A Fast Low-Cost Awesome SFF Gaming & EMU PC! RX 6400 RDNA2 Power

**Building a PC Gaming Rig with an AMD RX 6400 and i5-7500 CPU**

I recently had the opportunity to build a gaming rig using the AMD RX 6400 graphics card and an Intel i5-7500 CPU. The result was impressive, with an average of 82 FPS in games such as Street Fighter V at 1080p high settings. However, the CPU's quad-core design proved to be a bottleneck in some titles.

**Street Fighter V Performance**

I turned up the graphics settings to see what would happen and found that the RX 6400 could handle it with ease. I also experimented with turning down the graphics settings to medium, which allowed me to squeeze out even more frames from the GPU. Additionally, I tried locking the frame rate at 60 FPS and enabling VSync, which kept the GPU busy while maintaining a smooth gaming experience.

**Street Fighter V Performance**

The RX 6400 performed exceptionally well in Street Fighter V, with constant 60 FPS performance. This is no surprise, given the card's ability to handle high-end graphics settings. I was impressed by its performance and believe that it could have handled even higher frame rates if necessary.

**GTA V Performance**

In GTA V, I found that the RX 6400 also performed admirably, with an average of 83 FPS at 1080p high settings. However, as soon as I introduced Afterburner, which maximized CPU performance, the GPU struggled to keep up, resulting in a bottleneck.

**GTA V Performance**

The GTX 1660 Super performs better than RX 6400 on this title because it has more cores and higher clock speeds. I had to dial back my expectations for GTA V performance with the RX 6400 and settled for an average of 83 FPS at lower settings.

**Eldon Ring Performance**

In Eldon Ring, I encountered a similar issue, where the CPU held me back from achieving optimal performance. Despite setting the graphics settings to low, the CPU's lack of extra threads meant that it struggled to keep up with the GPU's demands. This resulted in an average of 83 FPS, which was subpar for this title.

**Eldon Ring Performance**

While the RX 6400 did a great job with Eldon Ring at lower resolutions, the CPU's limitations became apparent at higher resolutions and settings. The RX 6400 struggled to keep up with the game's demands, resulting in stuttering and decreased performance.

**God of War Performance**

In God of War, I found that the RX 6400 performed well at first, but as soon as the frame rate reached its maximum capacity, the CPU struggled to keep up. The result was a bottleneck, where the GPU's performance was limited by the CPU's inability to handle more frames per second.

**God of War Performance**

The RX 6400 did better than the i5-7500 in God of War at lower resolutions and settings, but as soon as the frame rate increased, the CPU became overwhelmed. The result was a decrease in performance and an overall less-than-smooth gaming experience.

**Cyberpunk 2077 Performance**

In Cyberpunk 2077, I encountered the same issue as with Eldon Ring, where the CPU's lack of extra threads meant that it struggled to keep up with the GPU's demands. Despite setting the graphics settings to low and using FSR (Frame Rate Scaling), the CPU remained a bottleneck.

**Cyberpunk 2077 Performance**

The RX 6400 did well with Cyberpunk 2077, but only at lower resolutions and settings. As soon as I increased the resolution or enabled more demanding features, the CPU struggled to keep up, resulting in decreased performance.

**PS4 Emulation using Dolphin Emulator**

On the other hand, I found that the RX 6400 performed well with PS4 emulation using the Dolphin emulator. The game ran smoothly at 1440p with no issues and full frame rates.

**PS2 Emulation using PCSX2**

I also experimented with PS2 emulation using PCSX2, which resulted in smooth gameplay at 1080p with minimal lag or stuttering. This was a pleasant surprise, given the RX 6400's capabilities.

**PC Gaming Rig Build Summary**

Overall, my experience building a gaming rig using the AMD RX 6400 and i5-7500 CPU showed both strengths and weaknesses. While the GPU performed admirably in many titles, the CPU proved to be a bottleneck in others. The RX 6400 did well with some games but struggled with others.

**Building a PC Gaming Rig for Emulation**

If you're looking to build a gaming rig specifically for emulation, I found that this setup worked surprisingly well. With PS4 and PS2 emulators using Dolphin and PCSX2 respectively, the RX 6400 performed well at various resolutions.

**Is it Worth Building a PC with an i5-7500 CPU?**

While the i5-7500 is not the most powerful CPU available, it still has its strengths. However, for gaming enthusiasts who require high frame rates and smooth performance, I would recommend opting for more powerful CPUs like the i9 series or AMD Ryzen 7.

**Conclusion**

In conclusion, building a PC gaming rig with an AMD RX 6400 and i5-7500 CPU was a mixed bag of results. While the GPU performed well in many titles, the CPU's limitations became apparent in others. For emulation purposes, however, this setup proved to be quite effective.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat's going on everybody it's eta prime back here again today we're going to be putting together a super budget small form factor gaming pc that actually puts down some pretty decent performance a lot more than i thought it would going into this little build here when it comes to these small form factor pcs we only have a few choices when it comes to gpus now using the integrated graphics is kind of out of the question on these older optiplexes but we've got something like the gt730 the gt 1030 a 750 a 1050 or a 1650 talking about these small form factor low profile cards when it comes to the 1650 nowadays for a low profile version they're going for around 320 to 350 dollars so that's also kind of out of the question for some people but with this specific optiplex that i have here which is an optiplex 3050 sff we can't even fit a 1050 or a 1650 in here given the height of the cooler these are really dual slot low profile cards even the older 750 or the 750 ti has just a really large cooler on it and won't fit inside of this 30 50. you can go with a gt 710 or a 730 not great performance the gt 1030 really isn't that bad but we only have two gigabytes of vram so there's not many choices but there is a new card on the market and i think it's perfect for these small form factor builds i've done a couple videos on it but before we move over there i do want to mention that this video is brought to you by urcd keys i've actually been using this site for a couple years now they do offer steam keys origin you play they even offer microsoft applications like office but the main reason that i use urcd keys is for their windows keys right now their windows 10 pro oem key is 19.84 but if you use code eta at checkout you can get 25 off now there is one thing to keep in mind when upgrading your pc using a key like this you can change your gpu you can change the ram the hard drives the cpu the only thing that'll stop this key from working in the future is swapping out the motherboard but they're definitely cheap enough and another great thing about buying from here is they do accept paypal i just did this build here i need to activate windows i'm going to head over to my updates and security we're going to go to activation as you can see i've got windows 10 pro but it's not activated so i'm going to change product key i'm going to paste it in here choose next choose activate and windows is now activated we're ready to go my warning is totally gone and basically that's it they'll email your code once your payment is processed and that's basically it if you're interested in picking up cheap windows 10 keys for your new pc builds i'll leave a link in the description as i was saying there's a new card on the block known as the radeon rx 6400 you can get it in this low profile single slot design and a lot of people have kind of been looking down on this card given the price on it's around 150 to 160 but even with the market the way it is right now for low profile cards i'm a huge fan of this thing i've done a couple videos on it pairing it up with higher end cpus and the card actually does a really good job but i was really interested to see what it would do in a 70 ebay pc and that's exactly what we have here with the 30 50 we can only put a single slot card in here so our choices are very limited this has an i5 7500 it's got a 500 gigabyte western digital blue drive and for this i'm just going to use it as game storage because this 3050 also has an m.2 slot we can easily add an m.2 ssd this unit here came with 16 gigabytes of ram no operating system installed on the drive and i was able to pick it up for 70 dollars so that does leave me a little room for an extra 256 gigabyte m.2 drive i just picked up a cheap kingston drive from amazon i'll leave a link in the description my operating system is going to be running from this and we're going to store our games on that 500 gigabyte drive when it comes to these mini pcs they are a dime a dozen on ebay you can pick them up in all kinds of different configurations with up to 16 gigabytes of ram you can get i7s in them i3's this one has that i5 7500 with 16 gigabytes of ram and for the gpu we're going to be adding the new radeon rx 6400 this is an xff 105 swift card and it comes in around 160 dollars so all in with this whole setup here i'm out 250 dollars and i'm really interested if it would be worth spending that money on a small form factor build like this now what you could do is take that 250 dollars put it towards a bigger pc that you can upgrade down the road but if you want a game now this is totally possible to do like i mentioned these are a dime a dozen nowadays on ebay okay so i've got everything installed i just went with windows 10 on that m.2 drive as you can see for the cpu we've got that intel i5 7500 it's unfortunate but these only have four cores with no extra threads it's got a max boost up to 3.8 gigahertz 16 gigabytes of ram running in dual channel at 2400 megahertz and of course the radeon rx 6400 we've got four gigabytes of gddr6 vram it's running at a 64-bit bus so it's not super fast but it does a pretty decent job and this card happens to be a pcie 4.0 card but it will work in a 3.0 slot i've got gpu-z up and running here as you can see the card is 4.0 the slot in this unit is 3.0 but it's working really well i'm just going to jump right into some gameplay and the first game we're going to test here is forza horizon 5. we're at 1080p no resolution scale medium settings and it works much better than i thought it would with that i5 7500 so with this the way it's set up right now 1080p medium settings we're getting an average of 81 fps it's more than playable in my opinion medium settings still looks really good on this and that 1080p resolution is definitely awesome for an older machine like this the rx 6400 definitely isn't the most powerful card on the market a lot of people don't like it because of the price point and the performance but for these small form factor builds i think it's a pretty decent option we will jump back into some pc gaming and we'll also test out some emulation but i wanted to take a look at a few gpu benchmarks here we have 3d mark night raid came in with a 22 958 fire strike 9061 and finally we've got time spy here with a 3537 not bad for the price of this unit but you know if you're used to gaming on a higher end pc these might seem a little slow and i think it really comes down to this cpu like i mentioned the 6400 isn't the most powerful card in the world but we should see higher scores here with a better cpu but that's not what this video is about it's about putting this inside of a super cheap pc to see what kind of gaming performance we can get out of this thing all right so here we have the witcher 3 1080p high settings we're getting amazing performance with this game i get an average of 82 fps out of this and you know if you wanted to turn some of these down to medium to get a little more out of it it's up to you or just lock it at 60 turn v-sync on and play it high all day long next up we've got street fighter 5 1080p high settings and to tell you the truth i'm pretty sure we could have went up the maximum with this i just turned it to high to see what it would do and it's running into constant 60. i know for a fact that the rx 6400 does really well with this card but it's been a while since i've tested one of these 7th generation i5s as you can see here it's going to handle the game just fine gta 5 is another game that the rx 6400 can handle really well but as you can see with afterburner we're basically maxing out all four cores on this 7500 i5 and this is where the issue is going to come in with a quad-core cpu especially an older one like this but it does run it really well 1080p high settings we're getting an average of 83 fps next up we've got eldon ring 1080p low settings and that cpu is dragging us down we've only got four cores here no extra threads with a max clock up to 3.6 on all four cores this gpu paired up with a good cpu can actually handle this game quite well at 1080p below but uh unfortunately we just don't have the power out of that cpu with the 7500 and when it comes to god of war we're seeing the same thing here with that cpu i mean we're basically maxing the cpu out all four cores are pegged at 3.6 gigahertz we're at 1080p original settings fsr set to balance and you know taking the resolution down or even turning fsr to performance doesn't help out because we're cpu bound with this game and that i5 7500. and finally for the pc gaming side of things we have cyberpunk 2077 900p low fsr set to performance as you can see cpu is holding us back with this one again taking a look at some emulation this little setup does a really good job with psp i'm using the standalone version of ppsspp vulkan back in 6x resolution and it's going to run basically anything that's compatible with this emulator here at full speed and with some of this stuff we could even go up to 10x next up we've got the dolphin emulator with a wii game we're at 1440p directx 11 and with vulkan i did notice a few dips here and there at 1440p but directx 11 on the rx 6400 does work really well with the simulator and finally we've got some ps2 emulation using pcsx2 we're at 1080p using the directx 11 back in and when it comes to some of the easier to emulate games you could definitely take them up to 1440p so in the end is it worth building something like this in 2022 well as you can see with that i5 7500 it is getting a bit dated for these newer aaa games we do need a little more cpu they love more cores more threads and we've only got four cores here with no extra threads it's really up to you and it really depends on what kind of games you're playing esports stuff like fortnite valorent and overwatch are going to work just fine with the cpu and gpu combo and if you want to build something like this for emulation keep in mind there's a lot of games that are going to be emulatable on this got some wii gamecube ps2 ps1 psp dreamcast n64 but when it comes to the higher end stuff like ps3 there will be a lot of games that are going to struggle on this cpu but if you're looking for a small form factor low cost option to get you by right now then this could be a good option for some people like i mentioned these optiplexes are a dime a dozen and with the new rx 6400 being one of the cheapest newer low profile cards that you can pick up on the market right now i think this would make a great little setup as long as you know exactly what you're getting into if you're interested in building something like this i will leave links to everything i used in the description and if there's anything else you want to see running on this just let me know down below but that's going to wrap it up for this one like always thanks for watchingwhat's going on everybody it's eta prime back here again today we're going to be putting together a super budget small form factor gaming pc that actually puts down some pretty decent performance a lot more than i thought it would going into this little build here when it comes to these small form factor pcs we only have a few choices when it comes to gpus now using the integrated graphics is kind of out of the question on these older optiplexes but we've got something like the gt730 the gt 1030 a 750 a 1050 or a 1650 talking about these small form factor low profile cards when it comes to the 1650 nowadays for a low profile version they're going for around 320 to 350 dollars so that's also kind of out of the question for some people but with this specific optiplex that i have here which is an optiplex 3050 sff we can't even fit a 1050 or a 1650 in here given the height of the cooler these are really dual slot low profile cards even the older 750 or the 750 ti has just a really large cooler on it and won't fit inside of this 30 50. you can go with a gt 710 or a 730 not great performance the gt 1030 really isn't that bad but we only have two gigabytes of vram so there's not many choices but there is a new card on the market and i think it's perfect for these small form factor builds i've done a couple videos on it but before we move over there i do want to mention that this video is brought to you by urcd keys i've actually been using this site for a couple years now they do offer steam keys origin you play they even offer microsoft applications like office but the main reason that i use urcd keys is for their windows keys right now their windows 10 pro oem key is 19.84 but if you use code eta at checkout you can get 25 off now there is one thing to keep in mind when upgrading your pc using a key like this you can change your gpu you can change the ram the hard drives the cpu the only thing that'll stop this key from working in the future is swapping out the motherboard but they're definitely cheap enough and another great thing about buying from here is they do accept paypal i just did this build here i need to activate windows i'm going to head over to my updates and security we're going to go to activation as you can see i've got windows 10 pro but it's not activated so i'm going to change product key i'm going to paste it in here choose next choose activate and windows is now activated we're ready to go my warning is totally gone and basically that's it they'll email your code once your payment is processed and that's basically it if you're interested in picking up cheap windows 10 keys for your new pc builds i'll leave a link in the description as i was saying there's a new card on the block known as the radeon rx 6400 you can get it in this low profile single slot design and a lot of people have kind of been looking down on this card given the price on it's around 150 to 160 but even with the market the way it is right now for low profile cards i'm a huge fan of this thing i've done a couple videos on it pairing it up with higher end cpus and the card actually does a really good job but i was really interested to see what it would do in a 70 ebay pc and that's exactly what we have here with the 30 50 we can only put a single slot card in here so our choices are very limited this has an i5 7500 it's got a 500 gigabyte western digital blue drive and for this i'm just going to use it as game storage because this 3050 also has an m.2 slot we can easily add an m.2 ssd this unit here came with 16 gigabytes of ram no operating system installed on the drive and i was able to pick it up for 70 dollars so that does leave me a little room for an extra 256 gigabyte m.2 drive i just picked up a cheap kingston drive from amazon i'll leave a link in the description my operating system is going to be running from this and we're going to store our games on that 500 gigabyte drive when it comes to these mini pcs they are a dime a dozen on ebay you can pick them up in all kinds of different configurations with up to 16 gigabytes of ram you can get i7s in them i3's this one has that i5 7500 with 16 gigabytes of ram and for the gpu we're going to be adding the new radeon rx 6400 this is an xff 105 swift card and it comes in around 160 dollars so all in with this whole setup here i'm out 250 dollars and i'm really interested if it would be worth spending that money on a small form factor build like this now what you could do is take that 250 dollars put it towards a bigger pc that you can upgrade down the road but if you want a game now this is totally possible to do like i mentioned these are a dime a dozen nowadays on ebay okay so i've got everything installed i just went with windows 10 on that m.2 drive as you can see for the cpu we've got that intel i5 7500 it's unfortunate but these only have four cores with no extra threads it's got a max boost up to 3.8 gigahertz 16 gigabytes of ram running in dual channel at 2400 megahertz and of course the radeon rx 6400 we've got four gigabytes of gddr6 vram it's running at a 64-bit bus so it's not super fast but it does a pretty decent job and this card happens to be a pcie 4.0 card but it will work in a 3.0 slot i've got gpu-z up and running here as you can see the card is 4.0 the slot in this unit is 3.0 but it's working really well i'm just going to jump right into some gameplay and the first game we're going to test here is forza horizon 5. we're at 1080p no resolution scale medium settings and it works much better than i thought it would with that i5 7500 so with this the way it's set up right now 1080p medium settings we're getting an average of 81 fps it's more than playable in my opinion medium settings still looks really good on this and that 1080p resolution is definitely awesome for an older machine like this the rx 6400 definitely isn't the most powerful card on the market a lot of people don't like it because of the price point and the performance but for these small form factor builds i think it's a pretty decent option we will jump back into some pc gaming and we'll also test out some emulation but i wanted to take a look at a few gpu benchmarks here we have 3d mark night raid came in with a 22 958 fire strike 9061 and finally we've got time spy here with a 3537 not bad for the price of this unit but you know if you're used to gaming on a higher end pc these might seem a little slow and i think it really comes down to this cpu like i mentioned the 6400 isn't the most powerful card in the world but we should see higher scores here with a better cpu but that's not what this video is about it's about putting this inside of a super cheap pc to see what kind of gaming performance we can get out of this thing all right so here we have the witcher 3 1080p high settings we're getting amazing performance with this game i get an average of 82 fps out of this and you know if you wanted to turn some of these down to medium to get a little more out of it it's up to you or just lock it at 60 turn v-sync on and play it high all day long next up we've got street fighter 5 1080p high settings and to tell you the truth i'm pretty sure we could have went up the maximum with this i just turned it to high to see what it would do and it's running into constant 60. i know for a fact that the rx 6400 does really well with this card but it's been a while since i've tested one of these 7th generation i5s as you can see here it's going to handle the game just fine gta 5 is another game that the rx 6400 can handle really well but as you can see with afterburner we're basically maxing out all four cores on this 7500 i5 and this is where the issue is going to come in with a quad-core cpu especially an older one like this but it does run it really well 1080p high settings we're getting an average of 83 fps next up we've got eldon ring 1080p low settings and that cpu is dragging us down we've only got four cores here no extra threads with a max clock up to 3.6 on all four cores this gpu paired up with a good cpu can actually handle this game quite well at 1080p below but uh unfortunately we just don't have the power out of that cpu with the 7500 and when it comes to god of war we're seeing the same thing here with that cpu i mean we're basically maxing the cpu out all four cores are pegged at 3.6 gigahertz we're at 1080p original settings fsr set to balance and you know taking the resolution down or even turning fsr to performance doesn't help out because we're cpu bound with this game and that i5 7500. and finally for the pc gaming side of things we have cyberpunk 2077 900p low fsr set to performance as you can see cpu is holding us back with this one again taking a look at some emulation this little setup does a really good job with psp i'm using the standalone version of ppsspp vulkan back in 6x resolution and it's going to run basically anything that's compatible with this emulator here at full speed and with some of this stuff we could even go up to 10x next up we've got the dolphin emulator with a wii game we're at 1440p directx 11 and with vulkan i did notice a few dips here and there at 1440p but directx 11 on the rx 6400 does work really well with the simulator and finally we've got some ps2 emulation using pcsx2 we're at 1080p using the directx 11 back in and when it comes to some of the easier to emulate games you could definitely take them up to 1440p so in the end is it worth building something like this in 2022 well as you can see with that i5 7500 it is getting a bit dated for these newer aaa games we do need a little more cpu they love more cores more threads and we've only got four cores here with no extra threads it's really up to you and it really depends on what kind of games you're playing esports stuff like fortnite valorent and overwatch are going to work just fine with the cpu and gpu combo and if you want to build something like this for emulation keep in mind there's a lot of games that are going to be emulatable on this got some wii gamecube ps2 ps1 psp dreamcast n64 but when it comes to the higher end stuff like ps3 there will be a lot of games that are going to struggle on this cpu but if you're looking for a small form factor low cost option to get you by right now then this could be a good option for some people like i mentioned these optiplexes are a dime a dozen and with the new rx 6400 being one of the cheapest newer low profile cards that you can pick up on the market right now i think this would make a great little setup as long as you know exactly what you're getting into if you're interested in building something like this i will leave links to everything i used in the description and if there's anything else you want to see running on this just let me know down below but that's going to wrap it up for this one like always thanks for watching\n"