One of these gaming PCs is FASTER for the price...

Building a Budget PC: The Rise of Used Components

When it comes to building a budget PC that can handle modern gaming, many enthusiasts are turned off by the high price tags of new components. However, as we'll explore in this article, there's an alternative approach that can get you a powerful system without breaking the bank.

My DIY PC is a great example of how one can build a competitive gaming rig on a shoestring budget. By using a 350 watt lodge's power supply and a thermal take versa h22 case, I was able to create a system that meets my gaming needs without sacrificing too much performance. These components aren't the most ideal for a budget PC, but they have no impact on gaming performance and can easily be swapped out for similar parts to meet our budgetary needs.

Adding a second-hand key of Windows 10 brings the total cost of our ideal budget PC to just north of $550, making it an affordable option for many enthusiasts. However, I've left the CPU and GPU for both systems at their stock frequencies, only tweaking the memory in our AMD system to overclock it slightly to 29.33 megahertz due to the rise in supreme dependency on memory speeds.

Using the latest bios and drivers for both systems ensures that we're getting the most out of our components. While our suite of benchmarks may be brief, the results are telling – my DIY PC shows significant gains right out of the gate with a 25% lead in the overall score and a whopping 28% for the graphics score.

Cinebench r15 tests CPU performance show that the $99 rise in APU is a game-changer, outperforming the $350 3570K which was nearly $300 when it first launched six years ago. In Battlefield 1, our used system trails its modern rival with the DIY rig scoring six extra frames per second for an 11% increase on average.

However, while our AMD rig may not be the absolute best in every test, its performance is certainly competitive. In Doom, we saw a 36% lead and average frame rates, while hitting the 60fps mark for its 1% lows. The Rison machine crushes the competition in this title.

GTA V was our final test, and we saw continued trends of our AMD rig pulling ahead an average FPS of 83 equates to a 38% gain with 1% lows looking strong as well again. While the Craigslist PC puts up a good fight, it just can't hang with the modern day system.

The use of used components is not without its risks, however. Buying a chip from 2018 may seem like a bargain, but even if you can find one on eBay for dirt cheap, it's unlikely to be worth it. The $350 3570K may have been an attractive option six years ago, but with the development of modern architecture and optimization by game developers, it's not as desirable as newer CPUs.

The GTX 1050, on the other hand, reminded us today how equipped it is for 1080p gaming, and the fact that it hasn't felt the full effects of inflation like many other cards makes it an accessible option for most users. The card also pairs nicely with our rise in APU, making it a viable choice for a budget build.

While these extreme price hikes certainly make high-end gaming PCs unobtainable for most of us, there's still hope for those on a budget. Using a combination of new and used parts might be the best option at any rate – while it may not yield the absolute highest performance, it can get you a system that handles full HD gaming like a champ.

The market prices are certainly affecting the PC building community right now, but there's still room for innovation and creativity. If you're being affected by these price hikes or have found a way to circumvent them, I'd love to hear about it in the comments. And if you enjoyed this video, be sure to like it, subscribe to the channel, and follow me on Floatplane to watch all of my videos a week early without ads for $3 a month.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthe pc3 7x gaming headset from mass drop and Sennheiser brings you into the game with an open back design featuring angled drivers for pinpoint locational accuracy be heard clearly through the fold-down noise cancelling mic and enjoy the long-lasting comfort of large plush velvet ear pads now available in an all matte black finish so the headset looks as good as it sounds for more info click the link in the description and catch the drop before it's gone what's going on guys welcome back to the channel so after testing the four year old gaming PC that I found on Craigslist last week I promised I would soon post a quick follow-up video to see if I could build a faster PC using brand new hardware with the same 550 dollar budget now with GPU and memory prices at an all-time high buying used parts particularly older components which haven't been affected by the inflation seems like a good place to turn at the same time there's also a decent selection of current gen Hardware that gets you a lot of bang for the buck so we'll be pitting these two approaches against each other today and seeing how they stack up now while the Craigslist rig here didn't blow us away by any means it was certainly playable getting anywhere from 40 to 60 FPS at 1080p on medium settings depending on the game and that was mostly thanks to the system's Intel Core i5 35 70 K and MSI Radeon HD 7850 now it's up to me to build something faster now obviously this isn't my first rodeo when it comes to picking parts on a tight budget but given the current state of the market I had to be super frugal and strategic when choosing hardware for my build my processor of choice was the new AMD Rison 320 200 G APU which packs 4 cores and 4 threads just like the Intel chip it's up against a $99 MSRP makes this a tough part to pass up I spent 50 bucks on an asrock a 320 m dgs micro ATX motherboard whose chipset denies us any cpu overclocking capabilities but it's just about the best board I could squeeze into our very tight budget that's paired with a dual channel 8 gigabytes of Crucial ddr4 at 2400 speed that I scored for just 86 bucks quote-unquote just 86 bucks while the big of graphics on our apu are adequate for light gaming probably need a little bit more horsepower to rival the Radeon HD 7850 so I managed to snag a GTX 1050 2 gigabyte card from MSI for a hundred and fifty four dollars as for storage case and power supply I had to round up some budget hardware that we had lying around the office including a 120 gig hyper x 3k SSD a one terabyte Seagate Barracuda hard drive a terrifying 350 watt lodge's power supply and a thermal take versa h22 case although these components aren't perfectly suited for our budget they have no impact on gaming performance and can easily be swapped out for similar parts to meet our budgetary needs which is why I felt it was ok to use them for today's tests tossing in a second hand key of Windows 10 brings the total cost of our ideal budget PC to just north of 550 dollars to mitigate any effects the silicon lottery might have on our test results I've actually left the CPU and GPU for both systems at their stock frequencies the only thing I've tweaked is the memory in our AMD system overclocking it slightly to 29 33 megahertz due to rise in supreme dependency on memory speeds final things to note I am using the latest bios and drivers for both systems and you'll forgive today's suite of benchmarks being rather brief as I did begin encountering some crashes when trying to run certain titles on our Craigslist PC be that as it may I think we have more than enough data to draw some conclusions so diving right in with 3d mark firestrike my DIY PC shows significant gains right out of the gate with a 25% lead in the overall score and a whopping 28% for the graphics score if you think these numbers are a telling sign of what's to come next you're right Cinebench r15 which tests CPU performance shows the $99 rise in APU outperforming the 35 70 K which was nearly $300 when it first launched six years ago hotdamn have we come a long way in its defense when I left the 35 70 K at its overclocked of 4.1 gigahertz it did beat out the APU in this test albeit by a very small margin in battlefield 1 our used system trails it's modern rival with the DIY rig scoring six extra frames per second for an 11% increase on average the only small victory for the Craigslist PC here is that it's 1% lows are quite a bit stronger however this probably won't make a huge difference in practice the Rison machine crushes the competition in Doom with a 36 percent lead and average frame rates while hitting the 60fps mark for its 1% lows while they used rigged can definitely handle doom at this setting we get a much smoother experience on the current gen system our last title was GTA 5 and we saw the continued trend of our AMD rig pulling ahead an average FPS of 83 equates to a 38% gain with 1% lows looking strong as well again the Craigslist PC manages to score higher 0.1% lows in a futile attempt to prove its dominance in the end the Craigslist PC put up a good fight but it just couldn't hang with the modern day system it was actually really interesting to see just how similar the cpu performance was between the 35 70 K and the 2200 G but even if you can find one on eBay for dirt cheap buying an Ivy Bridge chip in 2018 doesn't make a whole lot of sense when you can still get a well priced CPU that does great for 1080p gaming has a solid upgrade path and sports a modern architecture that developers are currently optimizing their games around on the graphic side of things the GTX 1050 reminded us today how equipped it is for 1080p gaming as well and the fact that it hasn't felt the full effects of inflation like many other cards makes it an accessible option for most users the card also seems to pair very nicely with our rise in APU building a PC with brand-new parts proved to be the better choice for today's little experiment but the tables could have easily turned had we found a better deal on used hardware in our local area and there's no real black-and-white here either using a combination of new and used parts might be the best option at any rate while these extreme price hikes certainly make a high-end gaming PC unobtainable for most of us it's nice to know that we can still build a good entry level system that handles full HD gaming like a friggin champ that's all I got for now guys but let me know if you're being affected by the market prices right now and if you've somehow found a way to circumvent the situation I'm sure we'd all like to hear about it you can also toss me a like on this video if you enjoyed it it helps us a lot get subscribed to the channel so you don't miss any more content coming real soon and follow me on floatplane to watch all of my videos a week early without ads for 3 bucks a month I'll drop a for it in the description apart from that guys thank you so much for watching have a good one and I'll see you in the next videothe pc3 7x gaming headset from mass drop and Sennheiser brings you into the game with an open back design featuring angled drivers for pinpoint locational accuracy be heard clearly through the fold-down noise cancelling mic and enjoy the long-lasting comfort of large plush velvet ear pads now available in an all matte black finish so the headset looks as good as it sounds for more info click the link in the description and catch the drop before it's gone what's going on guys welcome back to the channel so after testing the four year old gaming PC that I found on Craigslist last week I promised I would soon post a quick follow-up video to see if I could build a faster PC using brand new hardware with the same 550 dollar budget now with GPU and memory prices at an all-time high buying used parts particularly older components which haven't been affected by the inflation seems like a good place to turn at the same time there's also a decent selection of current gen Hardware that gets you a lot of bang for the buck so we'll be pitting these two approaches against each other today and seeing how they stack up now while the Craigslist rig here didn't blow us away by any means it was certainly playable getting anywhere from 40 to 60 FPS at 1080p on medium settings depending on the game and that was mostly thanks to the system's Intel Core i5 35 70 K and MSI Radeon HD 7850 now it's up to me to build something faster now obviously this isn't my first rodeo when it comes to picking parts on a tight budget but given the current state of the market I had to be super frugal and strategic when choosing hardware for my build my processor of choice was the new AMD Rison 320 200 G APU which packs 4 cores and 4 threads just like the Intel chip it's up against a $99 MSRP makes this a tough part to pass up I spent 50 bucks on an asrock a 320 m dgs micro ATX motherboard whose chipset denies us any cpu overclocking capabilities but it's just about the best board I could squeeze into our very tight budget that's paired with a dual channel 8 gigabytes of Crucial ddr4 at 2400 speed that I scored for just 86 bucks quote-unquote just 86 bucks while the big of graphics on our apu are adequate for light gaming probably need a little bit more horsepower to rival the Radeon HD 7850 so I managed to snag a GTX 1050 2 gigabyte card from MSI for a hundred and fifty four dollars as for storage case and power supply I had to round up some budget hardware that we had lying around the office including a 120 gig hyper x 3k SSD a one terabyte Seagate Barracuda hard drive a terrifying 350 watt lodge's power supply and a thermal take versa h22 case although these components aren't perfectly suited for our budget they have no impact on gaming performance and can easily be swapped out for similar parts to meet our budgetary needs which is why I felt it was ok to use them for today's tests tossing in a second hand key of Windows 10 brings the total cost of our ideal budget PC to just north of 550 dollars to mitigate any effects the silicon lottery might have on our test results I've actually left the CPU and GPU for both systems at their stock frequencies the only thing I've tweaked is the memory in our AMD system overclocking it slightly to 29 33 megahertz due to rise in supreme dependency on memory speeds final things to note I am using the latest bios and drivers for both systems and you'll forgive today's suite of benchmarks being rather brief as I did begin encountering some crashes when trying to run certain titles on our Craigslist PC be that as it may I think we have more than enough data to draw some conclusions so diving right in with 3d mark firestrike my DIY PC shows significant gains right out of the gate with a 25% lead in the overall score and a whopping 28% for the graphics score if you think these numbers are a telling sign of what's to come next you're right Cinebench r15 which tests CPU performance shows the $99 rise in APU outperforming the 35 70 K which was nearly $300 when it first launched six years ago hotdamn have we come a long way in its defense when I left the 35 70 K at its overclocked of 4.1 gigahertz it did beat out the APU in this test albeit by a very small margin in battlefield 1 our used system trails it's modern rival with the DIY rig scoring six extra frames per second for an 11% increase on average the only small victory for the Craigslist PC here is that it's 1% lows are quite a bit stronger however this probably won't make a huge difference in practice the Rison machine crushes the competition in Doom with a 36 percent lead and average frame rates while hitting the 60fps mark for its 1% lows while they used rigged can definitely handle doom at this setting we get a much smoother experience on the current gen system our last title was GTA 5 and we saw the continued trend of our AMD rig pulling ahead an average FPS of 83 equates to a 38% gain with 1% lows looking strong as well again the Craigslist PC manages to score higher 0.1% lows in a futile attempt to prove its dominance in the end the Craigslist PC put up a good fight but it just couldn't hang with the modern day system it was actually really interesting to see just how similar the cpu performance was between the 35 70 K and the 2200 G but even if you can find one on eBay for dirt cheap buying an Ivy Bridge chip in 2018 doesn't make a whole lot of sense when you can still get a well priced CPU that does great for 1080p gaming has a solid upgrade path and sports a modern architecture that developers are currently optimizing their games around on the graphic side of things the GTX 1050 reminded us today how equipped it is for 1080p gaming as well and the fact that it hasn't felt the full effects of inflation like many other cards makes it an accessible option for most users the card also seems to pair very nicely with our rise in APU building a PC with brand-new parts proved to be the better choice for today's little experiment but the tables could have easily turned had we found a better deal on used hardware in our local area and there's no real black-and-white here either using a combination of new and used parts might be the best option at any rate while these extreme price hikes certainly make a high-end gaming PC unobtainable for most of us it's nice to know that we can still build a good entry level system that handles full HD gaming like a friggin champ that's all I got for now guys but let me know if you're being affected by the market prices right now and if you've somehow found a way to circumvent the situation I'm sure we'd all like to hear about it you can also toss me a like on this video if you enjoyed it it helps us a lot get subscribed to the channel so you don't miss any more content coming real soon and follow me on floatplane to watch all of my videos a week early without ads for 3 bucks a month I'll drop a for it in the description apart from that guys thank you so much for watching have a good one and I'll see you in the next video\n"