**A Cautionary Tale: The Struggle of Building a Budget Gaming PC**

I must admit that I've given up and decided to buy a CD drive after struggling with the installation process on my budget gaming build. Despite having experience building older PCs and general PC builds, this particular project was a nightmare for me. The reason behind this struggle is the fact that my build is aimed at beginners who want to try out PC gaming without breaking the bank.

The problem lies in the overwhelming amount of information available when trying to find compatible components for your build. This can lead to frustration and even discourage people from continuing with PC gaming due to the difficulties encountered while troubleshooting. To make matters worse, simply buying an exact setup that Linus Tech Tips shows in his videos might not be the most effective solution.

As a seasoned PC builder, I was surprised to find that my gaming PC's seemed fairly impressive at first glance. With an average of 60 frames per second at 1080p, it seems playable, but the experience is far from smooth. There would be periods of time where the frame rate would drop to as low as 10 frames per second for a good minute or so, which is unacceptable and can lead to death in mid-game.

This sporadic frame dropping issue was not unique to my build, as I found that it occurred across multiple games, including DOTA, Overwatch, CSGO, and Fortnite. The fact that this issue persisted even when running the latest updates and drivers made me question the results shown by experienced PC builders like Linus Tech Tips.

In conclusion, if you're new to PC gaming and looking for a daily driver build, I would advise against spending $150 on a pre-built system. Instead, consider buying an entry-level CPU, motherboard, RAM, and a second-hand graphics card, such as the GTX 960, which can be found for around $80.

Alternatively, if you're willing to spend a bit more money, go for a Dell Optiplex with at least an i7-2670s CPU. This will provide a better gaming experience and won't bottleneck as much due to the CPU's performance. However, if you're a PC enthusiast who enjoys tinkering with old hardware, then by all means go ahead and buy that budget build – just don't use it as a daily driver.

With that, I think that concludes my video. Thank you for watching, and if you like what you see, be sure to like, comment, and subscribe for more content!

WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enabout a week ago Linus in the gang converted an old Dell Optiplex office PC into what they said is a pretty good value for money 1080p medium to low settings gaming machine whoa dang buttery smooth that is way smoother look at that now my first thought was I can definitely do this better I can find better deals in Japan and build a faster PC for less money but during the process of building my anti Lynas machine I realized a it's not very easy to do and B the question kept creeping up is it actually worth it should you spend roughly a hundred and fifty dollars on a gaming machine and we'll find out all of these answers after this message from our sponsors now before we actually look at whether or not you should spend a hundred and fifty dollars on a gaming machine or if that's the kind of thing you should just leave up to like tech youtubers and crazy people let's have a look at the actual PC that I had and how it compares to Linus tech tips is offering now as far as the CPU goes I actually downgraded a bit I'm using a Q 8400 it's still a quad-core CPU which blindness showed was very important but its core clocks are a little bit lower it's 2.6 6 gigahertz as supposed to 2.8 hopefully that doesn't make too big a difference I've also got 4 gigs of ddr2 and I also put an SSD in it because while that's very important for usability and then I decided to splurge on a graphics card I actually found a great deal on a gtx 960 but whether or not the cpu is gonna be too much of a bottleneck is something that we will see later I guess and the thing is the motherboard that I used is actually it doesn't allow for overclocking so it means that I can't squeeze more performance out of the CPU unfortunately now the total amount of money that I spent on this entire setup was a hundred and forty dollars which is ten dollars less than what line is spent on his setup now that we've got the parts configuration out of the way let's see how this PC actually performs compared to Linus tech tips is offering and after having looked at the benchmarks it seems as though the Linus's destroyer 9000 didn't really do its job it didn't destroy Linus except for in one game fortnight so that's a bit weird but I guess it shows that fortnight isn't as CPU intensive his counter-strike go is and as overwatch is but yeah that's one of the issues with these benchmarks because there were also quite vague with what settings they use they just said like 1080p low it meant that I might not have been able to match up the settings so that might be why there were discrepancies now with all of the direct comparisons out of the way let's get into the real meat and potatoes of this video which is should you actually spend a hundred and fifty dollars on a gaming PC the average frame rates frame rates look pretty good but is it actually worth the money now there are two reasons why I think it actually isn't general parts compatibility because of how old these platforms are it's quite difficult to find conclusive information around what components will work with what other components and Linus actually had this issue in his video because they wanted to use an extreme addition quad core from the same generation as this CPU that the Dell Optiplex had in it and even though Intel said it should technically be compatible it didn't work but luckily because they were using a dowel machine they could just go onto Dells website and kind of look at their compatibility list even for their older machines I wasn't as lucky though because I had a jetway motherboard in my PC that is not a prebuilt it meant that it was from a company that no one's ever heard of before and there was no information around what components should work with it and luckily the cpu I got did end up working with the motherboard no problem but I ran into a big issue when trying to install Windows on the machine because obviously I wanted to use a flash drive to install windows on it because I mean who owns a CD drive today and according to the internet and sources around motherboards with legacy biases on it which is from the Stone Age but it's what this motherboard has you should be able to do that and well unfortunately I just couldn't I tried various file systems on the USB drives and various ways of actually making it a boot drive but the motherboard wouldn't recognize any of it so then after about two days of struggling with this I just gave up and decided to buy a CD drive after that it was really easy to install windows on it because it immediately recognized everything but for me it was a struggle and I have quite a lot of experience building older pcs and just PCs in general but because of the budget of this build it's kind of not aimed at people who have a lot of experience it's aimed at people who want to try out PC gaming but aren't really ready to commit so they don't want to spend that much money and if you're in that position trying to wade through the ridiculous amount of information to try and find something relevant to the components that you're using is a nightmare and it could lead to you not wanting to continue on with the PC gaming experience just because of how difficult troubleshooting components are when there's this old now a response to this could be that well just buy the exact set up that Linus tech tip shows in his videos because he an experienced PC builder goes through the effort of seeing what is compatible and then showing you the results but the thing is that kind of brings me to my second issue even though my gaming PC's seemed fairly impressive I mean you're getting about 60 frames per second average in all of these games at 1080p it's seems playable right but it didn't really feel like 60 frames per second because you'd have like a two-minute period of gaming where it runs perfectly fine and then just randomly not related to what's happening on screen because it wouldn't be you know necessarily a particularly busy combat sequence or whatever the frame rate would drop to like 10 frames per second for a good minute or so which is terrible and if that happens mid gunfight then you're going to die and the thing is it doesn't that's it's just not a good gaming experience having these ridiculous frame drops kind of happen sporadically throughout the match that you're playing now I don't know if that's something that's unique to this specific PC that I was using so the thing is when looking at Linus's results of like whoa this is really playable and everything's hunky-dory I'd like to know for what kind of periods of time they actually ran the benchmarks for because if you run a benchmark for like three minutes you could show that it does perform really well but it just wasn't my experience when gaming for long periods of time so when I played like an entire 40 minute DOTA match for example there would be periods during which you would have massive frame drops it was the same for overwatch overwatch was the worst by the way out of all of them and the same thing for csgo and and fortnight so yeah I don't think the results are as impressive as they seem on the surface in conclusion if you're new to PC gaming and you're looking to buy a daily driver PC don't spend one hundred and fifty dollars on one because it's not going to be the best experience I think if you do want to save money buy a new CPU something like an entry-level intolerant D CPU a new motherboard some RAM and then you can buy a secondhand graphics card something like the gtx 960 because i got it for about $80 which is quite cheap especially considering that it performs similarly to a gtx 1050 TI so in that situation you could save about $100 or if you want to buy something for even less money go for a Dell Optiplex but not with a CPU that old buy something with at least an i7 2670 500k in it because those CPUs will cost a little bit more but they will perform a lot better in games and if you put a better graphics button it's not gonna be bottlenecks as much by the CPU but if you're a PC enthusiast that enjoys playing with old hardware then go for it in fact you've probably already bought one and you're busy screwing with around with it now while watching this video of me so if you're doing it to have fun go for it but don't use it as a daily driver anyway with that I think that's the end of the video thank you very much for watching if you like to do like and subscribe to the channel for more videos like this one until the next oneabout a week ago Linus in the gang converted an old Dell Optiplex office PC into what they said is a pretty good value for money 1080p medium to low settings gaming machine whoa dang buttery smooth that is way smoother look at that now my first thought was I can definitely do this better I can find better deals in Japan and build a faster PC for less money but during the process of building my anti Lynas machine I realized a it's not very easy to do and B the question kept creeping up is it actually worth it should you spend roughly a hundred and fifty dollars on a gaming machine and we'll find out all of these answers after this message from our sponsors now before we actually look at whether or not you should spend a hundred and fifty dollars on a gaming machine or if that's the kind of thing you should just leave up to like tech youtubers and crazy people let's have a look at the actual PC that I had and how it compares to Linus tech tips is offering now as far as the CPU goes I actually downgraded a bit I'm using a Q 8400 it's still a quad-core CPU which blindness showed was very important but its core clocks are a little bit lower it's 2.6 6 gigahertz as supposed to 2.8 hopefully that doesn't make too big a difference I've also got 4 gigs of ddr2 and I also put an SSD in it because while that's very important for usability and then I decided to splurge on a graphics card I actually found a great deal on a gtx 960 but whether or not the cpu is gonna be too much of a bottleneck is something that we will see later I guess and the thing is the motherboard that I used is actually it doesn't allow for overclocking so it means that I can't squeeze more performance out of the CPU unfortunately now the total amount of money that I spent on this entire setup was a hundred and forty dollars which is ten dollars less than what line is spent on his setup now that we've got the parts configuration out of the way let's see how this PC actually performs compared to Linus tech tips is offering and after having looked at the benchmarks it seems as though the Linus's destroyer 9000 didn't really do its job it didn't destroy Linus except for in one game fortnight so that's a bit weird but I guess it shows that fortnight isn't as CPU intensive his counter-strike go is and as overwatch is but yeah that's one of the issues with these benchmarks because there were also quite vague with what settings they use they just said like 1080p low it meant that I might not have been able to match up the settings so that might be why there were discrepancies now with all of the direct comparisons out of the way let's get into the real meat and potatoes of this video which is should you actually spend a hundred and fifty dollars on a gaming PC the average frame rates frame rates look pretty good but is it actually worth the money now there are two reasons why I think it actually isn't general parts compatibility because of how old these platforms are it's quite difficult to find conclusive information around what components will work with what other components and Linus actually had this issue in his video because they wanted to use an extreme addition quad core from the same generation as this CPU that the Dell Optiplex had in it and even though Intel said it should technically be compatible it didn't work but luckily because they were using a dowel machine they could just go onto Dells website and kind of look at their compatibility list even for their older machines I wasn't as lucky though because I had a jetway motherboard in my PC that is not a prebuilt it meant that it was from a company that no one's ever heard of before and there was no information around what components should work with it and luckily the cpu I got did end up working with the motherboard no problem but I ran into a big issue when trying to install Windows on the machine because obviously I wanted to use a flash drive to install windows on it because I mean who owns a CD drive today and according to the internet and sources around motherboards with legacy biases on it which is from the Stone Age but it's what this motherboard has you should be able to do that and well unfortunately I just couldn't I tried various file systems on the USB drives and various ways of actually making it a boot drive but the motherboard wouldn't recognize any of it so then after about two days of struggling with this I just gave up and decided to buy a CD drive after that it was really easy to install windows on it because it immediately recognized everything but for me it was a struggle and I have quite a lot of experience building older pcs and just PCs in general but because of the budget of this build it's kind of not aimed at people who have a lot of experience it's aimed at people who want to try out PC gaming but aren't really ready to commit so they don't want to spend that much money and if you're in that position trying to wade through the ridiculous amount of information to try and find something relevant to the components that you're using is a nightmare and it could lead to you not wanting to continue on with the PC gaming experience just because of how difficult troubleshooting components are when there's this old now a response to this could be that well just buy the exact set up that Linus tech tip shows in his videos because he an experienced PC builder goes through the effort of seeing what is compatible and then showing you the results but the thing is that kind of brings me to my second issue even though my gaming PC's seemed fairly impressive I mean you're getting about 60 frames per second average in all of these games at 1080p it's seems playable right but it didn't really feel like 60 frames per second because you'd have like a two-minute period of gaming where it runs perfectly fine and then just randomly not related to what's happening on screen because it wouldn't be you know necessarily a particularly busy combat sequence or whatever the frame rate would drop to like 10 frames per second for a good minute or so which is terrible and if that happens mid gunfight then you're going to die and the thing is it doesn't that's it's just not a good gaming experience having these ridiculous frame drops kind of happen sporadically throughout the match that you're playing now I don't know if that's something that's unique to this specific PC that I was using so the thing is when looking at Linus's results of like whoa this is really playable and everything's hunky-dory I'd like to know for what kind of periods of time they actually ran the benchmarks for because if you run a benchmark for like three minutes you could show that it does perform really well but it just wasn't my experience when gaming for long periods of time so when I played like an entire 40 minute DOTA match for example there would be periods during which you would have massive frame drops it was the same for overwatch overwatch was the worst by the way out of all of them and the same thing for csgo and and fortnight so yeah I don't think the results are as impressive as they seem on the surface in conclusion if you're new to PC gaming and you're looking to buy a daily driver PC don't spend one hundred and fifty dollars on one because it's not going to be the best experience I think if you do want to save money buy a new CPU something like an entry-level intolerant D CPU a new motherboard some RAM and then you can buy a secondhand graphics card something like the gtx 960 because i got it for about $80 which is quite cheap especially considering that it performs similarly to a gtx 1050 TI so in that situation you could save about $100 or if you want to buy something for even less money go for a Dell Optiplex but not with a CPU that old buy something with at least an i7 2670 500k in it because those CPUs will cost a little bit more but they will perform a lot better in games and if you put a better graphics button it's not gonna be bottlenecks as much by the CPU but if you're a PC enthusiast that enjoys playing with old hardware then go for it in fact you've probably already bought one and you're busy screwing with around with it now while watching this video of me so if you're doing it to have fun go for it but don't use it as a daily driver anyway with that I think that's the end of the video thank you very much for watching if you like to do like and subscribe to the channel for more videos like this one until the next one