The Benchmark Test

As I sat down to conduct this benchmark test, I couldn't help but feel a sense of excitement and trepidation. The system I was testing was a bargain bin build, with a price tag of $170. I had to admit, I was a bit skeptical about its capabilities. Would it be able to handle the demands of modern games? Or would it struggle to keep up?

First things first, I booted up The Witcher 3 in ultra-high settings and started running the game at maximum frame rates. To my surprise, the system performed admirably, consistently delivering mid-30s to mid-40 frames per second. This was a great result, considering the price point of the system. It's clear that this build is capable of handling demanding games, despite its modest cost.

Next, I decided to test Overwatch, a game that requires fast-paced action and quick reflexes. However, things didn't quite go as planned. The game wouldn't record properly using CTFs, and it would shut down suddenly without warning. I had to switch to using my camera to record gameplay, which was a bit of a workaround. Despite this hiccup, the system performed well during gameplay, with smooth and consistent performance even at high frame rates.

As I played Overwatch, I couldn't help but feel a sense of nostalgia. This was an old system that I had built back in the day when I was playing games like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 on my college's campus network. My aiming skills were a bit rusty, and I was definitely not as good at Roadhog as I used to be. However, despite my lack of skill, the system handled gameplay smoothly and consistently.

One thing that stood out during this test was the system's temperature performance. The CPU load never reached extreme levels, even with the game running at maximum intensity. This was a great result, considering that the motherboard and power supply were not exactly top-of-the-line components. Additionally, the GPU usage remained relatively low, with only 75-80% of the card being used.

The build summary for this system is quite telling. With its old processor, outdated motherboard, and limited RAM, it's clear that this is a budget-friendly build that's meant to get someone started on PC gaming. It's not intended to play the latest Triple A titles for an extended period of time, but rather to provide a stepping stone into the world of gaming.

In conclusion, this benchmark test was a success, and I'm happy with the results. Despite its modest cost, the system performed admirably in both The Witcher 3 and Overwatch. Of course, there were some minor issues during the test, such as the problems with recording gameplay using CTFs. However, these were easily overcome by switching to using my camera instead.

Overall, I would recommend this build to anyone looking to get into PC gaming on a budget. It's not meant to be a top-of-the-line system, but rather a entry-point into the world of gaming. If you're new to my channel and haven't subscribed yet, I'd encourage you to do so, as there are plenty of other videos and content available on the site. And if you enjoyed this video, please consider leaving a like and sharing it with your friends and family.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey what's up everyone my name is Danny and you're watching nerd on a budget so welcome to the next budget build for June 2016 if you've been watching my content for a while then you already know the deal but for the people who are new to my channel uh let me fill you in a little bit I do all my budget builds using mostly secondhand parts that means that they're used and the reason I do that is because there's a lot of money to be saved if you use used parts I'm not talking about just like 10 to 20% savings compared to the new parts I'm talking about like 30 40 or even sometimes 50% savings compared to if you were to build an equivalent computer using only new components my last two builds came in at around the $250 price point and I'll post them in the description section below but for this build I decided to try to push that price even lower some people only like to play games like CS goo or League of Legends um uh OverWatch is out now so those games don't require as much as titles like Grand Theft Auto 5 and The Witcher 3 so the reason for building this build the way I did it was to try to Target that audience in terms of the deals for the parts that I found uh in terms of like the Rarity if you were to compare it to a trading card game or like to an MMO equipment Rarity chart they probably be in the uncommon category they they aren't super common you're not going to be able to just watch this video and go out and find all the parts that I use for around similar prices in the same day but if you spend about two or 3 weeks you can probably put a Build Together very similar for a similar price point what you'll see in this video as well as all the build videos that I do is that they can be replicated uh so remember that but without further Ado let's check out the build here's a quick look at all the parts that I use in this build as always the prices include shipping and taxes so the final price reflects exactly how much I paid the CPU and the motherboard were bought as a combo from Craigslist if you remember these were the parts that I bought from the very first Craigslist ridealong video I ever made and I got them for $60 the CPU is an AMD Phenom X4 955 Black Edition quad core processor each of the cores clock in at 3.2 GHz stock It's actually an older processor and it's about 8 years old now but we'll see how it handles the games of today it comes with the stock heat SN and if you look at this it is the original thermal paste that was applied on it that means that this thermal paste can be about eight years old I'm going to use it because even though it's 8 years old it's not flaking yet and it's still a little bit gooey so I think I can make it work of course I'm going to monitor the temperatures very closely and if there's a problem with the temperatures then I'll clean off the old paste and I'll put new one on it was paired with an MSI NF 750 motherboard when going for older Parts like this I personally try to find deals as combos because buying parts separately makes it a lot harder to match and it can cost more since the individual Parts aren't made anymore the graphics card and the power supply were also bought in the bundle I got the GTX 660 and The Cooler Master 500 W Extreme Power Plus on Hardware swap for $80 which breaks the pricing down to around $65 for the 660 and $15 for the power supply with the announcement of the 1000 series Nvidia cards the GTX 660 is now considered three generations old this doesn't make it obsolete though if you follow budget builds you'll see that one of the most popular cards is GTX 750 Ti it's a cheap get affordable card that can still run the latest games today well the GTX 660 beats it just slightly and it comes in at a cheaper price point when used so that's why I chose it for this build as for the power supply is nothing too special and you can tell that it's an older one because it doesn't have the braiding around the cables it works though and Johnny Guru gave this power supply a thumbs up the review was actually for the 430 watt variant but this one's in the same family so it should be good to go for the ram I found some Kingston low profile DDR3 clocked at 1333 MHz I bought a set of 2x4 GB on Reddit Hardware swap for $20 but for this build I'm actually only going to use one stick so I'll add $10 to the price for storage I found a 160 GB Samsung spinpoint hard drive this basically came out to be $5 and the reason it was so inexpensive was because of the capacity and the fact that it's a SATA to but come on we're talking about $5 here this works well for people who mainly play rtss mobile or FPS games that aren't any more than 10 to 15 GB you can always add storage later without a problem and last but not least of course the case which will hold all the components and I went with the enax thorx midsize Tower I was able to get this for $35 brand new on New Egg and there's also a $20 rebate which brought the final total price down to $15 there's nothing too spectacular about this case it was just something that was cheap and had good reviews on New Egg and could fit a fulls size ATX motherboard so that's why I went with it I had zero problems when putting this Build Together the case had plenty of room to work in and everything fit where it needed to I'm not the biggest stickler in the world when it comes to Aesthetics so I never spend too much time on cable management I kind of just bundle them behind the panel without doing too much velcro or zip tying you can be the judge of how I ended up looking but I don't care too much and it works for me I'm still using my Windows 7 key from college to install a fresh OS into my builds and then taking advantage of the Windows 10 upgrade to generate a new unique license if you don't have any old windows licenses so that you can do this there are multiple options you can go with and I'll link them in the description section below but it ends up being one of two things either use Windows 10 unactivated since it still works or buy a cheaper key off of a third party seller like kinguin in terms of CPU temperature the old thermal pce actually ended up working just fine so let's see how this performs all right so I know I said that this build was carried more towards like csgo players and mobile players you know less intense games but I figured you know I've been testing Witcher 3 on all my build so far so why not keep that tradition up um so let's do that and I'm going to record with my camera because I know that the CPU is pretty old and craps would kill it so I want the game play that I'm showing you guys to be smooth at least so we're going to go with the camera and on OverWatch depending on uh how that actually performs with craps I may or may not use this camera too um I know it's a little bit ghetto but at least what you see is exactly how the system performs without having to add frames for fraps being on so yep let's check out the options so let's go with medium since this is a really cheap build and let's see 1080p uh I don't think we're going to get more than 60 frames per second so this setting and dsync should be fine um and everything else is set to medium and for postprocessing I'm actually going to put on low because the frame drops that you get from setting it to a higher setting isn't worth the actual visual difference like I don't even notice the difference between low and medium uh for postprocessing most of it is the graphics so we'll set it to that and start it all right so we're in game and let's see so mid 20s 30 FPS it's kind of all over the place let's see stabilize all right so mid-30s let's go in the water always got to do the water test all right still at mid-30s so the ram is uh bo maxed out at the four gigs that's in the system um graphics card is maxed out and we CPU has a little bit of room and everything is at safe temperatures okay all right so let's fight these downers all right mid 30 frames per second okay let's get killed by these downers actually the game is even telling me to run but I died instead okay so around mid3 frames per second so we'll try that one more time just to make sure that the results are consistent all right we are alive again I think I really need to make progress from here because all my benchmarks have been this area and I I'm not sure if I said it before but I don't play Witcher 3 normally I just got the digital code from buying a product and uh I'm not interested in really playing it for the storyline I'm more of a multiplayer game type of person so I'm just using this just to Benchmark all right uh so both times pretty consistent mid-30s to 40 frames per second uh considering the price of the computer and how demanding The Witcher 3 is I'm very happy with the results so let's check out OverWatch I'm actually going to be using my camera to record because uh when I start OverWatch up with cs on it warns me that says that it's not supported and it still lets you play but I was using cfts to record during gameplay and the program would just shut down uh out of nowhere not blue screen to death or anything it just OverWatch was shut down so I don't know what's up with that I couldn't get it to work every match I played uh it would just stop and that's why I have this little message right here uh cuz I left a couple of matches early due to the game shutting down so I don't want to get penalized I'm just going to use this camera so let's go into settings and have it 1920 x 10 of course no FPS limit desync is off and Graphics quality is set to high so let's see how this does the last time I played an FPS normal like you know daily would be back in college like 2007 2008 with the original Call of Duty Modern Warfare after that I kind of just played only mobas and MMOs and stuff like that so my uh aiming isn't that great right now so don't judge me too harshly I going to play roadhog because I like that he's self- sustainable he can he can self heal he has a lot of health and his Hook is super fun so I'm not the best with him yet all right so right out of the gate CPU is at Max load even without craps so uh good thing I don't have it on anyways um three out of 4 gbes of Ram is being used and the GPU is about 75 to 80% um everything is within safe temperatures ah all right getting owned but uh smooth gameplay so that's good all right so as low is about mid-40s uh when there's like a lot of action on the screen oh dropped to 40 all right yeah so uh anywhere from 40 to 60 depending on how many players on the screen at the same time and how many bullets are flying around you're playing a 2016 new title with a system that cost $170 on high uh and you're getting this performance um for what we have right here I'm really happy with what this system can do so that's going to be the end of The Benchmark let's take a look at the build summary everything is pretty Bargain Bin compared to the builds I've done before this we're using a really old processor in motherboard only 4 GB of RAM a tiny sta 2 hard drive a power supply that isn't rated 80 plus a stock heat snc with stock thermal paste the list kind of just goes on but you've seen the benchmarks they didn't disappoint I don't know if you can really expect much more out a system that cost $170 out the door this is just meant to get someone started on PC gaming for the first time with such a low cost barrier it's definitely not meant to play the latest Triple A titles for the next few years all right and that is the build if you enjoyed this video then as always I appreciate it if you can leave a like that really helps me out because it makes my video more findable is that the word uh it makes it so that my video pops up on searches so that other people can find my content as well and if you're new to my channel and you haven't subscribed yet then all I ask of you is to consider doing so if you enjoyed this video and if you're not convinced yet then please check out the rest of my content and see if that changes your mind if not then I just thank you for watching regardless now for the question of this video would this PC suit your needs why or why not I'm curious to hear what you guys think but other than that that is the end of this video I hope you enjoyed thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one byehey what's up everyone my name is Danny and you're watching nerd on a budget so welcome to the next budget build for June 2016 if you've been watching my content for a while then you already know the deal but for the people who are new to my channel uh let me fill you in a little bit I do all my budget builds using mostly secondhand parts that means that they're used and the reason I do that is because there's a lot of money to be saved if you use used parts I'm not talking about just like 10 to 20% savings compared to the new parts I'm talking about like 30 40 or even sometimes 50% savings compared to if you were to build an equivalent computer using only new components my last two builds came in at around the $250 price point and I'll post them in the description section below but for this build I decided to try to push that price even lower some people only like to play games like CS goo or League of Legends um uh OverWatch is out now so those games don't require as much as titles like Grand Theft Auto 5 and The Witcher 3 so the reason for building this build the way I did it was to try to Target that audience in terms of the deals for the parts that I found uh in terms of like the Rarity if you were to compare it to a trading card game or like to an MMO equipment Rarity chart they probably be in the uncommon category they they aren't super common you're not going to be able to just watch this video and go out and find all the parts that I use for around similar prices in the same day but if you spend about two or 3 weeks you can probably put a Build Together very similar for a similar price point what you'll see in this video as well as all the build videos that I do is that they can be replicated uh so remember that but without further Ado let's check out the build here's a quick look at all the parts that I use in this build as always the prices include shipping and taxes so the final price reflects exactly how much I paid the CPU and the motherboard were bought as a combo from Craigslist if you remember these were the parts that I bought from the very first Craigslist ridealong video I ever made and I got them for $60 the CPU is an AMD Phenom X4 955 Black Edition quad core processor each of the cores clock in at 3.2 GHz stock It's actually an older processor and it's about 8 years old now but we'll see how it handles the games of today it comes with the stock heat SN and if you look at this it is the original thermal paste that was applied on it that means that this thermal paste can be about eight years old I'm going to use it because even though it's 8 years old it's not flaking yet and it's still a little bit gooey so I think I can make it work of course I'm going to monitor the temperatures very closely and if there's a problem with the temperatures then I'll clean off the old paste and I'll put new one on it was paired with an MSI NF 750 motherboard when going for older Parts like this I personally try to find deals as combos because buying parts separately makes it a lot harder to match and it can cost more since the individual Parts aren't made anymore the graphics card and the power supply were also bought in the bundle I got the GTX 660 and The Cooler Master 500 W Extreme Power Plus on Hardware swap for $80 which breaks the pricing down to around $65 for the 660 and $15 for the power supply with the announcement of the 1000 series Nvidia cards the GTX 660 is now considered three generations old this doesn't make it obsolete though if you follow budget builds you'll see that one of the most popular cards is GTX 750 Ti it's a cheap get affordable card that can still run the latest games today well the GTX 660 beats it just slightly and it comes in at a cheaper price point when used so that's why I chose it for this build as for the power supply is nothing too special and you can tell that it's an older one because it doesn't have the braiding around the cables it works though and Johnny Guru gave this power supply a thumbs up the review was actually for the 430 watt variant but this one's in the same family so it should be good to go for the ram I found some Kingston low profile DDR3 clocked at 1333 MHz I bought a set of 2x4 GB on Reddit Hardware swap for $20 but for this build I'm actually only going to use one stick so I'll add $10 to the price for storage I found a 160 GB Samsung spinpoint hard drive this basically came out to be $5 and the reason it was so inexpensive was because of the capacity and the fact that it's a SATA to but come on we're talking about $5 here this works well for people who mainly play rtss mobile or FPS games that aren't any more than 10 to 15 GB you can always add storage later without a problem and last but not least of course the case which will hold all the components and I went with the enax thorx midsize Tower I was able to get this for $35 brand new on New Egg and there's also a $20 rebate which brought the final total price down to $15 there's nothing too spectacular about this case it was just something that was cheap and had good reviews on New Egg and could fit a fulls size ATX motherboard so that's why I went with it I had zero problems when putting this Build Together the case had plenty of room to work in and everything fit where it needed to I'm not the biggest stickler in the world when it comes to Aesthetics so I never spend too much time on cable management I kind of just bundle them behind the panel without doing too much velcro or zip tying you can be the judge of how I ended up looking but I don't care too much and it works for me I'm still using my Windows 7 key from college to install a fresh OS into my builds and then taking advantage of the Windows 10 upgrade to generate a new unique license if you don't have any old windows licenses so that you can do this there are multiple options you can go with and I'll link them in the description section below but it ends up being one of two things either use Windows 10 unactivated since it still works or buy a cheaper key off of a third party seller like kinguin in terms of CPU temperature the old thermal pce actually ended up working just fine so let's see how this performs all right so I know I said that this build was carried more towards like csgo players and mobile players you know less intense games but I figured you know I've been testing Witcher 3 on all my build so far so why not keep that tradition up um so let's do that and I'm going to record with my camera because I know that the CPU is pretty old and craps would kill it so I want the game play that I'm showing you guys to be smooth at least so we're going to go with the camera and on OverWatch depending on uh how that actually performs with craps I may or may not use this camera too um I know it's a little bit ghetto but at least what you see is exactly how the system performs without having to add frames for fraps being on so yep let's check out the options so let's go with medium since this is a really cheap build and let's see 1080p uh I don't think we're going to get more than 60 frames per second so this setting and dsync should be fine um and everything else is set to medium and for postprocessing I'm actually going to put on low because the frame drops that you get from setting it to a higher setting isn't worth the actual visual difference like I don't even notice the difference between low and medium uh for postprocessing most of it is the graphics so we'll set it to that and start it all right so we're in game and let's see so mid 20s 30 FPS it's kind of all over the place let's see stabilize all right so mid-30s let's go in the water always got to do the water test all right still at mid-30s so the ram is uh bo maxed out at the four gigs that's in the system um graphics card is maxed out and we CPU has a little bit of room and everything is at safe temperatures okay all right so let's fight these downers all right mid 30 frames per second okay let's get killed by these downers actually the game is even telling me to run but I died instead okay so around mid3 frames per second so we'll try that one more time just to make sure that the results are consistent all right we are alive again I think I really need to make progress from here because all my benchmarks have been this area and I I'm not sure if I said it before but I don't play Witcher 3 normally I just got the digital code from buying a product and uh I'm not interested in really playing it for the storyline I'm more of a multiplayer game type of person so I'm just using this just to Benchmark all right uh so both times pretty consistent mid-30s to 40 frames per second uh considering the price of the computer and how demanding The Witcher 3 is I'm very happy with the results so let's check out OverWatch I'm actually going to be using my camera to record because uh when I start OverWatch up with cs on it warns me that says that it's not supported and it still lets you play but I was using cfts to record during gameplay and the program would just shut down uh out of nowhere not blue screen to death or anything it just OverWatch was shut down so I don't know what's up with that I couldn't get it to work every match I played uh it would just stop and that's why I have this little message right here uh cuz I left a couple of matches early due to the game shutting down so I don't want to get penalized I'm just going to use this camera so let's go into settings and have it 1920 x 10 of course no FPS limit desync is off and Graphics quality is set to high so let's see how this does the last time I played an FPS normal like you know daily would be back in college like 2007 2008 with the original Call of Duty Modern Warfare after that I kind of just played only mobas and MMOs and stuff like that so my uh aiming isn't that great right now so don't judge me too harshly I going to play roadhog because I like that he's self- sustainable he can he can self heal he has a lot of health and his Hook is super fun so I'm not the best with him yet all right so right out of the gate CPU is at Max load even without craps so uh good thing I don't have it on anyways um three out of 4 gbes of Ram is being used and the GPU is about 75 to 80% um everything is within safe temperatures ah all right getting owned but uh smooth gameplay so that's good all right so as low is about mid-40s uh when there's like a lot of action on the screen oh dropped to 40 all right yeah so uh anywhere from 40 to 60 depending on how many players on the screen at the same time and how many bullets are flying around you're playing a 2016 new title with a system that cost $170 on high uh and you're getting this performance um for what we have right here I'm really happy with what this system can do so that's going to be the end of The Benchmark let's take a look at the build summary everything is pretty Bargain Bin compared to the builds I've done before this we're using a really old processor in motherboard only 4 GB of RAM a tiny sta 2 hard drive a power supply that isn't rated 80 plus a stock heat snc with stock thermal paste the list kind of just goes on but you've seen the benchmarks they didn't disappoint I don't know if you can really expect much more out a system that cost $170 out the door this is just meant to get someone started on PC gaming for the first time with such a low cost barrier it's definitely not meant to play the latest Triple A titles for the next few years all right and that is the build if you enjoyed this video then as always I appreciate it if you can leave a like that really helps me out because it makes my video more findable is that the word uh it makes it so that my video pops up on searches so that other people can find my content as well and if you're new to my channel and you haven't subscribed yet then all I ask of you is to consider doing so if you enjoyed this video and if you're not convinced yet then please check out the rest of my content and see if that changes your mind if not then I just thank you for watching regardless now for the question of this video would this PC suit your needs why or why not I'm curious to hear what you guys think but other than that that is the end of this video I hope you enjoyed thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one bye\n"