Building a Budget Gaming PC: A Review of the $250 Machine

As I sit here with my newly assembled budget gaming PC, I'm excited to share my thoughts on this machine's performance and value. With a price tag of just $250, it was clear that compromises would be made in order to reach such a low cost point. However, as I delved deeper into the world of computer hardware, I discovered that this PC has more than enough oomph to handle a wide range of modern games.

In the top left-hand corner of my monitor, I have all the information I need: CPU usage, temperature, GPU temp, GPU usage, FPS minimum, average, and maximum. This data is crucial in understanding how my machine performs in various scenarios. By adjusting these settings, I was able to achieve a steady 60 FPS, which is impressive considering the hardware specifications.

One of the standout features of this PC is its ability to handle demanding games at high resolutions. In Overwatch, I averaged 62 FPS with full weather on, while Project Cars delivered an average of 78 FPS in similar conditions. While these numbers may not be as high as those found on more powerful systems, they are still respectable, especially considering the cost.

However, there are some areas where this PC falls short. The two-gigabyte video memory is a major limitation, particularly when it comes to modern games that require more VRAM. I witnessed firsthand how this limitation affects gameplay in GTA V, where the game struggled to maintain high frame rates. Despite this, the machine still manages to handle most modern titles, including Fortnite and Rocket League.

One area where this PC shines is in older games. Skyrim, for example, runs beautifully at ultra-high settings, while Fallout 4 handles itself with ease. The machine's i7 processor provides plenty of processing power to tackle even the most demanding titles. While it may not be able to handle PS3 or Xbox emulation, it will still provide excellent performance for PC gamers.

To further test my system, I added some overclocking tools to see if I could squeeze out better performance. As expected, this resulted in a significant increase in frame rates and overall responsiveness. With an overclock, the machine's capabilities expand even further, potentially allowing for smoother gameplay at 60 FPS or higher.

Throughout the testing process, I noticed that the system tends to run warmer than I would have liked. However, this is not uncommon in budget gaming PCs, where compromises are often made in order to reduce costs. It's also worth noting that the machine has a decent cooling system, which helps to mitigate these temperature concerns.

As I reflect on my experience with this $250 machine, it's clear that while there may be some limitations, the overall performance is still very impressive. If you're looking for a budget-friendly gaming PC that can handle modern games at 1080p resolution, this machine is definitely worth considering. Just be sure to keep an eye out for deals and discounts, as these opportunities can arise quickly.

To supplement my review, I've included some links in the description below to various GPUs on eBay, which I've had my eye on for some time now. I'm excited to test these systems further and provide more in-depth reviews once they become available.

Finally, I want to thank you for watching, and I encourage you to hit that like button and subscribe to my channel for future content. If you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to leave them in the comments below.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enbefore we get started here I just want to get this out of the way this video pertains to used parts and used pcs you can build a new system for around the same price let's say you want to use the two hundred GE from AMD but you're not gonna have the same performance until you add a little more money and throw in a dedicated GPU or you could go with the 2200 G and add a p450 motherboard it's gonna be a little more expensive than this bill to here but there is good upgrade ability down the road so in the end it's really up to you you could save the money that you were gonna use to build a used part PC and put it towards new parts and just wait a little longer what's going on guys the CTA Prime back here again today I'm gonna be putting together a $250 gaming / emulation PC now this video here will be strictly focused on the PC gaming side of everything I will be making a dedicated emulation video on this setup here so keep an eye on the channel I didn't want this to turn into a 30-minute video so this whole setup cost me two hundred and fifty one dollars to put together I'm using a used optiplex 990 with an i7 2604 $80.00 I'll have a price list in just a second I wasn't able to find all the parts I needed to build this in one go it actually took me 28 days I've bought some from Craigslist offer up and you can even try Facebook marketplace but I do suggest using eBay you're gonna find stuff that's a little higher price but when you pay with PayPal you have that buyer protection the 990 only came with 4 gigabytes of RAM and no hard drive so I had to get some more RAM I found this on offer up for $30 this is 16 gigabytes of ddr3 1600 ballistic ram it's a low profile and you can find deals like this all over the place you just have to be ready to buy when it's there the GPU I'm gonna be using here is a little lackluster I wish I could have got something with a little more vram but I only paid 65 dollars for this this is an EVGA gtx 960 2 gigabyte variant i suggest going with something a little higher in you can get a 970 for a hundred to 120 on ebay go with an RX 480 or an RX 570 if you have a little more cash i really recommend the RX 580 even though this isn't a very high-end card we should be able to get medium to high settings in most games at 1080p for storage I picked up a silicon power 256 gigabyte SSD on Amazon they're $34 actually I think as of making this video right now they're on sale for 31 and finally I needed a better power supply than the one that came in this so I'm going with an EVGA 600 why I know it's a little overkill for the system but for $40.00 I really couldn't beat the price and as of making this video these are actually on sale at Best Buy for $34.99 so if I would have waited I could have saved a few bucks and got this under 250 total cost on all the parts for this build 251 dollars now this is totally possible for somebody else to come around the same exact price here you just have to keep an eye out check Craigslist offer up let it go actually don't check let it go nobody ever replies to you and Facebook marketplace you can also buy through eBay and it's great because you do have buyer protection if you use your PayPal and let's say you bought a graphics card it doesn't work when it shows up there's a good chance you could get refunded so it is a mess in here and the power supply has been changed in the past this is an ultra 350 watt but I'm not gonna trust it here I already got that 600 watt EVGA that's gonna work out just fine in here so the first thing I did was remove the power supply and then I took the whole unit out back and I kind of dusted it out I used an air blower just to get all the loose dust off of it and then I just wiped it down a little bit I'm gonna throw this new power supply in here we need to put the RAM in video card and see what this thing can do even with an old PC like this I still love modular power supplies because I got a lot of cables in here that aren't gonna be going to use but I can kind of shove them up in the top here maybe zip tie them I'm gonna try to make it look as clean as possible I mean after all this is an optical X 990 case so there's no cable management time to throw the RAM in here now this is an i7 2608 doesn't support 1600 megahertz ddr3 I think it will default down to 1333 it should work fine so we got 16 gigs in there now it's time to put the GPU in when I initially started measuring everything up I got a little worried because it doesn't look like it's gonna fit but it will fit in here just fine you just have to kind of angle it in if it didn't I was gonna have to remove this hard drive cage so after it's all said and done I think it looks pretty decent I did have to mount the SSD in an odd place but it seems to fit here fine all that's left to do is install windows get steam up and running and get some games going the first thing I always like to do when I get everything set up is run a quick Geekbench now for the single core we squirt a 3548 multi core eleven thousand nine hundred and seventeen not the best but it looks really good for the price we paid here the next thing I usually do is run Cinebench r15 this is a quad-core CPU with eight threads at 3.4 gigahertz but it will turbo up to 3.8 we scored a 605 here not bad we are below that 37 70 but this is a 2nd gen i7 CPU it's the 2600 so I think that's pretty decent time to see how this thing performs first up we have Apex legends this is a mix of medium and high settings at 1080p have all the information we need up in the top left hand corner got the CPU usage temperature GPU temp GPU usage FPS minimum average and maximum I probably could have dropped everything down to medium and got a steady 60 out of it the gameplay is pretty good we got an average of 57 a low of 44 and a maximum of 75 like I mentioned I wish there was a little more vram with this GPU I probably should have spent the extra cash and got the rx 570 or the rx 580 we could do high settings here 1080p with that 580 part sure we at the 4 gigabyte or the 8 but it's not bad at all for a used $250 PC plus as making this video this game only came out a few days ago so overtime performance will get better on lower end systems and I haven't even overclocked this card yet so with an overclock there's a chance we could get a nice steady 60 and all the games I tested I did have vsync off so you might see some spring tearing here's the game that's been out for a while it's been very well optimized over the years this is an overwatch high settings 100% resolution scale 1080p I had no doubt that this machine would play overwatch this well here's project cars - I did want to show you the settings here it's a mix of medium and high with no MSAA I'm gonna be doing this first level with rain on cuz rain is a killer in this game we got the full thunderstorm on and unfortunately my Game Capture didn't pick the sound up for some reason in this clip we're averaging 62 FPS even with full weather on same exact settings on a clear day we got an average of 78 fps I wanted to throw a fighting game in here so I opted for injustice to now Street Fighter 5 runs really well on this but injustice 2 was given me a little trouble I did have to drop some of the settings down from high to medium so it's a mixed set here so a game like GTA 5 is where we're really gonna feel that two gigabytes of vram we need a little bit more but it seems perform pretty decently I got a mix setup of normal high settings here DirectX 11 1080p whenever I start testing this game is hard for me to stop playing out and all over the place running from these guys we're getting the average of eighty eight eighty seven FPS minimum of sixty seven this set up is handling it pretty well had to throw some csgo in here we got high settings 1080p average of 129 fps I knew it was going to handle this game file and finally rocket League 1080p maxed out by the end of this match we had an average of 115 a low of 96 this is more than playable just because I know it's gonna be asked yes I did test for at night 1080p high average of 67 minimum of 54 Elsa tested pop G average 63 minimum 52 at medium settings so overall I think the machine runs pretty good some older games are gonna run fine on here you can max out the source engine games 1080p ultra settings Skyrim runs great at Ultra fallout for high settings runs fine even though this is just a non K second-generation i7 it still holds its own in 1080p gaming now adding a better GPU only net you better performance and that's something I might do down the road I'm really thinking about getting a 570 or a 580 to test out on this thing but for right now I think it's doing a great job like it's it's I really appreciate you guys watching I'm gonna leave some links in the description to eBay to a few GPUs that have been looking at had my eyeball on them for a little while and definitely keep an eye on the channel because I think this thing is gonna be an excellent emulation PC I'm gonna be testing out some 3ds some ps2 some PSP some dolphin with GameCube and Wii I'll even throw some sim you in here I don't think it's gonna do a great job with ps3 or xbox emulation but I'll put it in the video and if there's anything else you want to see let me know in the comments below it is definitely possible to build a machine at this price you just have to keep your eye out and be ready to purchase when the item becomes available because that's the main thing I've missed out on so many deals because I just procrastinate it best thing to do is when you see it get it I'd really appreciate it if you could hit that like button maybe subscribe to the channel click that little Bell icon so you know when I upload my next video and like always thanks for watching youbefore we get started here I just want to get this out of the way this video pertains to used parts and used pcs you can build a new system for around the same price let's say you want to use the two hundred GE from AMD but you're not gonna have the same performance until you add a little more money and throw in a dedicated GPU or you could go with the 2200 G and add a p450 motherboard it's gonna be a little more expensive than this bill to here but there is good upgrade ability down the road so in the end it's really up to you you could save the money that you were gonna use to build a used part PC and put it towards new parts and just wait a little longer what's going on guys the CTA Prime back here again today I'm gonna be putting together a $250 gaming / emulation PC now this video here will be strictly focused on the PC gaming side of everything I will be making a dedicated emulation video on this setup here so keep an eye on the channel I didn't want this to turn into a 30-minute video so this whole setup cost me two hundred and fifty one dollars to put together I'm using a used optiplex 990 with an i7 2604 $80.00 I'll have a price list in just a second I wasn't able to find all the parts I needed to build this in one go it actually took me 28 days I've bought some from Craigslist offer up and you can even try Facebook marketplace but I do suggest using eBay you're gonna find stuff that's a little higher price but when you pay with PayPal you have that buyer protection the 990 only came with 4 gigabytes of RAM and no hard drive so I had to get some more RAM I found this on offer up for $30 this is 16 gigabytes of ddr3 1600 ballistic ram it's a low profile and you can find deals like this all over the place you just have to be ready to buy when it's there the GPU I'm gonna be using here is a little lackluster I wish I could have got something with a little more vram but I only paid 65 dollars for this this is an EVGA gtx 960 2 gigabyte variant i suggest going with something a little higher in you can get a 970 for a hundred to 120 on ebay go with an RX 480 or an RX 570 if you have a little more cash i really recommend the RX 580 even though this isn't a very high-end card we should be able to get medium to high settings in most games at 1080p for storage I picked up a silicon power 256 gigabyte SSD on Amazon they're $34 actually I think as of making this video right now they're on sale for 31 and finally I needed a better power supply than the one that came in this so I'm going with an EVGA 600 why I know it's a little overkill for the system but for $40.00 I really couldn't beat the price and as of making this video these are actually on sale at Best Buy for $34.99 so if I would have waited I could have saved a few bucks and got this under 250 total cost on all the parts for this build 251 dollars now this is totally possible for somebody else to come around the same exact price here you just have to keep an eye out check Craigslist offer up let it go actually don't check let it go nobody ever replies to you and Facebook marketplace you can also buy through eBay and it's great because you do have buyer protection if you use your PayPal and let's say you bought a graphics card it doesn't work when it shows up there's a good chance you could get refunded so it is a mess in here and the power supply has been changed in the past this is an ultra 350 watt but I'm not gonna trust it here I already got that 600 watt EVGA that's gonna work out just fine in here so the first thing I did was remove the power supply and then I took the whole unit out back and I kind of dusted it out I used an air blower just to get all the loose dust off of it and then I just wiped it down a little bit I'm gonna throw this new power supply in here we need to put the RAM in video card and see what this thing can do even with an old PC like this I still love modular power supplies because I got a lot of cables in here that aren't gonna be going to use but I can kind of shove them up in the top here maybe zip tie them I'm gonna try to make it look as clean as possible I mean after all this is an optical X 990 case so there's no cable management time to throw the RAM in here now this is an i7 2608 doesn't support 1600 megahertz ddr3 I think it will default down to 1333 it should work fine so we got 16 gigs in there now it's time to put the GPU in when I initially started measuring everything up I got a little worried because it doesn't look like it's gonna fit but it will fit in here just fine you just have to kind of angle it in if it didn't I was gonna have to remove this hard drive cage so after it's all said and done I think it looks pretty decent I did have to mount the SSD in an odd place but it seems to fit here fine all that's left to do is install windows get steam up and running and get some games going the first thing I always like to do when I get everything set up is run a quick Geekbench now for the single core we squirt a 3548 multi core eleven thousand nine hundred and seventeen not the best but it looks really good for the price we paid here the next thing I usually do is run Cinebench r15 this is a quad-core CPU with eight threads at 3.4 gigahertz but it will turbo up to 3.8 we scored a 605 here not bad we are below that 37 70 but this is a 2nd gen i7 CPU it's the 2600 so I think that's pretty decent time to see how this thing performs first up we have Apex legends this is a mix of medium and high settings at 1080p have all the information we need up in the top left hand corner got the CPU usage temperature GPU temp GPU usage FPS minimum average and maximum I probably could have dropped everything down to medium and got a steady 60 out of it the gameplay is pretty good we got an average of 57 a low of 44 and a maximum of 75 like I mentioned I wish there was a little more vram with this GPU I probably should have spent the extra cash and got the rx 570 or the rx 580 we could do high settings here 1080p with that 580 part sure we at the 4 gigabyte or the 8 but it's not bad at all for a used $250 PC plus as making this video this game only came out a few days ago so overtime performance will get better on lower end systems and I haven't even overclocked this card yet so with an overclock there's a chance we could get a nice steady 60 and all the games I tested I did have vsync off so you might see some spring tearing here's the game that's been out for a while it's been very well optimized over the years this is an overwatch high settings 100% resolution scale 1080p I had no doubt that this machine would play overwatch this well here's project cars - I did want to show you the settings here it's a mix of medium and high with no MSAA I'm gonna be doing this first level with rain on cuz rain is a killer in this game we got the full thunderstorm on and unfortunately my Game Capture didn't pick the sound up for some reason in this clip we're averaging 62 FPS even with full weather on same exact settings on a clear day we got an average of 78 fps I wanted to throw a fighting game in here so I opted for injustice to now Street Fighter 5 runs really well on this but injustice 2 was given me a little trouble I did have to drop some of the settings down from high to medium so it's a mixed set here so a game like GTA 5 is where we're really gonna feel that two gigabytes of vram we need a little bit more but it seems perform pretty decently I got a mix setup of normal high settings here DirectX 11 1080p whenever I start testing this game is hard for me to stop playing out and all over the place running from these guys we're getting the average of eighty eight eighty seven FPS minimum of sixty seven this set up is handling it pretty well had to throw some csgo in here we got high settings 1080p average of 129 fps I knew it was going to handle this game file and finally rocket League 1080p maxed out by the end of this match we had an average of 115 a low of 96 this is more than playable just because I know it's gonna be asked yes I did test for at night 1080p high average of 67 minimum of 54 Elsa tested pop G average 63 minimum 52 at medium settings so overall I think the machine runs pretty good some older games are gonna run fine on here you can max out the source engine games 1080p ultra settings Skyrim runs great at Ultra fallout for high settings runs fine even though this is just a non K second-generation i7 it still holds its own in 1080p gaming now adding a better GPU only net you better performance and that's something I might do down the road I'm really thinking about getting a 570 or a 580 to test out on this thing but for right now I think it's doing a great job like it's it's I really appreciate you guys watching I'm gonna leave some links in the description to eBay to a few GPUs that have been looking at had my eyeball on them for a little while and definitely keep an eye on the channel because I think this thing is gonna be an excellent emulation PC I'm gonna be testing out some 3ds some ps2 some PSP some dolphin with GameCube and Wii I'll even throw some sim you in here I don't think it's gonna do a great job with ps3 or xbox emulation but I'll put it in the video and if there's anything else you want to see let me know in the comments below it is definitely possible to build a machine at this price you just have to keep your eye out and be ready to purchase when the item becomes available because that's the main thing I've missed out on so many deals because I just procrastinate it best thing to do is when you see it get it I'd really appreciate it if you could hit that like button maybe subscribe to the channel click that little Bell icon so you know when I upload my next video and like always thanks for watching you\n"