**A $500 PC that Surpasses Console Gaming Experience**

In this video review, we put to the test a PC that can rival console gaming systems at an affordable price point of $500. The system in question is equipped with a powerful CPU and GPU that are capable of delivering smooth gameplay experiences, even on demanding titles.

The PC's build quality is impressive, despite some minor drawbacks such as the non-removable drive cage. However, this does not detract from the overall cooling performance of the system, which allows for optimal temperatures to be maintained, ensuring that our CPU and GPU can operate at their best. The presence of a fast SSD also contributes to this by allowing for quick loading times and reduced lag in games.

**Benchmarks and Performance**

To evaluate the PC's performance, we ran a series of benchmarks using various titles. We tested these games at 1920x1080 resolution with the latest Nvidia driver (version 3.88.7). The system's ability to deliver smooth gameplay experiences is evident, as most games reached an average frame rate of 60 FPS or higher. Notably, even in demanding titles like Battlefield 1, the PC was able to maintain a respectable average frame rate of around 52 FPS.

**One Percent Lows and Perceived Choppiness**

The system's ability to deliver smooth gameplay experiences is further supported by its one percent low performance, which indicates the slowest one percent of performance on average. In this case, most games delivered one percent lows above 30 FPS, ensuring minimal perceived choppiness even in stressful scenarios.

**Upgrade Path and Versatility**

One of the standout features of this PC is its upgrade path, allowing users to easily swap out components such as the CPU or graphics card, or add new ones to enhance performance. This makes it an attractive option for those who want a system that can grow with them over time, rather than being locked into a single platform.

**Comparison to Console Gaming**

In comparison to console gaming systems, this PC offers a significant advantage in terms of flexibility and upgradeability. Additionally, the ability to use a keyboard and mouse interface, high refresh rate displays, and other peripherals can enhance the overall gaming experience. The system's versatility also extends to other activities such as web browsing, streaming, email productivity, and content creation.

**Conclusion**

In conclusion, this $500 PC is an excellent choice for those who want to enter the world of PC gaming without breaking the bank. Its ability to deliver smooth gameplay experiences on demanding titles, combined with its upgrade path and versatility, make it a compelling option for those looking to expand their gaming horizons.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enoh hey Chris come over here check out this Tower of Power damn and the perfect pair to match oh yeah go ahead and touch him if you like I can barely fit my hands around the room that's the laugh gate then he look me straight in my eyes as he was feeling him up said he'd never seen anything like it I can't believe what I'm hearing right now you guys are disgusting oh you guys talking about the case fans oh sorry continue the new H 500 P from coolermaster sports a pair of 200 millimeter RGB fans generous radiator support and phenomenal cable management packed in a unique industrial exterior click the link of the description to learn more what's up guys welcome back to the channel hope you're all doing well so you guys probably recall last month when I walked into a Micro Center retail store in Tustin California on Black Friday morning with $500 cash in my hand they actually used a credit card doesn't matter anyway I set out to build a PC or buy the parts required for a PC within that budget and this is what I came up with a sub $500 actually closer to 400 and $70 Rison 3 based gaming PC and today we're gonna be testing it out to see how it does in a variety of games now $500 is a pretty attractive price point for a gaming PC because it's fairly comparable to what you'd spend on a modern console the only difference is that with a gaming PC that you build yourself there's no real set guarantee as to how it's gonna perform in game whereas with an Xbox for example if you buy an xbox and your friend buys an Xbox you can both rest assured that your gaming experience is between more or less identical with a gaming PC there's a lot of questions and doubts and it can be intimidating especially if it's your first time building so today we're gonna actually do some benchmarks on this guy to see what kind of performance we can get and whether or not it's worth forking out sub $500 to build your own system for gaming if you guys happen to miss part one or even if he did watch it since it was so long ago yeah sorry that's my fault of course let's go ahead and just do a quick refresher on the specs using in this system starting with our CPU we have the AMD risin three 1200 which is a quad-core chip for the base clock of 3.1 gigahertz it's a fantastic value great bang for the buck and it doesn't draw too much power or give off much heat which is why the included Wraith spire stock cooler that we have from AMD is going to pull it down just fine the chips currently seated in an Asus Prime a 320 MK motherboard which features the a320 chipset and that chipset unfortunately does not support CPU overclocking there was a bit of a confusion at micro Center when I was there I didn't realize that I could have afforded a more expensive be 350 motherboard with my budget but because of all the the Black Friday deals that were going on they were sort of conflicting with the sticker price and so forth you can watch the part 1 video for details but that is all to say we cannot overclock our CPU which is quite a bummer that being said you can overclock memory on a 320 which is exactly what I did with our 2 by 4 gig kit of hyper X ddr4 2400 I was actually able to take that within the UEFI 229 33 megahertz and that's gonna help us quite a bit actually in gaming performance with the rise in architecture or the Zen architecture I should say and its integration with Infinity fabric and so forth so that was really exciting I'm glad we at least got that down moving on to our GPU we have the EVGA GeForce GTX 1050 t I this is not an overclocked model I don't believe it comes factory overclocked or anything like that fortunately I was able to push that as well we got a 140 mega Hertz offset on the core clock and a 300 megahertz offset on the memory clock that took us up to nineteen hundred and two megahertz on the memory clock under load and then the core clock frequency was fluctuating anywhere between 1750 and 1850 mega Hertz was pretty constant within that within that range because the temperature didn't really change once we got to around 60 61 degrees Celsius which I guess I already gave away the max temperature for a GPU it doesn't get very hot big surprise the CPU while we're at it only got up to 51 degrees Celsius out of all the testing we did I was probably testing for a good six seven hours straight today didn't get any harder than than than 51 then with the old Wraith spire rounding off our components here we've got a large assist 650 watt 80 plus gold-certified power supply believe it or not a one terabyte Toshiba hard drive and a thermal take versa h22 plus mid power case now for being a dirt cheap case I'm actually kind of a fan speaking of fans the chassis comes with four case pans all right - at the top one at the rear and the one at the front - the blue LED move but still lots of nice air flow coming through this case despite the kind of cumbersome non removable drive cage it's still pretty cool in here all things considered which also explains why our CPU and GPU are able to stay as cool as they are altogether we have a pretty solid system if you guys are wondering what this SSD is doing right here that's actually my Steam library so I don't have to keep loading games up onto every new system so they were loading fast but it doesn't really affect performance in any way so speaking of performance though why don't we talk about that all the games that I tested were run at 1920 by 1080 using the latest wiffle driver from Nvidia that's version 3 88.7 one at the time of filming and yeah that's pretty much all one say other than that you guys know the drill Windows 10 Pro 64-bit and all that jazz so I'm gonna go ahead and kick it off to some benchmarks I also did a 3d mark time spy and fire strike just for the walls and we'll circle back and talk about the results before closing out this video sound good all right three two one well well well you little scamp you did it you did a good job for four hundred and seventy dollars I'm quite impressed with this little rig I mean six out of the seven games we tested mind you most of these games are triple-a titles guys were able to hit 60fps on average the only one that didn't that fell a little short was battlefield one I believe that hit 52 FPS on average but still really not too bad and beyond that all of our games saw one percent lows of at least 30 FPS and for those of you who don't know one percent lows basically indicates the slowest one percent of performance on average so that's that is to say that this guy's head was floating above that 30 FPS threshold of vast majority of the time that equates to very little to no perceived choppiness even in very stressful scenarios or scenes that I was testing so that's all really great news to top it all off there was only one game that we could not run at very high or ultra settings and that was pub key which as we all know is a very poorly optimized game and it's not even a finished game by any means so that's a really good testament for this little PC here for under $500 you're getting your foot in the door to PC gaming and in my opinion it's it's it beats out of console hands-down and there's a couple other reasons why not only are you getting a better gaming experience but you have an upgrade path so instead of having to buy the new Xbox one xxxx when that comes out because you want all the new features there you can simply just swap out the CPU as you see fit or your graphics card upgrade your memory etc and since you'll have already built your PC from the ground up you won't have any problem swapping those components out later down the line to top it all off there is simply so much more you can do with the PC than you can your average console this is not just a gaming machine and and granted consoles can do things like web browsing and streaming Netflix but I feel like even those experiences are far superior in a desktop environment when you get things like a keyboard and mouse interface and high refresh rate displays and so forth not to mention the endless list of other things you can do on a PC like installing emulators and expanding your game library even further or creating a server and looking up your photos and videos and other precious files and documents or email productivity word processing content creation Photoshop video editing and so forth there's so much out there guys that you can do with this thing that you just can't do with an Xbox and so if you have five hundred dollars in your hand and you're at a fork in the road console gaming PC you know where I stand and I know a lot of you guys who watch me regularly are already aware of all this I'm preaching to the choir here so this is really targeted to those who may be intimidated or have never built a gaming PC on their own before and might be sitting on the fence not sure which way to go so if that's you I hope that this video it has in some small way nudged you in the right direction because it really is a great experience so if you guys happen to enjoy this video I'm sure to toss me a like on it that helps me tremendously and also feel free to subscribe to the channel for more tech stuff coming at you really soon finally if you'd like to see videos like this a week early without ads you can check me out on floatplane I will leave a link in the description below have a good one guys thank you so much for watching again and I will see y'all in the next videooh hey Chris come over here check out this Tower of Power damn and the perfect pair to match oh yeah go ahead and touch him if you like I can barely fit my hands around the room that's the laugh gate then he look me straight in my eyes as he was feeling him up said he'd never seen anything like it I can't believe what I'm hearing right now you guys are disgusting oh you guys talking about the case fans oh sorry continue the new H 500 P from coolermaster sports a pair of 200 millimeter RGB fans generous radiator support and phenomenal cable management packed in a unique industrial exterior click the link of the description to learn more what's up guys welcome back to the channel hope you're all doing well so you guys probably recall last month when I walked into a Micro Center retail store in Tustin California on Black Friday morning with $500 cash in my hand they actually used a credit card doesn't matter anyway I set out to build a PC or buy the parts required for a PC within that budget and this is what I came up with a sub $500 actually closer to 400 and $70 Rison 3 based gaming PC and today we're gonna be testing it out to see how it does in a variety of games now $500 is a pretty attractive price point for a gaming PC because it's fairly comparable to what you'd spend on a modern console the only difference is that with a gaming PC that you build yourself there's no real set guarantee as to how it's gonna perform in game whereas with an Xbox for example if you buy an xbox and your friend buys an Xbox you can both rest assured that your gaming experience is between more or less identical with a gaming PC there's a lot of questions and doubts and it can be intimidating especially if it's your first time building so today we're gonna actually do some benchmarks on this guy to see what kind of performance we can get and whether or not it's worth forking out sub $500 to build your own system for gaming if you guys happen to miss part one or even if he did watch it since it was so long ago yeah sorry that's my fault of course let's go ahead and just do a quick refresher on the specs using in this system starting with our CPU we have the AMD risin three 1200 which is a quad-core chip for the base clock of 3.1 gigahertz it's a fantastic value great bang for the buck and it doesn't draw too much power or give off much heat which is why the included Wraith spire stock cooler that we have from AMD is going to pull it down just fine the chips currently seated in an Asus Prime a 320 MK motherboard which features the a320 chipset and that chipset unfortunately does not support CPU overclocking there was a bit of a confusion at micro Center when I was there I didn't realize that I could have afforded a more expensive be 350 motherboard with my budget but because of all the the Black Friday deals that were going on they were sort of conflicting with the sticker price and so forth you can watch the part 1 video for details but that is all to say we cannot overclock our CPU which is quite a bummer that being said you can overclock memory on a 320 which is exactly what I did with our 2 by 4 gig kit of hyper X ddr4 2400 I was actually able to take that within the UEFI 229 33 megahertz and that's gonna help us quite a bit actually in gaming performance with the rise in architecture or the Zen architecture I should say and its integration with Infinity fabric and so forth so that was really exciting I'm glad we at least got that down moving on to our GPU we have the EVGA GeForce GTX 1050 t I this is not an overclocked model I don't believe it comes factory overclocked or anything like that fortunately I was able to push that as well we got a 140 mega Hertz offset on the core clock and a 300 megahertz offset on the memory clock that took us up to nineteen hundred and two megahertz on the memory clock under load and then the core clock frequency was fluctuating anywhere between 1750 and 1850 mega Hertz was pretty constant within that within that range because the temperature didn't really change once we got to around 60 61 degrees Celsius which I guess I already gave away the max temperature for a GPU it doesn't get very hot big surprise the CPU while we're at it only got up to 51 degrees Celsius out of all the testing we did I was probably testing for a good six seven hours straight today didn't get any harder than than than 51 then with the old Wraith spire rounding off our components here we've got a large assist 650 watt 80 plus gold-certified power supply believe it or not a one terabyte Toshiba hard drive and a thermal take versa h22 plus mid power case now for being a dirt cheap case I'm actually kind of a fan speaking of fans the chassis comes with four case pans all right - at the top one at the rear and the one at the front - the blue LED move but still lots of nice air flow coming through this case despite the kind of cumbersome non removable drive cage it's still pretty cool in here all things considered which also explains why our CPU and GPU are able to stay as cool as they are altogether we have a pretty solid system if you guys are wondering what this SSD is doing right here that's actually my Steam library so I don't have to keep loading games up onto every new system so they were loading fast but it doesn't really affect performance in any way so speaking of performance though why don't we talk about that all the games that I tested were run at 1920 by 1080 using the latest wiffle driver from Nvidia that's version 3 88.7 one at the time of filming and yeah that's pretty much all one say other than that you guys know the drill Windows 10 Pro 64-bit and all that jazz so I'm gonna go ahead and kick it off to some benchmarks I also did a 3d mark time spy and fire strike just for the walls and we'll circle back and talk about the results before closing out this video sound good all right three two one well well well you little scamp you did it you did a good job for four hundred and seventy dollars I'm quite impressed with this little rig I mean six out of the seven games we tested mind you most of these games are triple-a titles guys were able to hit 60fps on average the only one that didn't that fell a little short was battlefield one I believe that hit 52 FPS on average but still really not too bad and beyond that all of our games saw one percent lows of at least 30 FPS and for those of you who don't know one percent lows basically indicates the slowest one percent of performance on average so that's that is to say that this guy's head was floating above that 30 FPS threshold of vast majority of the time that equates to very little to no perceived choppiness even in very stressful scenarios or scenes that I was testing so that's all really great news to top it all off there was only one game that we could not run at very high or ultra settings and that was pub key which as we all know is a very poorly optimized game and it's not even a finished game by any means so that's a really good testament for this little PC here for under $500 you're getting your foot in the door to PC gaming and in my opinion it's it's it beats out of console hands-down and there's a couple other reasons why not only are you getting a better gaming experience but you have an upgrade path so instead of having to buy the new Xbox one xxxx when that comes out because you want all the new features there you can simply just swap out the CPU as you see fit or your graphics card upgrade your memory etc and since you'll have already built your PC from the ground up you won't have any problem swapping those components out later down the line to top it all off there is simply so much more you can do with the PC than you can your average console this is not just a gaming machine and and granted consoles can do things like web browsing and streaming Netflix but I feel like even those experiences are far superior in a desktop environment when you get things like a keyboard and mouse interface and high refresh rate displays and so forth not to mention the endless list of other things you can do on a PC like installing emulators and expanding your game library even further or creating a server and looking up your photos and videos and other precious files and documents or email productivity word processing content creation Photoshop video editing and so forth there's so much out there guys that you can do with this thing that you just can't do with an Xbox and so if you have five hundred dollars in your hand and you're at a fork in the road console gaming PC you know where I stand and I know a lot of you guys who watch me regularly are already aware of all this I'm preaching to the choir here so this is really targeted to those who may be intimidated or have never built a gaming PC on their own before and might be sitting on the fence not sure which way to go so if that's you I hope that this video it has in some small way nudged you in the right direction because it really is a great experience so if you guys happen to enjoy this video I'm sure to toss me a like on it that helps me tremendously and also feel free to subscribe to the channel for more tech stuff coming at you really soon finally if you'd like to see videos like this a week early without ads you can check me out on floatplane I will leave a link in the description below have a good one guys thank you so much for watching again and I will see y'all in the next video\n"