4K should be the last thing on your mind but actually not bad here it is only about 30 to 40 FPS on average but we don't see again any lag time spikes or anything notice our CP utilization actually drops overall and that's a a direct result I think of the frame rate dropping as well so the CPU isn't working as hard to keep up with the frames being rendered by the graphics card totally normal um the 5600 XT though isn't totally like breaking its back over this resolution so if you're happy with 30 FPS in a racing game and a lot of older console racing games around 30 FPS then I suppose you could game in 4k with this not recommended but just wanted to throw this out there now to be clear because I know some of you are wondering how on Earth is f123 playing as smoothly as it is considering the price of this thing and GTA 5 a much older title significantly less intensive if you really want it to be giving us these strange artifacting texture gaps and things that we haven't really seen in other quad core chips that are not hyperthreaded that are even older than the i56500 and I think those concerns are warranted it's almost like the CP is not getting enough voltage or maybe the motherboard's base clock is screwed up I did check in the Bios there's really not much we can do there it's a very limited UI of course we have a locked chipset and a locked CPU skew so we can't do anything there but uh there were there was nothing else that I could toggle that could really change the amount of power being fed to the CPU so I concluded that GTA V had to have been in I went back and I tested a few other titles Battlefront 2 dirt 5 no issues there and 1080p or even 1440p able to keep at least 60 FPS in those with around medium to high settings so GT5 for whatever reason it's just that strange outlier not often that that happens in fact I usually use GTA 5 for these older cheaper rigs because it tends to perform quite well there but I didn't want to give you the impression that this system is like hit or miss I think for 200 bucks you can't expect too much from it but you're not going to have the kinds of experience we had in GTA 5 and most of the titles you throw at it as long as you've managed expectations and I've got to say Bare Bones builds like these have a special place in my heart it wasn't too long ago I was a young broke college kid and had only a few hundred to my name I had spent about $500 on a core I3 GTX 750ti Bare Bones breaker what I thought was Bare Bones at the time don't ask me why I pair a z97 motherboard with that uh CPU it it really made no sense but I really wish back then I had somebody like myself on YouTube telling me to instead spend $200 or something in that ballpark on this or something like this it just would have made so much more sense I was a baller on a budget or at least I thought I was and I thought I was building something really good in reality though I probably could have built something much better if I had just entertain the used Market if I had just entertained oems like this I know they don't look appealing yes this case sucks yes the stock power supply sucks yes the CPU Cooler sucks but it doesn't mean you have to completely sacrifice in the way of performance right we were we're testing in 1440p intentionally here to show that this will actually punch well above its weight class in the price Department heck scoring around 30% better than all submitted results in 3D Mark time spy a 1440p synthetic is really good actually for a $200 rig and that's all I wanted to prove here you don't need to spend $500 or $1,000 to get a decent entrylevel gaming PC $200 will do it if you'll just take the chance on some used hardware and maybe even an oem yeah it can look a bit cringey at times have absolutely no idea how I'm going to get this graphic card back out of here I think I'm going to have to just leave it permanently installed but uh like those are the the side effects of tight budgets you know I I tend to look at things with a fairly neutral perspective at first and then if I'm genuinely shocked and impressed by how things turn out then there we go I mean that that's all the more upside I don't go into much of this optimistically I really don't as long as you account for the dimensions like proper fitments you can usually finesse the rest um I really wasn't looking for forward to taking a Dremel to this or like a drill bit and like you know you know drilling out the the rivets and things but uh we didn't have to right so that was a that was a win at the very least in my book we didn't have any other major issues apart from that slight Ram problem in the beginning but um actually turned out okay for 200 bucks I I I really can't complain I don't think you should either unless you can find free Hardware it's going to be pretty tough to beat something like this in today's market I know that you know discretionary spending's going down enthusiasm in this space is going down but it doesn't mean you have to just completely cease working with hardware at all you can just scale back your budgets a bit if you want to build something like this for a friend or a family member I mean 200 bucks is a lot more approachable than5 or $600 yes it's used yes it comes with its own set of risks yes buying on eBay can take longer sometimes those parts aren't going to work out of the box you're going have to go through the refund process yes it might be a headache I think that's actually part of the fun though when it it all works out in the end it just feels much more I don't know it feels like he accomplished something extra and that's one of the things that you don't get with a new build you expect things in a new build to work at the first time especially you've been building PCS for a while you never really know what you're going to get with these so if you want to spend 40 50 bucks by yourself an oem and try your luck I think it's the best 40 50 bucks you could spend as a tech Enthusiast I really do apart from maybe buying like complete mystery Tech or something but I'll leave that to Austin Evans you guys enjoyed this one give it a thumbs up consider subscribing if you haven't already leave a comment down below and check out the description for Relevant links my name is Greg thanks for learning with meokay okay hear me out I think we did pretty good with this eBay special here an HP pre-built it's a proes 400 um you certainly wouldn't want to game with this as is but I only spent 50 bucks on it now I believe this Tower was mislabeled on eBay this is the exact same sell we purchased two previous systems from that were also mislabeled as four parts or defective not working simply because they didn't have a windows partition or a storage drive for that matter attached to the motherboards in question and this screen here reveals that of course there's nothing for this system to boot into because there's no storage Drive attach so it's not really defective or for parts it's working it just needs a drive and that's a very quick fix if you even want to call it a fix we were upfront with the seller about this mistake this mislabeling we told them we would send these systems back to them free of charge since they were quote unquote mislabeled misdiagnosed but they were super cool they just said hey that's our loss your gain that's really cool but I think we're going to be able to turn this into something actually pretty sweet for the price I'm aiming for around a $200 all-in budget we're starting out with 50 bucks here on this thing and uh I think we lucked out depending on how much RAM is in here I'm not sure because the of course description was vague as usual uh we might just be able to swap out the power supply and throw in a pretty decent graphics card for around maybe 100 bucks or so and end up with a $200 barebones gaming PC that'll actually handle some newer titles in 720 and 1080p I don't know worth a shot so without further Ado let's jump into it right after this stay with me if you're sick of seeing that same activate Windows watermark over and over head on over to VIP SCD key where they have Windows 10 and 11 Pro OEM keys at a fraction of the price of retail just see the secure payment method like PayPal enter your product key into your PC settings window and say byebye to the watermark and be sure to use your offer code skgs for That Sweet discount first things first let's see what we're dealing with inside uh yeah about what I expected actually this looks like a a standard matx motherboard it looks like we're going to be able to swap this board out in the future if we so desire maybe a sleeper build in the works it has two uh two of its four dim slots completely removed from the board I I suspect that's like a cost-saving measure and uh well it's green PCB cheap CPU Cooler I mean it's what I'd expect in a pre-built of this caliber looks like this is a uh hold on a second let's flip things upside down there we go a 300 wat power supply and thankfully looks like we're using standard connectors we have a 24 pin here off to the left and a standard four pin for CPU power and check this out we get a rideable disc drive something you don't see too much of anymore now something I'm heavily banking on is this sticker right here I suspect there's a core i5 in here but I'm not entirely sure what generation I5 it is this sticker suggests that it's at least a Skylake I5 which would be a pretty big win maybe an i5 6400 or 6400t that would be pretty sweet I'm hoping it's not a Haswell i5 and I'm definitely hoping it's not an i3 because uh well that sticker would be one big tease first things first I do want to clean it up just a bit this is some dark dust all right well it looks better than it did but it's certainly not deep cleaned my real concern with the large chunks of dust that are no longer in here now let's go ahead and get this thing fired up with our portable monitor just going to add a small discret card here since we don't have dedicated HDMI out from the motherboard that tends to be an oem Trend I'd be fairly shocked if this didn't power on based on our previous good experiences with the seller we've got the power strip now on we have a green light at the back of the power supply that's a good sign and here we go power button uh hello there we go yeah the beeps are usually not a good thing um three red beeps two white beeps think we're going to have to look this one up in the manual cuz uh we're not seeing what the previous owner was seeing at first I thought this had something to do with the discret card we added however it looks like it has something to do with memory we either need a receipt memory or swap dims maybe there's a dead dim or a dead memory Channel maybe we knocked something loose while we were cleaning I doubt it but uh man these are pretty stiff we're going to check these out anyway looks like we get 8 gigs of ddr4 in this rig which is pretty solid for a $50 system Allin although it is a bit odd that these are two separate sticks so one HP 4 gig stick and it looks like another 4 gigs was added this is a crucial dim here maybe one of these is bad a few moments later aha would you look at that so we do get a post with the HP dim now we're going to swap in the The crucial dim here and see if we can't get the same result maybe it doesn't like two different dims at two different frequencies I think they're both 21 33 MHz though o actually this crucial dim here is slower so these just might not like playing ball with each other these oems can be very finicky as well I bet we get a post with just this dim as well inserted and would you look at that no problems at all I've actually tried at this point both dims in both slots separately so we don't have a dim specific issue we don't have a slot issue or a memory Channel issue I just don't think these like playing ball together I'm going to give it one more shot swapping the two dims around from the original slots they were in because it is possible that the system is trying to default the frequency of the first dim which happens to be faster than the second dim uh because of the slot order and sometimes the biosis can do that and it will create instability because the slower dim sometimes can't keep up at the higher frequency that's why they've been the way they are and labeled the way they are and sold the way they are so uh let's swap things around we'll give it one more shot worst case not a big deal I've got some very cheap ddr4 to throw in here it's not going to alter our budget by any major amount of money 12 seconds later pH well it works now I actually had to go back and check the footage to see which dim was in which slot originally turns out we have things exactly the way they were before I just didn't realize it so it was likely just a seating issue simply removing the dims and reating them fixed it telling you computers sometimes so then now that that's taken care of we can now focus on overhauling this build starting first with the power supply it is an absolute necessity to take care of that first so that we have enough power to supply to our discret card which I'll reveal shortly after first we'll need to remove this old unit and recall we have a clip back here to worry about we're going to push back on that I should pop this out I think I've got oh yeah there's a lovely Dust Bunny there waiting for us this 550 W evj BP power supply should do the trick and while it is a taded shorter than the original unit we should need to to rely on the clip at all because more of the weight's going to be situated near the back she went in nice and easy we've got it tightened down now and things have been rewired now I already see a few compromises we'll have to make if we want to fit a larger card in here this USB header for one is in a very crappy spot this board is flipped upside down so the the shroud of the gravic card is going to extend upward which means it's going to hit this because our card's a little bigger so we're going to have to disconnect this if we want to make it work um that's unfortunate but not the end of the world same goes possibly for some of these SATA connects I think these are actually high enough they shouldn't be in the way speaking of graphics card time this is an RX 5600 XT and I stand by this this is one of the best value graphics cards you can currently buy anywhere new or used I think for the performance that you're getting and the money you're spending it just doesn't make any sense to buy anything else if you're content with 1080P or lower gaming the 5600 XT is still a very capable card you'll see that in the benchmarks we show a bit later this isn't an extremely bulky card it's not super power hungry or anything and this particular skew from Asus I think looks pretty darn good I really can't believe cards like this are selling for $100 or less today it will however be a slightly awkward fit since uh we got to kind of wiggle it in around this front frame here um yeah you know I haven't entirely thought this through if you can't already tell see the problem is this piece is riveted in multiple locations and it looks like it is a structure part of the case as well a lot of boring math later I was about to switch cards entirely because I didn't think it would work we actually managed to get it all in here I just had to uh I had to finesse some things I had to remove the uh front panel assembly here to make a bit more room the issue really was that there were just cables in the way where I had to kind of finesse the card I had to get it past where it needed to go first and then rotate it because you can see the clearance between the edge of this card and this Frame is I mean we're talking maybe a centimeter or so so uh very tight tolerances all around but it almost looks like this card was made for this case because the cutout for the eight pin is right where it needs to be without us uh having to press on anything alarming speaking of alarming we need to be very careful with these extra cables we don't want any of them to get snagged in these fans that would uh that would be a bad time also these fans are kind of dirty I thought I clean those all right I think we've got everything wired up now both fans spin without issue we got to be really careful about this uh this is a speaker wire here and that thing keeps hanging down might have to zip tie that somewhere but uh all looks good clearances look okay I think we can put the front panel and the right side panel back on just to prove that it actually is a viable system and then we can power it on I love how sleeper this is just by looking at the exterior you'd have no idea what we're packing on the inside here we go power and also power no beeps oh we got one beep cable detection error USB cable okay it's it's noticing that we disconnected USB 3 that's actually oddly specific and would you look at that loading straight into Windows I didn't mention this but I did connect our SSD from our other OEM videos as well um this uh is which we've been using Intel platforms the whole time I'm not expecting there to be a serious uh driver issue and I don't expect that'll affect performance either in the long run but uh if we were switching between Intel and AMD often flip-flopping back and forth you'll lose some performance because some old drivers remain that can conflict with new ones and that's why I always recommend you reinstall Windows if you're switching between them or if you're upgrading from a very old Intel platform to a very new one etc etc uh that not aside we appear to be staish we're just sitting here on the desktop time to run some benchmarks but first before we gete of ourselves what CPU are we dealing with CPU Z tells us it's a core i56500 so yes a Skylake CPU no not the worst Skylake I5 you could possibly have in here I was thinking it would be a 6400 or even worse a 6 400t which is like a an underclocked version of the 6400 the 6500 is actually not bad it is a slightly higher frequency chip still only has four cores though and only four threads no hyperthreading here as for our first Benchmark you guys know the routine this is 3D Mark time spy a 1440p synthetic dx12 you can see the playback here is actually fairly smooth anywhere between about 40 and 60 FPS 1440p is is kind of on a higher end for a 5600 XT and this car actually seemingly holding its own here but as for the physics test this is going to be CPU intensive you can see things are running extra slow here very low frame rate not good for really any CPU especially one with only four threads I have a feeling this is going to catch up to us at some point in the gaming benchmarks I will say though a score averaging better than 28% of all submitted results is not too shabby for a $200 system 3D mark saying that a budget gaming PC in 2023 is something somewhere around 10,000 on the score chart we're averaging about 6,000 here maybe a little above that and uh well we're not terribly far off from this it could be worse though we could be an office laptop so there's that and if we compare specifically our graphic score to our CPU score you can see that heavy implied bottleneck the CPU is going to be holding us back in a lot of these upcoming tests so at first as usual GTA 5 a much older title I think suits these sorts of builds much better in 2023 unfort Ely in the 1440p high preset we are um having a bit of trouble um the frame rates all over the place you can see it's very stuttery very jittery in fact there are some scenes where I mean we're holding on a single frame for about half a second or so that is not good at all not smooth and you can see our CP utilization across all four threads is often pegged at 100% this is not desirable and I'm actually kind of surprised that it's this bad I I have a feeling that many of the recent updates in this game have been taking their toll used to be four cores was plenty for this game back in 2013 1415 when this came out but it doesn't look like it's enough today and Skylake is definitely showing its age in the architecture department now as things move down to the road this is where um yeah it just it completely falls off a cliff we've got scenes where cars appear to just be floating in midair some scenes where the textures aren't being rendered fully and other scenes where the textures aren't being rendered at all we're just like driving on nothing because it is so bottlenecked on the throughput side for the CPU it just can't process what's being generated by the graphics card quickly enough this is why it's important to eliminate Edie bottleneck if possible but here's where things get interesting if we bump the resolution from 1440p to 2160p effectively 4K for gaming this Smooths things out massively no more serious stuttering no more crazy frame time spikes it actually Smooths out a lot and not at a huge cost of frame rate we're still around 80 90 100 FPS or so on average in the flyby scene which is pretty darn impressive now we're still heavily CPU bottlenecked but the CPU is able to keep up a bit more as the frame rate drops since it doesn't have to make as many calls although I will add that totally goes out the window at the street view again for whatever reason this game just does not like playing well with this 6500 moving on then to f123 just another title I wanted to throw into the mix here this game actually fares quite well in 1440p high preset we do have a bit of anti-aliasing and stuff mixed in as well averaging somewhere around 70 to 75 FPS our CPU though you'll notice is not being fully bottlenecked there is still a bit of a graphics bottleneck I think it's because we still have the high preset running and a bit of anti- aing but uh overall this is a much nicer smoother experience because we don't have a serious bottleneck in either CPU or GPU category and just for the laws I also decided to bump this game to 4K I was curious you know $200 system 4K should be the last thing on your mind but actually not bad here it is only about 30 to 40 FPS on average but we don't see again any lag time spikes or anything notice our CP utilization actually drops overall and that's a a direct result I think of the frame rate dropping as well so the CPU isn't working as hard to keep up with the frames being rendered by the graphics card totally normal um the 5600 XT though isn't totally like breaking its back over this resolution so if you're happy with 30 FPS in a racing game and a lot of older console racing games around 30 FPS then I suppose you could game in 4k with this not recommended but just wanted to throw this out there now to be clear because I know some of you are wondering how on Earth is f123 playing as smoothly as it is considering the price of this thing and GTA 5 a much older title significantly less intensive if you really want it to be giving us these strange artifacting texture gaps and things that we haven't really seen in other quad core chips that are not hyperthreaded that are even older than the i56500 and I think those concerns are warranted it's almost like the CP is not getting enough voltage or maybe the motherboard's base clock is screwed up I did check in the Bios there's really not much we can do there it's a very limited UI of course we have a locked chipset and a locked CPU skew so we can't do anything there but uh there were there was nothing else that I could toggle that could really change the amount of power being fed to the CPU so I concluded that GTA V had to have been in I went back and I tested a few other titles Battlefront 2 dirt 5 no issues there and 1080p or even 1440p able to keep at least 60 FPS in those with around medium to high settings so GT5 for whatever reason it's just that strange outlier not often that that happens in fact I usually use GTA 5 for these older cheaper rigs because it tends to perform quite well there but I didn't want to give you the impression that this system is like hit or miss I think for 200 bucks you can't expect too much from it but you're not going to have the kinds of experience we had in GTA 5 and most of the titles you throw at it as long as you've managed expectations and I've got to say Bare Bones builds like these have a special place in my heart it wasn't too long ago I was a young broke college kid and had only a few hundred to my name I had spent about $500 on a core I3 GTX 750ti Bare Bones breaker what I thought was Bare Bones at the time don't ask me why I pair a z97 motherboard with that uh CPU it it really made no sense but I really wish back then I had somebody like myself on YouTube telling me to instead spend $200 or something in that ballpark on this or something like this it just would have made so much more sense I was a baller on a budget or at least I thought I was and I thought I was building something really good in reality though I probably could have built something much better if I had just entertain the used Market if I had just entertained oems like this I know they don't look appealing yes this case sucks yes the stock power supply sucks yes the CPU Cooler sucks but it doesn't mean you have to completely sacrifice in the way of performance right we were we're testing in 1440p intentionally here to show that this will actually punch well above its weight class in the price Department heck scoring around 30% better than all submitted results in 3D Mark time spy a 1440p synthetic is really good actually for a $200 rig and that's all I wanted to prove here you don't need to spend $500 or $1,000 to get a decent entrylevel gaming PC $200 will do it if you'll just take the chance on some used hardware and maybe even an oem yeah it can look a bit cringey at times have absolutely no idea how I'm going to get this graphic card back out of here I think I'm going to have to just leave it permanently installed but uh like those are the the side effects of tight budgets you know I I tend to look at things with a fairly neutral perspective at first and then if I'm genuinely shocked and impressed by how things turn out then there we go I mean that that's all the more upside I don't go into much of this optimistically I really don't as long as you account for the dimensions like proper fitments you can usually finesse the rest um I really wasn't looking for forward to taking a Dremel to this or like a drill bit and like you know you know drilling out the the rivets and things but uh we didn't have to right so that was a that was a win at the very least in my book we didn't have any other major issues apart from that slight Ram problem in the beginning but um actually turned out okay for 200 bucks I I I really can't complain I don't think you should either unless you can find free Hardware it's going to be pretty tough to beat something like this in today's market I know that you know discretionary spending's going down enthusiasm in this space is going down but it doesn't mean you have to just completely cease working with hardware at all you can just scale back your budgets a bit if you want to build something like this for a friend or a family member I mean 200 bucks is a lot more approachable than5 or $600 yes it's used yes it comes with its own set of risks yes buying on eBay can take longer sometimes those parts aren't going to work out of the box you're going have to go through the refund process yes it might be a headache I think that's actually part of the fun though when it it all works out in the end it just feels much more I don't know it feels like he accomplished something extra and that's one of the things that you don't get with a new build you expect things in a new build to work at the first time especially you've been building PCS for a while you never really know what you're going to get with these so if you want to spend 40 50 bucks by yourself an oem and try your luck I think it's the best 40 50 bucks you could spend as a tech Enthusiast I really do apart from maybe buying like complete mystery Tech or something but I'll leave that to Austin Evans you guys enjoyed this one give it a thumbs up consider subscribing if you haven't already leave a comment down below and check out the description for Relevant links my name is Greg thanks for learning with me\n"