The Importance of Budgeting When Building a PC

When it comes to building a high-performance PC, it's easy to get caught up in the excitement of choosing top-of-the-line components and spending as much money as possible. However, this approach can lead to overspending and financial waste. A well-balanced build that meets your needs without breaking the bank is a much more satisfying experience.

In this article, we'll explore some common pitfalls to avoid when building a PC, and provide tips on how to save money while still achieving impressive performance.

The Impact of Budgeting on CPU Performance

One of the key areas where budgeting can have an impact is on the CPU. A high-end CPU can be a significant contributor to the overall performance of your system, but it's not the only factor at play. The CPU is often the bottleneck in most systems, and a well-balanced build that takes this into account can achieve impressive results without breaking the bank.

For example, consider a system with a 5.52 GHz CPU that's locked down to prevent overclocking. This might seem like it would limit performance, but in reality, it can actually help to improve stability and reduce the risk of crashes. By keeping the CPU at a fixed speed, we can eliminate the need for expensive cooling solutions or overclocking equipment.

However, even with a locked-down CPU, there are still ways to achieve high performance without overspending. For instance, investing in a good quality power supply (PSU) can make a big difference. A reputable PSU that's designed to handle high levels of power and heat dissipation can help to ensure that your system runs smoothly and efficiently.

The Role of RAM in Building a PC

RAM is another area where budgeting can have a significant impact on the overall performance of your system. While it's true that more RAM can be beneficial for certain applications, such as video editing or gaming, there's no need to overspend on high-end RAM just to meet minimum requirements.

In fact, investing in 32 GB of RAM or slightly slower RAM (e.g., 4,800 megatransfers per second) can make a big difference without breaking the bank. By reducing costs here, we can free up budget for other areas where it's more critical to invest.

The Cost of Quality: What You Get for Your Money

When it comes to building a PC, quality and performance are often tied together. However, this doesn't mean that you need to overspend on the most expensive components available.

In fact, many top-tier parts can be found at competitive prices if you're willing to shop around. For instance, the motherboard we used for this build (a $159 model) is capable of supporting high-end CPUs and GPUs without breaking the bank.

Similarly, the cooler that comes with our system is a solid performer that's well-suited for most use cases. While it may not be as flashy as some other cooling solutions on the market, it gets the job done without costing an arm and a leg.

Overspending on Components: The Risks and Consequences

One of the biggest pitfalls when building a PC is overspending on components that you don't need. This can happen easily, especially if you're new to building systems or haven't built a PC in a while.

For example, investing too much money into a high-end graphics card (GPU) without considering whether it's truly necessary for your use case can be a costly mistake. Similarly, buying a motherboard that's far more expensive than needed can also lead to financial waste.

In our build, we saw this play out when we chose the 4080 Super GPU. While it's certainly a powerful component, we realized later on that a slightly less powerful GPU (e.g., 4070) would have been sufficient for most use cases without breaking the bank.

The Importance of Budgeting and Prioritization

So how can you avoid overspending on components and build a high-performance PC without breaking the bank? The key is to prioritize your needs and set a realistic budget.

When it comes to budgeting, there are a few key areas where you should focus:

* Motherboard: This is often the most expensive component in any system, but it's also one of the most critical. Look for a reputable brand that offers competitive pricing without sacrificing performance.

* Cooler: A good quality cooler can make a big difference in terms of heat dissipation and noise levels. Look for a reliable solution that meets your needs without breaking the bank.

* RAM: While more RAM is always better, there's no need to overspend on high-end RAM just to meet minimum requirements. 32 GB or slightly slower RAM (e.g., 4,800 megatransfers per second) can make a big difference without costing an arm and a leg.

By prioritizing your needs and setting a realistic budget, you can build a high-performance PC that meets your needs without breaking the bank.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enoh it's springtime the skies are blue the birds are chirping we're at Micro Center it's a great day we interrupt this video to bring you a special message from iFix head no we interrupt this Interruption with this Interruption about new stuff from iix head we should grab his card but inventory sucks fix the inventory problems with I fix it who don't drop it can't fix that with I fix it just kidding yes you can wish you could take I fix it with you anywhere but your pockets aren't big enough introducing the new Mo and the new minnow take them with you anywhere so get I fix it for your loved one or just get them for yourself okay so we're at Micro Center right now they're sponsoring today's video I've had an idea of something I've wanted to do for a while that I'm finally going to get to do and I brought the truck because I need to make sure I have enough room to bring all of it home because what I want to do is I want to show I I've talked about ways you can waste money when building a computer it's easy to waste money accident even so what we're going to do is I've picked a a tier of Parts where they're basically the same so an i7 40 14700 k um z790 motherboards the same 4070 TI super tier of graphics card the same amount of ram the same amount of storage the same size power supply but what I've done is with the exception of the case and the CPU which are identical we are going to be taking a top tier build where we overspend on a motherboard and we overspend on the graphics card and we overspend on the RAM and we overspend on the storage and we go topof the line on that stuff and actually not quite as topof the line as we could have with like the motherboard I think the board I chose was like 600 something bucks where I could have gone as high as like $1,200 for the motherboard which is already stupid even for a I9 processor and then we're going to take the same classification of Parts but at the more entry level price point still sticking with like a z7 90 chipset which to be honest we could even go lower than that if we wanted but then what we're going to do is we're going to build the systems and we're going to show you side by side how much they cost and how much performance you really do or foreshadowing don't gain by overspending on your parts so let's go inside right now I'm going to grab the parts we'll lay them out here on the bed of the truck and we'll show you it it's kind of eye opening how different the price points are because let's just say you could build another mid-tier computer for the savings between one and the other okay so we got both our builds here we'll kind of go over the expensive build first yeah it may look like it's sponsored by Asus remember this is Microcenter stuff I just can't help it that they're the most most expensive Brands really we could have gone with like an MSI Godlike but we didn't on purpose because like I said a $1,300 motherboard or 12,200 whatever it is is ridiculous so I went with the maxus z790 dark hero motherboard that came in at $57 $9 for a motherboard like I said they're both 14700 K the 14700 K here was $369 at micr Center Ram I went with uh was 339 bucks it's 32 GB of 6600 uh ddr5 from Corsair it's the Dominator titanium they're it's beautiful Ram but you know it's again very expensive for storage we went with a two terab drives for both this is the t700 from crucial the t700 pro extremely fast Drive um again kind of expensive though cuz it is a top tier product that came in at $399 for that 2 TB Drive um yeah that's what it came in at so anyway for power supply we th000 watt for both of these builds I wanted to build in some additional Headroom for power usage in the future so 1,000 Watts I thought was good because we could step up from a 4070 TI super to a 4080 super 4090 in the future maybe whatever next gen going to your connector GPU ends up being but that's the Thor 1000 wat platinum and that costs and I always ignore the stickers because it's never rings up at that price $359 okay well that's what the sticker said so whatever and then for the cooler the most expensive AIO I could find for 360 was the ryogen 360 argb and this uh came in at $349 so that was a correct price on there both of these builds are using NZXT H9 cases I've got two of those right here it's the flow for better air flow they're in Black that's $159 you can place hold that for any case cost that you want so as long as you factor in $100 $150 $200 whatever your case is going to be um it's just a box to Hold Your Parts and needs to have good air flow that's what I chose because I like the H9 flow so what was the total on this this build came to a grand total before tax of $3,429 and 92 the fact that we could spend $3500 before tax or $3,695 after tax and not have a 4080 and not have an I9 shows you there was some extremely inefficient use of funds so let's look at the other build fun fact this is how I fold paper this is how Phil folds paper so I just thought to point that out but anyway okay so again the same i7 14700 K right there so that was $369 as we already know uh for the Ram or excuse me for the motherboard on this one I chose again a z790 udac from uh gigabyte the ud brand has been around for a long time in terms of like gigabytes portfolio now I use it all the way back with like FX processors and AMD it's always performed well so as long as we keep the BIOS and stuff updated um it's going to definitely give us better bang for the buck that came in at $169.99 versus the other one $579 so as you can see there's a $400 $420 savings right there uh so for Ram again I've got crucial right here this is the ddr5 pro I love it it's no frills there's no RGB or anything on there it's just solid nand Micron uh chips in there obviously cuz it's crucial 5600 uh megga transfers per second CL 46 it's a good set of ram it's plenty fast 5600 is more than fast enough for most people uh and that came in at a grand total of $159 you could save money if you want with a 32 gig and 32 gigs probably more than enough for anybody but in this instance I wanted to take on the position of the buyer that's trying to build himself like most people shopping in the $2,500 price point would be like a dream PCC that's a lot of money so let's make sure we get good parts and not completely go bottom budget but feel like we have parts that are going to last us for a while so it's not the base 4,800 it's 5600 you could probably even push that a little bit higher if you wanted our drive is a 2 TB Samsung 970 Evo plus it is a gen 3 Drive the other Drive is a Gen 5 12,400 MBT per second this is 3,500 mby per second clearly it's one quarter the speed of the other Drive unfortunately most people are never going to notice that speed difference because it's very rare that you're ever transferring files that are large enough for that speed to really ever show and when you're loading like textures and stuff in games it's pulling a lot of small files from different locations you're very rarely going to notice a difference between these two drives so I would personally save some money going gen 3 or maybe Gen 4 over a Gen 5 if you're shopping at this price point this drive cost us $239 you can even save more money by going even lower spec if you wanted by going say with the in-house Inland brand uh or just a smaller drive so again large enough drives that we're not going to fill it too quickly fast enough drives that we're not going to feel like it's slowing down our system we've talked about how drives can be the number one way to speed up a slow system especially if you're still on a hard drive for some odd reason uh okay so that was actually a little bit more expensive than I think I personally should have gone but when you see the price difference at the end you'll still see we're doing all right uh for our power supply there goes our processor what is it with j and dropping processors anyway this is the pq1 m 880 plus gold modular power supply from Deep cool deep cool is a brand that's really been kind of making uh well I guess making some waves in the industry if you will they've got a lot of really good products at competitive price points so that's again the th000 watt modular it's going to give us all the same uh compatibility we need for our graphics card to have a lot of Headroom in the future and I think this one might even be a PCI E5 uh with a PCI E5 cable I can't remember if it doesn't that will sort of suck but um actually don't think this one has a Gen 5 we'll see when I open it up otherwise we'll just have to use an adapter that's going to stink but you can always change a single cable easier than the whole power supply and considering this cost cost us $129 versus the Thor's $359 I feel like it was a fair trade and then I think that's pretty much it again the same case oh the graphics card of course so for graphics card the Zotac 470 TI super Trinity Black Edition this is an MSRP card at$ 799 uh versus the uh MSI gaming X slim which was uh $879 so it is a $70 cheaper card I think a lot of people myself included expected this to be an area to easily spend way too much money and get very little for it I I don't think that'll happen until you get up into like the 4080 super plus range because you have a bigger gap between cards and then last but not least we have our cooler Cooler Master Master liquid Master maker 360 core maker Master RGB Master cooler maker it's a $99 360 AIO nothing super special um but still going to give us enough cooling to where we can get full Boost clocks out of our CPU as long as we want to hold those boost clocks so what was the total on this one before tax 2,1 $29 so a difference of exactly $1,300 actually it's $ 22992 versus $ 3429 92 exactly the same sents that's weird so exactly $1,300 difference or another computer difference worth of cost because we could easily have bought and built like a 14600 system with a uh even the same motherboard if we wanted and a like a 4060 and a 1 TB drive and an 800 W power supply and a case and everything for that extra money so ask yourself is it worth spending that much money for a system when you could have bought made two systems for the same price let's go build them and put them side by side and see oh okay so the computers are built as you can see we've got the prices there 3429 versus 2129 from this angle you can see they actually don't look really any different the Lesser expensive PC doesn't look any less like quality like sometimes you go base bottom line PC uh they look that way this still looks like a high-end PC let's start with some CPU tests here so our I'm going to say cheap PC I don't mean cheap it's just cheaper okay our cheaper PC here and Center bench uh R23 multicore was a 34505 that's actually really high cuz a 30 a 13 or excuse me a 14900 K hits like 38,000 so it's actually really close to that and the only difference between the two CPUs honestly is there's more EC Cor with an I9 versus an i7 otherwise there the same PE cor count uh so 34505 versus a 35977 so about a 1,400 Point difference there or one oh excuse me a 4.3% difference now single core a 2171 on the cheaper PC versus a 2210 on the one on the uh expensive PC at a 1.8% difference there um cinebench r24 2052 on the cheaper versus is 20080 on the more expensive that's probably a more realistic side-by-side comparison in real world performance because r24 actually does different types of instructions in that test and different loads on different cores rather than just hammering all the cores and P cores and E cores as hard as it can um so it gives you a more realistic separation in performance between the two so 1.4% difference in performance now single core on the cheaper PC was a 128 versus a 131 or 2.3% difference there we also use geek bench uh six for this one free test so if you also these tests are free that we're mentioning here so you can go and download them and compare them to your own system if you're just curious as to how these prices stacked up versus your build uh geekbench 6 on the cheaper PC was a 2,9 $2,987 on multicore versus a 2,578 on the more expensive PC uh for a difference of 2.8% and then single core performance $29.99 on cheaper versus 3112 on more expensive for a difference of 3.8% so you can see we're really low on the percentage differences here now let's talk about why they would be different even though they're the exact same CPU we have two different manufacturers of motherboards here with two different Logics on how they're going to take advantage of Intel allowing higher Headroom and power table frequency charts you know power versus frequency curve or the VF curve um or voltage curves and all that between the two motherboards Asus as we know is very aggressive so the Asus motherboard here still has the out of the box bios we did not update the BIOS because I did not want to put into effect right now some of the newer bios that have come out since we've talked about the BIOS being too aggressive they sort of went the other direction now the voltage is too low and CPUs are crashing because there's not enough voltage so it's kind of the other direction now so we just went out of the box um so the enhanced multi or multi-core enhancement or let bios optimize settings that are on on Asus is more aggressive in terms of allowing more power more temperature Headroom and more importantly a a longer thermal velocity boost which means we're holding the core clocks higher even though it's only going to 5.5 which is the outof thebox settings for all core uh higher and longer on the Asus board than the gigabyte board now the gigo gigabyte board does have the enhanced features also on but they're not nearly as aggressive as Asus is because it's a completely different tier of motherboard which is the whole point of this video but was $16 motherboard versus a $579 motherboard I think that was a price does that weren't 3% at the most on performance I think 4% is what we saw in like a single core in one of them uh no it was 4.3% on Center bench R23 for allore CU it was significantly more expensive than 4.3% it was like 300% more expensive for that one part so we could easily go in because this is a k skube CPU we could easily go in there and overclock the board a little bit or just enable a longer longer thermal velocity boost timer if we wanted and easily match the performance but out of the box built XMP turned on on both boards so we're talking like 6600 versus I think it was 5600 on the ram okay let's talk about gaming cuz this is obviously going to be where the two SKS definitely compare to each other Port Royal on the cheaper PC was a 15,590 versus the more expensive PCS 15,776 or a whopping 1.2% difference so cyberpunk 2077 the cheaper PC and 1080p gave us 127 .45 FPS versus the more expensive PCS 131.8 or 2.9% FPS difference so 1440p on the cheaper PC uh was 10599 versus the more expensive PCS 10987 for an even more narrow difference of 3.7% we also tested f123 a new title for us I didn't test that yet but I just paid 70 bucks for today cuz I wanted to include it in today's test even though F1 2024 comes out in literally just a few days from now and I still had to pay $70 for the old version even though the new one is available for pre- purchase right now at the same 70 bucks first of all why the is it 70 bucks why are games 70 bucks now 1080p on the cheaper PC was 178 1080p on the more expensive PC was 182 for a whopping difference of 2.2% or 4 FPS uh 1440p 143 versus 146 for a difference of 2.1% okay let's talk about why some of those performance differences even exist if the parts are identical well let's go ahead and do some live stuff so you can see what's happening so we can talk about it okay so expensive on the left cheaper on the right anyway let's talk about the clock speeds you can see our GPU is currently at 63c 64c 100% load 2715 2730 2715 2760 so if we go to the other side you can see the CPU GPU is a little bit hotter running slightly slower 268 85 27 2685 27 2685 2715 so this one is generally about 50 MHz higher on average on the left side uh you can also notice that our CPUs are very comparable in their load their frequencies are going to fluctuate they're always going to fluctuate CU it's not a very CPU intensive test but you'll notice the temperatures are very comparable which doesn't bode well for this AIO versus the the $100 AIO versus the $360 AIO um or $350 whatever it is although this one does have a really cool screen and stuff on it I'll give it that the magnetic connectors there's a lot of Premium you pay for in that maybe I'll do a video about the premiums and what you actually get so we could technically go into afterburner over there and match those clock speeds and then we would get pretty much an identical score between the two so that is why we're getting a different performance in one PC versus the other when it comes to identical grade graphics cards and even identical grade CPUs so whereas the vbios in those graphics cards are a little bit more aggressive in the non- MSRP card that's essentially what our motherboards are doing to our CPUs our motherboards are being a little more aggressive one versus the other on the CPU allowing core clocks to go maybe a little higher or stay higher longer which is giving us that single digigit performance difference so let's go into a real title now something like cine bench or cine bench that's not a that's not a game title it's a game for me I love playing zenov bench uh but let's go into like cyberpunk and a real game and a real game load side by side in the exact same load and then let's see what the clocks are doing there and then we'll adjust the speeds dynamically and then see what happens if we get them all exactly the same okay so now that we have FPS loaded you can look look in a real 118 114 113 119 119 120 119 so it's actually a fair amount of difference here by having 2805 versus 2745 over there but what we're going to do now is I'm going to go into this one here and I'm going to see if we can't make it match so I'm do this I'm have Nick do it there we go so we're at the same 20805 interestingly enough there's still an FPS difference between the two because 112 113 115 116 so I feel like that GPU would have to be overclocked slightly to match it so go from 60 now to like say 100 on that core clock okay well you know what so the only other thing we can consider here is the cheaper PC does have a whole 1 GHz slower Ram speed which does come into effect during gaming gaming does RAM speed does have an effect on games especially a game like this that's rendering a lot of AI apcs and stuff or NPCs in the game so and then obviously there's fluctuation because I have a lot less cars on screen than that one cuz it is completely randomized they're not identical on the way it's happening on each save but you can see the numbers are so close together now by us adding an overclock which clearly has plenty of stability plenty of temperature headro to where now you would not even be able to notice the difference like this one's actually slightly lower than that one now was at a moment but I don't know about you I'd rather go in here and toggle some settings and dice roll to see if I can make up 3% different two excuse me 2.2% or whatever it was difference in a game versus spending $1,300 more to match the system that's doing it out of the box now obviously there's a whole lot of extra digging we could have done on this to uh get down to some real nitty-gritty like to actually compare the BIOS frequency settings to see what that voltage frequency chart looks like what is the actual turbo timer settings we know the Asus one is pushing things the the hardest out of all the motherboards as far as the ones we've tested and seen I know for a fact this that's having an effect on the CPU which is also having an effect on the overall performance of the CPU um even though they were locked 5.52 5.52 okay so they're not affecting this title so much but the RAM definitely could be but again the difference in price that we spent for that ram versus the again $1,300 is nothing jump change I mean that's like rent for a lot of people right there so I don't know about you we could have probably gotten this build on the cheaper build even under two grand if we wanted we could have easily saved another two 300 bucks no problem by even going with like 32 GB of RAM or going with even slightly slower Ram like 4,800 megat transfers per second or even reducing the power supply down to like 850 Watts cuz we don't really need 1,000 that's just future proofing to make sure that GPU or assuming that power supply stays relevant for longer now when it comes to the quality of the parts these are still top tier parts for both sides even though this is a cheaper build this is not a a a cheap PC by any means it is a high-end PC for all intents and purposes it's just as you can see you could easily spend way too much on one tier because realistically for the price we paid for this we should have had an upper price point on everything we should have had a 4080 super in there we should have had an I9 in there cuz we could easily have a 48 super and an I9 in this system and still spend less than we did by not going as high on the motherboard and such cuz this motherboard could still support that no problem whatsoever so I think it's really important for you to to consider the fact that you can easily overspend on Parts you don't need to necessarily sort by show me cheapest but I think there's a there's definitely uh a a good just meat and potato section of the genre right I think 200 bucks for a motherboard is where you should realistically cap out on a real build uh I don't think personally you should ever really look at higher than MSRP cards when it comes to graphics cards uh especially in the 4070 range like we are right now the 4070 TI super because when it came to GPU choice for us I mean the 470 TI super was as high as we could go without jumping to that, graphics card range but we could obviously jump to a gra $1,000 graphics card here easily if we wanted because we're talking $799 versus I think it was $869 now we're talking a difference of $130 to get to a 480 super MSRP which would be much faster than these even so yeah you can see right there and it's also unfortunately some of the confusion for a lot of new buyers or people that haven't bought Parts in a while that are now shopping trying to figure out like oh my gosh where should I go cuz you can easily Lea frog parts and overspend here and UND spend there so you can see the easiest component the the single component we overspent and spent way too much money on undoubtedly is the motherboard and I don't know why motherboards have gotten so expensive I think it's just it's become like a an arms race for the motherboard manufacturers to you can make the biggest most ridiculous motherboard that means nothing to the consumer like they L and2 overclocking championships okay cool but what does that mean to a average consumer nothing we got a $159 motherboard right here holding its own against the $579 motherboard hope this video has helped shed some literal light on things so you guys can see where to uh save some money and where to spend that money if you have that budget and you're like I'm going to spend all 3500 bucks I got cuz I I did my chores I got my birthday money from Grandma and I got all A's so I got like some extra money from my parents or I graduated I got I'm going to spend it I'm just going to be frivolous I'm going to spend it I don't care as you can see save money in other components and put them in other ones easily easily easy place to save money is the motherboard and the the cooler although the ryen 3 the ryogen 3 is really really cool but not 3 and 1/2 times the cost of The Cooler Master cooler that's over here keeping the CPUs what 65c 66 66 oh my gosh imagine that it's like 360 aios are comparable anyway all right I've rambled on enough tell me down below what you think your biggest tip would be for Builders to save money cuz I think we're going to probably see some varying answers but motherboard cooler RAM and storage is really easy to overspendoh it's springtime the skies are blue the birds are chirping we're at Micro Center it's a great day we interrupt this video to bring you a special message from iFix head no we interrupt this Interruption with this Interruption about new stuff from iix head we should grab his card but inventory sucks fix the inventory problems with I fix it who don't drop it can't fix that with I fix it just kidding yes you can wish you could take I fix it with you anywhere but your pockets aren't big enough introducing the new Mo and the new minnow take them with you anywhere so get I fix it for your loved one or just get them for yourself okay so we're at Micro Center right now they're sponsoring today's video I've had an idea of something I've wanted to do for a while that I'm finally going to get to do and I brought the truck because I need to make sure I have enough room to bring all of it home because what I want to do is I want to show I I've talked about ways you can waste money when building a computer it's easy to waste money accident even so what we're going to do is I've picked a a tier of Parts where they're basically the same so an i7 40 14700 k um z790 motherboards the same 4070 TI super tier of graphics card the same amount of ram the same amount of storage the same size power supply but what I've done is with the exception of the case and the CPU which are identical we are going to be taking a top tier build where we overspend on a motherboard and we overspend on the graphics card and we overspend on the RAM and we overspend on the storage and we go topof the line on that stuff and actually not quite as topof the line as we could have with like the motherboard I think the board I chose was like 600 something bucks where I could have gone as high as like $1,200 for the motherboard which is already stupid even for a I9 processor and then we're going to take the same classification of Parts but at the more entry level price point still sticking with like a z7 90 chipset which to be honest we could even go lower than that if we wanted but then what we're going to do is we're going to build the systems and we're going to show you side by side how much they cost and how much performance you really do or foreshadowing don't gain by overspending on your parts so let's go inside right now I'm going to grab the parts we'll lay them out here on the bed of the truck and we'll show you it it's kind of eye opening how different the price points are because let's just say you could build another mid-tier computer for the savings between one and the other okay so we got both our builds here we'll kind of go over the expensive build first yeah it may look like it's sponsored by Asus remember this is Microcenter stuff I just can't help it that they're the most most expensive Brands really we could have gone with like an MSI Godlike but we didn't on purpose because like I said a $1,300 motherboard or 12,200 whatever it is is ridiculous so I went with the maxus z790 dark hero motherboard that came in at $57 $9 for a motherboard like I said they're both 14700 K the 14700 K here was $369 at micr Center Ram I went with uh was 339 bucks it's 32 GB of 6600 uh ddr5 from Corsair it's the Dominator titanium they're it's beautiful Ram but you know it's again very expensive for storage we went with a two terab drives for both this is the t700 from crucial the t700 pro extremely fast Drive um again kind of expensive though cuz it is a top tier product that came in at $399 for that 2 TB Drive um yeah that's what it came in at so anyway for power supply we th000 watt for both of these builds I wanted to build in some additional Headroom for power usage in the future so 1,000 Watts I thought was good because we could step up from a 4070 TI super to a 4080 super 4090 in the future maybe whatever next gen going to your connector GPU ends up being but that's the Thor 1000 wat platinum and that costs and I always ignore the stickers because it's never rings up at that price $359 okay well that's what the sticker said so whatever and then for the cooler the most expensive AIO I could find for 360 was the ryogen 360 argb and this uh came in at $349 so that was a correct price on there both of these builds are using NZXT H9 cases I've got two of those right here it's the flow for better air flow they're in Black that's $159 you can place hold that for any case cost that you want so as long as you factor in $100 $150 $200 whatever your case is going to be um it's just a box to Hold Your Parts and needs to have good air flow that's what I chose because I like the H9 flow so what was the total on this this build came to a grand total before tax of $3,429 and 92 the fact that we could spend $3500 before tax or $3,695 after tax and not have a 4080 and not have an I9 shows you there was some extremely inefficient use of funds so let's look at the other build fun fact this is how I fold paper this is how Phil folds paper so I just thought to point that out but anyway okay so again the same i7 14700 K right there so that was $369 as we already know uh for the Ram or excuse me for the motherboard on this one I chose again a z790 udac from uh gigabyte the ud brand has been around for a long time in terms of like gigabytes portfolio now I use it all the way back with like FX processors and AMD it's always performed well so as long as we keep the BIOS and stuff updated um it's going to definitely give us better bang for the buck that came in at $169.99 versus the other one $579 so as you can see there's a $400 $420 savings right there uh so for Ram again I've got crucial right here this is the ddr5 pro I love it it's no frills there's no RGB or anything on there it's just solid nand Micron uh chips in there obviously cuz it's crucial 5600 uh megga transfers per second CL 46 it's a good set of ram it's plenty fast 5600 is more than fast enough for most people uh and that came in at a grand total of $159 you could save money if you want with a 32 gig and 32 gigs probably more than enough for anybody but in this instance I wanted to take on the position of the buyer that's trying to build himself like most people shopping in the $2,500 price point would be like a dream PCC that's a lot of money so let's make sure we get good parts and not completely go bottom budget but feel like we have parts that are going to last us for a while so it's not the base 4,800 it's 5600 you could probably even push that a little bit higher if you wanted our drive is a 2 TB Samsung 970 Evo plus it is a gen 3 Drive the other Drive is a Gen 5 12,400 MBT per second this is 3,500 mby per second clearly it's one quarter the speed of the other Drive unfortunately most people are never going to notice that speed difference because it's very rare that you're ever transferring files that are large enough for that speed to really ever show and when you're loading like textures and stuff in games it's pulling a lot of small files from different locations you're very rarely going to notice a difference between these two drives so I would personally save some money going gen 3 or maybe Gen 4 over a Gen 5 if you're shopping at this price point this drive cost us $239 you can even save more money by going even lower spec if you wanted by going say with the in-house Inland brand uh or just a smaller drive so again large enough drives that we're not going to fill it too quickly fast enough drives that we're not going to feel like it's slowing down our system we've talked about how drives can be the number one way to speed up a slow system especially if you're still on a hard drive for some odd reason uh okay so that was actually a little bit more expensive than I think I personally should have gone but when you see the price difference at the end you'll still see we're doing all right uh for our power supply there goes our processor what is it with j and dropping processors anyway this is the pq1 m 880 plus gold modular power supply from Deep cool deep cool is a brand that's really been kind of making uh well I guess making some waves in the industry if you will they've got a lot of really good products at competitive price points so that's again the th000 watt modular it's going to give us all the same uh compatibility we need for our graphics card to have a lot of Headroom in the future and I think this one might even be a PCI E5 uh with a PCI E5 cable I can't remember if it doesn't that will sort of suck but um actually don't think this one has a Gen 5 we'll see when I open it up otherwise we'll just have to use an adapter that's going to stink but you can always change a single cable easier than the whole power supply and considering this cost cost us $129 versus the Thor's $359 I feel like it was a fair trade and then I think that's pretty much it again the same case oh the graphics card of course so for graphics card the Zotac 470 TI super Trinity Black Edition this is an MSRP card at$ 799 uh versus the uh MSI gaming X slim which was uh $879 so it is a $70 cheaper card I think a lot of people myself included expected this to be an area to easily spend way too much money and get very little for it I I don't think that'll happen until you get up into like the 4080 super plus range because you have a bigger gap between cards and then last but not least we have our cooler Cooler Master Master liquid Master maker 360 core maker Master RGB Master cooler maker it's a $99 360 AIO nothing super special um but still going to give us enough cooling to where we can get full Boost clocks out of our CPU as long as we want to hold those boost clocks so what was the total on this one before tax 2,1 $29 so a difference of exactly $1,300 actually it's $ 22992 versus $ 3429 92 exactly the same sents that's weird so exactly $1,300 difference or another computer difference worth of cost because we could easily have bought and built like a 14600 system with a uh even the same motherboard if we wanted and a like a 4060 and a 1 TB drive and an 800 W power supply and a case and everything for that extra money so ask yourself is it worth spending that much money for a system when you could have bought made two systems for the same price let's go build them and put them side by side and see oh okay so the computers are built as you can see we've got the prices there 3429 versus 2129 from this angle you can see they actually don't look really any different the Lesser expensive PC doesn't look any less like quality like sometimes you go base bottom line PC uh they look that way this still looks like a high-end PC let's start with some CPU tests here so our I'm going to say cheap PC I don't mean cheap it's just cheaper okay our cheaper PC here and Center bench uh R23 multicore was a 34505 that's actually really high cuz a 30 a 13 or excuse me a 14900 K hits like 38,000 so it's actually really close to that and the only difference between the two CPUs honestly is there's more EC Cor with an I9 versus an i7 otherwise there the same PE cor count uh so 34505 versus a 35977 so about a 1,400 Point difference there or one oh excuse me a 4.3% difference now single core a 2171 on the cheaper PC versus a 2210 on the one on the uh expensive PC at a 1.8% difference there um cinebench r24 2052 on the cheaper versus is 20080 on the more expensive that's probably a more realistic side-by-side comparison in real world performance because r24 actually does different types of instructions in that test and different loads on different cores rather than just hammering all the cores and P cores and E cores as hard as it can um so it gives you a more realistic separation in performance between the two so 1.4% difference in performance now single core on the cheaper PC was a 128 versus a 131 or 2.3% difference there we also use geek bench uh six for this one free test so if you also these tests are free that we're mentioning here so you can go and download them and compare them to your own system if you're just curious as to how these prices stacked up versus your build uh geekbench 6 on the cheaper PC was a 2,9 $2,987 on multicore versus a 2,578 on the more expensive PC uh for a difference of 2.8% and then single core performance $29.99 on cheaper versus 3112 on more expensive for a difference of 3.8% so you can see we're really low on the percentage differences here now let's talk about why they would be different even though they're the exact same CPU we have two different manufacturers of motherboards here with two different Logics on how they're going to take advantage of Intel allowing higher Headroom and power table frequency charts you know power versus frequency curve or the VF curve um or voltage curves and all that between the two motherboards Asus as we know is very aggressive so the Asus motherboard here still has the out of the box bios we did not update the BIOS because I did not want to put into effect right now some of the newer bios that have come out since we've talked about the BIOS being too aggressive they sort of went the other direction now the voltage is too low and CPUs are crashing because there's not enough voltage so it's kind of the other direction now so we just went out of the box um so the enhanced multi or multi-core enhancement or let bios optimize settings that are on on Asus is more aggressive in terms of allowing more power more temperature Headroom and more importantly a a longer thermal velocity boost which means we're holding the core clocks higher even though it's only going to 5.5 which is the outof thebox settings for all core uh higher and longer on the Asus board than the gigabyte board now the gigo gigabyte board does have the enhanced features also on but they're not nearly as aggressive as Asus is because it's a completely different tier of motherboard which is the whole point of this video but was $16 motherboard versus a $579 motherboard I think that was a price does that weren't 3% at the most on performance I think 4% is what we saw in like a single core in one of them uh no it was 4.3% on Center bench R23 for allore CU it was significantly more expensive than 4.3% it was like 300% more expensive for that one part so we could easily go in because this is a k skube CPU we could easily go in there and overclock the board a little bit or just enable a longer longer thermal velocity boost timer if we wanted and easily match the performance but out of the box built XMP turned on on both boards so we're talking like 6600 versus I think it was 5600 on the ram okay let's talk about gaming cuz this is obviously going to be where the two SKS definitely compare to each other Port Royal on the cheaper PC was a 15,590 versus the more expensive PCS 15,776 or a whopping 1.2% difference so cyberpunk 2077 the cheaper PC and 1080p gave us 127 .45 FPS versus the more expensive PCS 131.8 or 2.9% FPS difference so 1440p on the cheaper PC uh was 10599 versus the more expensive PCS 10987 for an even more narrow difference of 3.7% we also tested f123 a new title for us I didn't test that yet but I just paid 70 bucks for today cuz I wanted to include it in today's test even though F1 2024 comes out in literally just a few days from now and I still had to pay $70 for the old version even though the new one is available for pre- purchase right now at the same 70 bucks first of all why the is it 70 bucks why are games 70 bucks now 1080p on the cheaper PC was 178 1080p on the more expensive PC was 182 for a whopping difference of 2.2% or 4 FPS uh 1440p 143 versus 146 for a difference of 2.1% okay let's talk about why some of those performance differences even exist if the parts are identical well let's go ahead and do some live stuff so you can see what's happening so we can talk about it okay so expensive on the left cheaper on the right anyway let's talk about the clock speeds you can see our GPU is currently at 63c 64c 100% load 2715 2730 2715 2760 so if we go to the other side you can see the CPU GPU is a little bit hotter running slightly slower 268 85 27 2685 27 2685 2715 so this one is generally about 50 MHz higher on average on the left side uh you can also notice that our CPUs are very comparable in their load their frequencies are going to fluctuate they're always going to fluctuate CU it's not a very CPU intensive test but you'll notice the temperatures are very comparable which doesn't bode well for this AIO versus the the $100 AIO versus the $360 AIO um or $350 whatever it is although this one does have a really cool screen and stuff on it I'll give it that the magnetic connectors there's a lot of Premium you pay for in that maybe I'll do a video about the premiums and what you actually get so we could technically go into afterburner over there and match those clock speeds and then we would get pretty much an identical score between the two so that is why we're getting a different performance in one PC versus the other when it comes to identical grade graphics cards and even identical grade CPUs so whereas the vbios in those graphics cards are a little bit more aggressive in the non- MSRP card that's essentially what our motherboards are doing to our CPUs our motherboards are being a little more aggressive one versus the other on the CPU allowing core clocks to go maybe a little higher or stay higher longer which is giving us that single digigit performance difference so let's go into a real title now something like cine bench or cine bench that's not a that's not a game title it's a game for me I love playing zenov bench uh but let's go into like cyberpunk and a real game and a real game load side by side in the exact same load and then let's see what the clocks are doing there and then we'll adjust the speeds dynamically and then see what happens if we get them all exactly the same okay so now that we have FPS loaded you can look look in a real 118 114 113 119 119 120 119 so it's actually a fair amount of difference here by having 2805 versus 2745 over there but what we're going to do now is I'm going to go into this one here and I'm going to see if we can't make it match so I'm do this I'm have Nick do it there we go so we're at the same 20805 interestingly enough there's still an FPS difference between the two because 112 113 115 116 so I feel like that GPU would have to be overclocked slightly to match it so go from 60 now to like say 100 on that core clock okay well you know what so the only other thing we can consider here is the cheaper PC does have a whole 1 GHz slower Ram speed which does come into effect during gaming gaming does RAM speed does have an effect on games especially a game like this that's rendering a lot of AI apcs and stuff or NPCs in the game so and then obviously there's fluctuation because I have a lot less cars on screen than that one cuz it is completely randomized they're not identical on the way it's happening on each save but you can see the numbers are so close together now by us adding an overclock which clearly has plenty of stability plenty of temperature headro to where now you would not even be able to notice the difference like this one's actually slightly lower than that one now was at a moment but I don't know about you I'd rather go in here and toggle some settings and dice roll to see if I can make up 3% different two excuse me 2.2% or whatever it was difference in a game versus spending $1,300 more to match the system that's doing it out of the box now obviously there's a whole lot of extra digging we could have done on this to uh get down to some real nitty-gritty like to actually compare the BIOS frequency settings to see what that voltage frequency chart looks like what is the actual turbo timer settings we know the Asus one is pushing things the the hardest out of all the motherboards as far as the ones we've tested and seen I know for a fact this that's having an effect on the CPU which is also having an effect on the overall performance of the CPU um even though they were locked 5.52 5.52 okay so they're not affecting this title so much but the RAM definitely could be but again the difference in price that we spent for that ram versus the again $1,300 is nothing jump change I mean that's like rent for a lot of people right there so I don't know about you we could have probably gotten this build on the cheaper build even under two grand if we wanted we could have easily saved another two 300 bucks no problem by even going with like 32 GB of RAM or going with even slightly slower Ram like 4,800 megat transfers per second or even reducing the power supply down to like 850 Watts cuz we don't really need 1,000 that's just future proofing to make sure that GPU or assuming that power supply stays relevant for longer now when it comes to the quality of the parts these are still top tier parts for both sides even though this is a cheaper build this is not a a a cheap PC by any means it is a high-end PC for all intents and purposes it's just as you can see you could easily spend way too much on one tier because realistically for the price we paid for this we should have had an upper price point on everything we should have had a 4080 super in there we should have had an I9 in there cuz we could easily have a 48 super and an I9 in this system and still spend less than we did by not going as high on the motherboard and such cuz this motherboard could still support that no problem whatsoever so I think it's really important for you to to consider the fact that you can easily overspend on Parts you don't need to necessarily sort by show me cheapest but I think there's a there's definitely uh a a good just meat and potato section of the genre right I think 200 bucks for a motherboard is where you should realistically cap out on a real build uh I don't think personally you should ever really look at higher than MSRP cards when it comes to graphics cards uh especially in the 4070 range like we are right now the 4070 TI super because when it came to GPU choice for us I mean the 470 TI super was as high as we could go without jumping to that, graphics card range but we could obviously jump to a gra $1,000 graphics card here easily if we wanted because we're talking $799 versus I think it was $869 now we're talking a difference of $130 to get to a 480 super MSRP which would be much faster than these even so yeah you can see right there and it's also unfortunately some of the confusion for a lot of new buyers or people that haven't bought Parts in a while that are now shopping trying to figure out like oh my gosh where should I go cuz you can easily Lea frog parts and overspend here and UND spend there so you can see the easiest component the the single component we overspent and spent way too much money on undoubtedly is the motherboard and I don't know why motherboards have gotten so expensive I think it's just it's become like a an arms race for the motherboard manufacturers to you can make the biggest most ridiculous motherboard that means nothing to the consumer like they L and2 overclocking championships okay cool but what does that mean to a average consumer nothing we got a $159 motherboard right here holding its own against the $579 motherboard hope this video has helped shed some literal light on things so you guys can see where to uh save some money and where to spend that money if you have that budget and you're like I'm going to spend all 3500 bucks I got cuz I I did my chores I got my birthday money from Grandma and I got all A's so I got like some extra money from my parents or I graduated I got I'm going to spend it I'm just going to be frivolous I'm going to spend it I don't care as you can see save money in other components and put them in other ones easily easily easy place to save money is the motherboard and the the cooler although the ryen 3 the ryogen 3 is really really cool but not 3 and 1/2 times the cost of The Cooler Master cooler that's over here keeping the CPUs what 65c 66 66 oh my gosh imagine that it's like 360 aios are comparable anyway all right I've rambled on enough tell me down below what you think your biggest tip would be for Builders to save money cuz I think we're going to probably see some varying answers but motherboard cooler RAM and storage is really easy to overspend\n"