Building a $100 Gaming PC Was a Mistake

I always doubted you could actually build a gaming PC for $100... so today I put my money where my mouth is to find out...
Some of the following product links are affiliate links for which I may be compensated.
Get your own $100 Gaming PC (Affiliate)
Dell Optiplex - ebay.us/X3CoVJ
Xeon E3-1226 V3 - ebay.us/d7cNcy
8GB DDR3 Ram - ebay.us/EQAJGy
GTX 650 - ebay.us/LOrFm0
GTX 1050 - ebay.us/QxsaPZ
120GB SSD (Possible subpar brand) - ebay.us/6O3iHq
240GB SSD (Better Brand) - ebay.us/7nSYh0
My Gear (Affiliate)
Sony A7s ii - ebay.us/SEfvwa
Godox SL-60w - ebay.us/pmmjRM
Canon 50mm F2.5 Macro - ebay.us/G8ouDi
Canon EF 28-70mm F2.8 - ebay.us/7UDmqQ

[@MrGalax00]

A gaming PC for $100 is too good to be true, this is a good alternative for a teenager with limited funds, and lots of free time to look for the really good deals.

[@shorty808100]

as a teen i was building minimum spec gaming PC's for around $450 back in the 90's 200mhz amd K-6 was my first build

[@MrGalax00]

@@shorty808100 Yeah for me it was a lot more fun playing on a budget PC growing up, than now on my current setup. Mostly cause I had more free time.

[@josephdias5859]

im running a 100$ gaming pc right now it it has a xeon 1650 basically an 3930k oced 4.4ghz on an alienware aurora r4 board 16gbs of ddr3 2400mhz and a gtx 1060 6gb and 875 watt psu its possible but you need to take risks

[@O2chevsky]

ez xeon e3-1230v2 any cpu cooler(may got for free - any tossed out stock cooler out of any computer shop) any case(for free same as previous) any h61 motherboard any 2*4 ddr3 ram rx 470/570 4gb fsp pnr 450w/550w any cheap 128/256gb ssd + cheap 500+gb hdd all of this should fit in $100 and play most of the games at mid-high settings

[@krisivanov7634]

My pc is for 100$ At least i can game on it Intel Core i3-6100 8gb ddr3 GTX 750 3TB HDD (1-1TB 1-2TB)(from friend for free) 240GB SSD

[@JDStickland]

For anyone actually wanting to attempt this, there are some workarounds to make this a lot better of an experience. Acer and Asus both make prebuilts similar to the Dell featured here that USUALLY come with standard power supplies and motherboards. They can also be found as Mid Towers with CPUs and RAM for $50-$70. From there, I would add a 240GB (~$15) or 512GB SSD (~$25), that leaves $35 or less for the GPU. A GTX 650 is pretty decent for the money, but it is also worth considering a Quadro K620, K2000, K2200, GTX 745, or FirePro W5000.

[@lyraemon_]

Wow thanks !!

[@Prime_Zao8]

👍✅

[@hovanthecool1995]

This is like my current PC! I got an Optiplex 990 DT with an i7-2600, 16 gigs of Dual Channel ram (4x4 mismatched sticks), and a Gigabyte Windforce GTX 960 (2 gig). The only thing I had to pay for was the graphics card and it was like 90-ish dollars back in 2019. The Dell I got free, along with the memory. The pc serves me well, though I would like a GTX 1650 4 gig now. But I will wait for the opportune moment.

[@aChairLeg]

Haha I love to hear it! That's such a practical and cheap setup. That 1650 is going to be a nice addition as well.

[@juanmassiosare9850]

At the beginning of 2021 I was able to get a Dell-socket 1155 motherboard with Q65 chipset, 4GB DDR4 and a Pentium G640 processor, all of that cost me about 25 USD, time later I got 5 DDR3-1600Mhz Sticks plus a 1TB HDD for only 25 USD; In early 2022 I bought another Dell-1155 motherboard with H61 chipset including an Intel i7 2600+Cooler, for only 25 USD and also bought a Dell-AMD HD 8570 1GB GDDR3 for 10 USD. So in all this invest about 85 USD, obviously at home I already had a Case, PSU, other HDDs/SSDs, etc. A couple of months ago I bought a GTX 1050ti 4GB GDDR5 for only 50 USD (a fan and without PCIe 6 pin), so the investment went up to 135 USD, but now I have 2 functional PCs for everything, including Gaming. * If your PC-Dell has a generic source (even if it bears the Dell seal) and you consider that it is not possible to change it for a better one or there is no way to adapt it or you are not interested at all, then there is every reason in the world to be interested in a GTX 1650 4GB (especially the one with GDDR6). The point is that the Gamer does not live only on CPU-Demanding games, there are also GPU-Demanding games and there obviously it is interesting to put a more powerful GPU and with more Vram, we take for granted that the i7 2600 will limit the fps in highly CPU games -Complaints, but that doesn't mean you or I would have to limit yourself to a GTX 1650, in my humble opinion. That is, if you could put a higher quality PSU, more GPUs like the RX 570 8GB, RX 480 8GB, RX 580 8GB, GTX 1060 6GB, GTX 1660 6GB, even GTX 1660Ti/GTX 1660 Super/ GTX 1070 would be of interest; They are more powerful graphics and with more Vram, which is good if you play at 1080p and if you are very interested in GPU-demanding games.

[@jimcachero]

I mean ….. a 100 dollars…I picked up a twin frozr msi 1650 for $50, a 1230v3 and 16 gb ram for $45 .. so happy the market is normalizing.

[@EmergencyChannel]

I had a Atom powered netbook that I used to game on, mostly dwarf fortress and rim world. I had to point a fan at it to keep it cooled and played at 15 fps. You will be surprised what you will put up with, if you have no choice.

[@aChairLeg]

Haha yep! I used to have a horrible laptop a a decade or so ago that I played minecraft on. Would do minimum settings 15-20 fps and I loved it!. I believe it ran the Rimworld Alpha just as poorly

[@MasterOfTheUniverse2]

@Lurch i dont think they are bragging about playing at 15 fps

[@floydlooney6837]

I had a Core Duo where the HDD died and I had to use Linux for years, the only real game I played was Warzone 2100 - which was kinda cool.

[@psykobowler]

I have been building Dell gaming pc's for kids for sometime now and the sweet spot is really around $250 not $100 for 1080p gaming. Of the $250 budget, $100 should be allocated to the graphics card. As of 2023, an rx 580 8gb can be found in eBay for around +/-$100. The remaining $150 can be used to purchase the motherboard, cpu, cpu cooler, ram, psu, ssd and case. It is better to buy individual components than get the one with the optiplex case because there are still parts you won't need from it. My go to motherboard is not an optiplex but rather an inspiron 660 because the motherboard takes xeon server cpu without a problem and do not need specialty adaptor for the psu, I/O front and no error code on the pc startup as long as you use the 4pin fan connector with a 4pin fan. It comes with an IO shield too for around $25 in ebay. I built one system a few weeks back and I got the motherboard for $25, a xeon e3-1270 for $30, 16gb ddr3 for $35, ssd for around $20, psu for around $20, cpu cooler for $15. The case is whatever I can find free around my area. I am sure you can get a rosewill or some cheap case for not that much money. This system can easily play in 1080p in current games since you do have 4 cores and 8 threads. I think the motherboard bios show it can hyperthread. The rx 580 with 8gb of vram helps with the video quality and plays most current popular games. Just throwing this out there. The system can easily be put in a nicer case in the future.

[@kurt3664]

Underrated, I hope this video blows up so many people can get interested on budget builds because it's pretty OP when you are only a student.

[@rehull1973]

You don't look for upgrade path at this price point. You get best old school and push it as hard it will go. Also, single stick of memory? Dual Channel will give good improvement and memory is cheap.

[@aChairLeg]

I already have various sticks of ddr3 lying around, some dead some not, so I just put in what I knew (mostly) worked since I rarely use ddr3 anymore. In the future, I'm planning on sticking to the parts list closer for accuracy

[@b0ne91]

An E3 1240 v3 will outperform an i5 6500 99% of the time. Staying on Haswell, since neither have an upgrade path anyway, enables you to upgrade the PSU (with a $5 24 pin adapter - they are safe) and save the money to put towards a better GPU. $200 will get you a base system, the aforementioned Xeon, 16GB DDR3, an RX 570 and a refurbished/b-stock 500W PSU as well as a 240GB SSD. Having a 4C/8T CPU also means you can use Discord or watch a video on another monitor while gaming without making your CPU bottleneck even worse. Skylake is still too expensive. If you could modify the BIOS for those OEM boards and run a QTJ2 in it, they'd be amazing value. But the DDR4 they work with is slow and having an NVMe SSD doesn't give you a real advantage over SATA for gaming as of now. 2 systems with no upgrade path that require a PSU upgrade to run a real GPU - but one is better price/performance. Until we can BIOS mod Skylake OEM boards (either to add the Xeon microcodes, or make LGA 1151 mutants work), they're not a great choice.

[@trolco]

Wow, i had same thoughts as i was seeing this video. It draws only up to 80 watt, the rest of this setup should use another 30w with all fans and bells in work...maybe a sata to 6-8 pin adapter for extra

[@femboyaliens789]

This was an awesome video! I've always wondered how practical those "$100 pc" builds were

[@aChairLeg]

Thank you! I was wondering the same thing because they seemed a little optimistic. I don't know how this build will hold up long term, but I've had a lot of old ram sticks die on me in the past, so that would be my main worry.

[@randomgamingin144p]

@@aChairLeg you should get one that includes a hard drive, that way you can keep the hard drive as extra storage

[@Kinder112]

That's a fair point, PC for $100 but you spend 20h looking for deal, traveling then troubleshooting old stuff, and for 20h of some extra work you could get $500 and just buy something new

[@aChairLeg]

Yeah it all depends on your situation. If you can find the exact right one, it could be as simple as throwing a cheap gpu in, but I couldn't find the right one for me without going barebones

[@Kinder112]

@@aChairLeg usually the answer is some optiplex and best gpu you can get, but only in developed countries. Other markets are quite more challenging

[@CuttinInIdaho]

I dont have to interact with other human beings lol. I feel the same way I found your videos with the 470 lenovo video. I hovered over it, and instead of playing the first 10 seconds as usual, the video jumped straight to the shot of your dog sniffing it. I had to put my dogs down due to age about 6 months ago, and your dog looks almost exactly like my dog, and I miss her so much. Life is weird sometimes.

[@ampm8210]

$100 crazy good price for a budget and someone wanting to try the pc scene for the first time.

[@Andrew-th8jk]

If they could bump it up to like 200 it would definitely improve their experience and first impressions of the scene though.

[@pyre78]

This reminds me a lot of my childhood growing up, and getting a bunch of passed down computer components and trying to squeeze as much FPS out of games that I could. My first computer was something like an old Dell Inspiron 530s with a Core 2 Duo and 3 gigs of RAM. After complaining enough my dad put some sort of ATI Radeon card he had lying around and I played as many games on the absolute lowest settings I could for years until I was able to eventually save up enough Christmas money to build my own PC. Getting more than 10 FPS on GTA 4 was a mind-blowing experience to me.

[@Huskmini]

great video, i would recommend just showing somewhere on the screen when you introduce a component its actual specs. always nice to have visuals. amazing video and new sub

[@aChairLeg]

Thank you! I'm actually starting to implement the text in the next video

[@pprofitt]

Finally! A video that is straight to the point. All of the other budget videos have somewhat better components but who actually wants to spend hours upon hours searching for those deals? Great video, and surprisingly not a terrible PC considering the price, great job!

[@aChairLeg]

Haha, thank you! That would always bother me too, I've never had the time to really search though multiple sites daily to find incredible deals. I did it one time for my Fury X back in 2017, and while I got a great deal, I decided I wasn't going to do it again because it was such a time sink.

[@pprofitt]

@@aChairLeg I'm glad we can relate in that sense haha

[@absurdgaming00]

You should slot in 1 & 2 *White to White* for proper DUAL channel RAM installation in the future or depending on the MOBO, it can be different colors but always first slot in first channel & second slot in second channel as labeled... 🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻 Happy New Year!

[@jasonwoodhead9187]

I managed to pick up an Optiplex 3020 sff for £45. Upgraded to 16gb ram for £14, and added a GTX 1050ti for £50. Yeah, it's only a 4th gen i5, but it plays what I want it to. Next upgrades will be an SSD and possibly an i7 4790.

[@Unmeito1776]

You could try looking for a Xeon since those preform well and are half the cost of an i7

[@jasonwoodhead9187]

@@Unmeito1776 I did consider a Xeon, especially as I am using a dedicated GPU anyway, but 4th gen i7's are cheap enough as it is these days.

[@xicyyzFN]

what games do you play and what is the avg fps I'm going to make a similar build but might use a 1650 super but i dont know yet please respond

[@jasonwoodhead9187]

@@xicyyzFN stuff like Forza Horizon 4 (medium) and 5 (low), The Master Chief Collection (medium), Halo Infinite (low), GTA V (medium\high), Fall Guys (high), but it's mainly used for emulation. The PC is connected to a 60hz screen, so I cap out at 60fps. The games stick to 60 pretty solidly though.

[@xicyyzFN]

@@jasonwoodhead9187 thank you for the reply im hoping to upgrade an optiplex 7020 mt using a gtx 1650 super and 8 extra gb of ram hopefully I'll be able to do it either the next month or in july

[@Chalisque]

The _only_ thing I use those cheapo SSDs for is as a fast USB stick for installing OSs off (mainly Ubuntu of some sort -- it's way quicker to write an ISO image to a small cheap SSD than a USB stick -- and I have some 32GB SSDs from when I bought them out of curiosity).

[@psycho_chicken_9589]

i don't really care about the ssd (regarding price), i'm using a 256gb ssd that was 22 euros, installed Mint in it and \Home in the hard drive, if the ssd fails, i'll just replace it and install the o.s., all my files will be safe in the hdd.

[@bryans8656]

This is the first of your videos that I've seen, and I enjoyed it so I subscribed. I recently built a similar system but it cost twice as much. I picked up a Dell OptiPlex 7010 SFF off eBay that came with Windows 10 Pro, a new 128GB SSD and 16GB RAM, and a stock 4th gen i5 CPU. I also purchased a low profile GT 1030 (eBay again). The system is very stable and, coincidentally, it too runs Bioshock Infinite just fine, along with many of my other older Steam games, so I'm happy with it. This machine isn't my primary computer, I pretty much live in Apple land these days (made the switch a couple of years ago), but I needed a Windows PC to run some of my old but necessary 32-bit .exe applications that I can't find adequate substitutes for.

[@aChairLeg]

Thank you! That's also an awesome use case for one of these, love to hear it

[@victorlima1503]

For 20$ more you can buy a RX 460 2GB GDDR5 OEM (a weird looking GPU with a red PCB), which is even better than a GT 1030 It's my personal recommendation for those interested in building something similar, or at least for those who are looking for a good but cheap GPU :3

[@aChairLeg]

Interesting, I completely forgot the RX series existed if I'm being honest haha. Appreciate the tip!

[@josephdias5859]

@@aChairLeg you can even get rx 460s in 4gb pretty cheap but rx470s and 570s only like 50-60 bucks used nowadays or rx 590s can be had for 70usd brand new on ali express tech yes city did a video on them honestly if someone shot for 150-200 build they could get something really decent for that price 100 is in the point were price to performance is really hard campared to like 50$ more

[@maanavtriestuff]

amazing video as always! This is weirdly a bit expensive as I made an under $150 Pc during the great graphics card depression I got an i7-2600 prebuilt with 8 GB ddr3 for around 75$ then sold the hard drive locally for 20$, brought an gtx 750Ti for $75 , and an SSD for $20 Still a budget beast even after considering this graphics card is outdated now.

[@hman6159]

Wow

[@HellFire107]

If you know what to look for, you can purchase untested or for parts only products on eBay. Less tech savvy users who don’t know what they’re selling or how to troubleshoot their own components sell things for insane prices. Purchased an MSI x370 Gaming Pro Carbon motherboard with USB overcurrent issues for $30 shipped which gave me no trouble at all. I just purchased an RX 5700XT with freezing issues for $75 which should be an easy software or power related fix

[@Webbie652]

I am watching this on the upgraded z400 server that I have been upgrading over time. Luckily it hasn't broken yet and performs really well for costing like 200 bucks even with the upgrades,keep in mind I am from Australia so this thing was cheap as chips once you factor in the currency difference. 22gb of ddr3, some old Radeon card, and a x5675 xeon cpu with 6 cores!

[@zeroturn7091]

Wish that I could’ve purchased a stripped Optiplex last year. That price is too good to pass up.

[@IHatePeeps1111]

I got a pc for 100 it has an i3 4130 and an amd firepro v3900 8gb ram came with an hdd and ssd If you don't care about modern gaming like 2013 and up it's perfectly fine I can run bo2 at 1080p and still get 70 to 80 fps on high textures and high texture filtering it may dip below 60 if there is a ton of things going on at once but you can lower the settings more to low textures and low texture filtering and maintain a high fps for a professional gpu it actually does alright The guy I got it from had batocera installed with over 9000 games and can run all things but the ps2 it does pretty good even at 1080p on the gamecube Now you can run newish games too but performance is kind of bad Like on metro last light redux which is playable fps at 1366x768 with mostly 30 to 40 fps if you don't mind using a controller lowering the textures to low doesn't really help performance in the benchmark and the benchmark actually performs worse than the game does by itself, the only time it may get a little low is when you are outside but it's not unplayable. I've not tested any other games yet but i'd assume all valve games except the newest will run just fine same with tes and the fallout series up to new vegas

[@drios007]

I had fun rebuilding my Lenovo K330. The original rebuild, i spent like $250, i spent $120 on an 2.5 SSD. I don't like cheap out too much. A 550w PSU i had laying around prompted the project, since the Mobo in the desktop was before Lenovo began using proprietary connections. I wouldn't have sunk $250 if it had not been for that. Nice gaming rig for my niece who plays Roblox only for now.

[@babylion1225]

I’ve attempted this myself and got amazing results, and I believe you can still do this now at current prices. Buy a Dell Inspiron 3847, they usually don’t show up in eBay searches because they’re actually home PCs instead of Office PCs. I found mine for $40~ but you can easily find them for 35-50. Then get a Used GTX 1060 3GB with a Sata to 6 pin adapter and there you go! Specs are supposed to be: i5 4660 8GB DDR3 @1600MHZ 300W PSU mine came with a terabyte of HDD but dells spec sheet says it can vary from 250-1tb depending on the amount chosen at original purchase And just slot in the 1060 and it plays most games fine and AAA’s played amazing with FSR!

[@Skyfight]

I did build my Girlfriend a 170€ (~180$) Gaming Pc with an i5 4570 , 12gb Ram , 120gb ssd , 500gb hdd, and an Gtx 960 4gb.

[@laur6405]

People really exagerrate when they call these PCs as cheap gaming console killer PCs. These PCs are still ok for regular use or to play older games from their generation. I actually use the SFF version of this PC (i7 4790,16GB,480GB SSD) as a home PC when i don't play games on my custom built gaming rig and it's absolutely fine,just not for gaming

[@andrewmcewan9145]

Haswell is still great. There are alot of consessions to pick when choosing a oem pc as a base. Most sandy/ivy systems do support regular power supplys and standard case mounting. They are about the easiest to case swap and upgrade. Haswell systems tend to keep standard motherboard mounting but have switched to 12vo somewhat more difficult to case swap. However adptors are plentiful and cheep and with a 4c8t xeon do very well in modern games. This is my pick for doing a oem build these days. Skylake + motherboards are weird shapes with non standard mounting, xeons no longer work in consumer boards so you have to pay the insane peices for the i7's. (If it was a non oem board you can bios mod everything but x390 serries [x as in any letter] to take any cpu from Skylake to coffie refresh including the 8c16t qs unlocked laptop chips from ali express. And these imho sre the best deals peroid right now. As well as mod in rebar support) So my recommendation Skylake + is frogot about the oem stuff it leaves too much performance on the table (locked ram speeds, usally comes wirh awful x16 dims and everything is priporory heavily limiting your upgrade options anyway)

[@HQdefault64]

I tried this same thing out to see what I could get, and i managed a hp elite 8200 with a i7 2600s, 16gb ram, 256gb ssd and a 1.5tb hdd, with a radeon pro wx 2100, all for $99.87 including shipping

[@GLDragon93]

I lucked out and got an i5 3330 8gb ram 1tb hdd and a gtx 750ti for 90€ on an asus P8H77-M LE mobo. I've spent about 50€ more for a 120gb ssd and a xeon e3 1240v2 (i7 3770). This was also a few weeks before pandemic and especially for my country (the 750ti alone goes for 80€, it still goes for about that much). It was an ebay listing from an occasional seller, the seller didn't post much and mentioned a gtx 750ti but had 4-5 somewhat blurry photos. I decide to take a gamble, and it paid.

[@22minecraftguy]

i got a dell optiplex 7010 for $40 (60 after ebay fees and such) i5-3470, 8gb ram, 500gb hdd. Got it threw and threw an rx 460 in it and put 20gbs of ram plus installed pop_os! I just use it for minecraft and osrs. I use it as a lower power pc than my main gaming pc so my room doesn't get heated up too much

[@jordanhaglin]

I have an Optiplex MT 9020, but mine has an i7-4770 at 4 cores/8 threads, paired with 24GB RAM and a SanDisk SSD. I pretty much just use it with Remote Desktop from my Mac if I need to quickly run a .exe program that isn’t supported on Mac without having to reboot my Mac in bootcamp. It’s actually a good build, and it might eventually get a GPU and NVMe riser.

[@GodIsGoodGoodIsGod]

Why is it that every time I watch one of your videos I get the itch to do it myself? I've already bought a t470s because of you! So, so looking forward to that $500 14 core video!

[@aChairLeg]

I just do whatever seems fun to do and justify the expense with videos haha. The $500 workstation pc is awesome, absolutely love it, hopefully video will be done next week!

[@GodIsGoodGoodIsGod]

@@aChairLeg You keep it up. I've honestly rewatched some of your videos 3-4 times just because of how well you explain stuff and to see if I can learn more from them! Really looking forward to the video. Have a great day!

[@iPeanutJelly]

Probably not $100. But you definitely can get a competitive enough pc at around the $300 area again with prices dropping back down

[@edbeagle7929]

My go to for a cheap gaming PC is a Dell 3050 it has an nvme slot and on ddr4 then toss storage of your choice add a 1650 great 1080 machine for 300 to 400 also I have found it's easy to mod the case for airflow

[@benbridges9585]

I just built a setup for my friend in a spare optiplex like that. You can actually fit a triple fan card in it if you cut out the 3.5 inch bays. Get a cheap cable adapter to use a standard ATX power supply and you're set. We will see how much a haswell i5 can bottleneck an RX 6700xt haha. So far its pretty fast. He wants a full custom setup later but for now this gets him started.

[@aChairLeg]

Haha that's awesome! Sounds like my first PC build, where I had to cut the PCIE brackets on my case to fit my gpu since the case was SFF

[@bumbaclot813]

If you want to spend money and learn a few lessons. Yes, very good idea. Nothing wrong with failing. Nothing wrong with learning from mistakes if the cost of those mistakes are low. And even if the cost of your mistakes are high, you learn from them, so good for you. I say go for it, 100$ pc? Try a 1$ pc and see how it goes! What's the worst that can happen? Make some mistakes and get messy!

[@Chalisque]

I didn't use it for gaming, but I got a 9010 off eBay for £100. Added a spare GPU, 16GB extra Ram, a few SSDs and HDDs I had and it worked great for a while. It couldn't run VMs (virtualisation enabled in BIOS, but VMs just crashed when booting). So my final BOM was around £300. But they're great value (though I prefer to buy something that works out of the box for £100 rather than buy bits for a similar price and faff around with hardware).

[@Vyraxis]

its easy to build cheap gaming pc's. so recently i found a dell optiplex 9020 at goodwill for 20 bucks. i was like no way this will work. guess what 1tb hdd i7 4770 and 8gb ram all working perfect for 20 bucks. i then hopped on ebay found a 650w powerspec power supply for 22 bucks + 14 for the atx psu adapter plus 45 bucks for a used mining rx 470 that i had to flash a normal bios onto. all said and done $101. $121 if you wanna count in the price of a 240 gb ssd i got for free from microcenter during the free coupons they wew doing. its totally possible and my wife games on that computer every single day never had an issue. took about a week to build. considering the fact i wasn't in the market to build the computer it didnt take long. i seen an opportunity and went for it.

[@NemusDark]

Nice finds!

[@kparserpcs6699]

So fun fact you can buy most of these parts used for almost 10$'s each give or take(other than gpu) and part it together. I do this alot to flip for about 150-200$ depending on the case and gpu.

[@xXDarthBagginsXx]

Nice video, but might want to utilize Dual Channel - in the video you showed Single Channel config (would give a slight bump in the performance). Also anything thing running 4th Gen Intel and above on most OEM built machines will have a custom pinout at this range, but the 3rd gen's actually have a standard plug config for PSU's rather than having to stick to the OEM's footprint. In the end if you deal hunt enough you can come across some really good deals out there.

[@aChairLeg]

Each DIMM was a different size and speed, so I just left them in single channel since the other hyper X 8gb stick I had died years ago. Interesting that the slightly older gen 3 PCs actually are in a way more up gradable

[@psycho_chicken_9589]

there's a couple things you could've done, get a psu ( with that you could buy a better gpu), use the ssd for the o.s. and a hard drive for everything else... i bought an optiplex over a year ago, changed the cpu, got a 500w psu, a gtx1060 6gb, 16 gb ram and a 256gb ssd, only the ssd was new, the rest was used...never had a problem.

[@bill_and_amanda]

I built a 6600K+Z270 system for about $400 and it's worked great: Intel Core i5-6600K ASUS Prime Z270A Corsair Vengeance 2x8GB DDR4 3200 RGB Coolermaster Hyper 212 RGB 650W EVGA SuperNOVA GA Silicon Power 256GB M.2 NVME Corsair C70 case Got it all on eBay used/refurbished/open box except the SSD, which I bought new from Amazon, and the case- which I got locally for $70 (but came with almost an entire system including a 4790K because the motherboard was bad). I just took my time, bid low and refused to get into a battle, and Googled relentlessly. That slowness also helped me spread it out over 2 or 3 paychecks. Patience is a virtue when you're deal hunting. I actually upgraded the CPU, motherboard just last night (and got a GPU upgrade from the wife for Christmas), not sure what I'm going to do with the old stuff. Might let the kids use it for their Minecraft, Among Us, Fall Guys, etc. Or maybe I'll build a router.

[@NemusDark]

There are in fact pretty good deals on Ebay , I have found a couple of hidden gems like a dell optiplex sff with a i5 6500 16gb of ram and 1tb hdd for 41$ +16 shipping and a Barebones Dell Precision 3620 that can be upgraded easily with a xeon v5 cpu and 16gb of ecc dd4 ram.

[@purpasmart_4831]

It seems like the haswell platforms are currently a good deal right, the 4770 and the xeon equivalent are still pretty good with their 8 threads.

[@aChairLeg]

Haswell seems to be in the perfect place where the pricing is decent, but it's not hit the pricing floor where you literally cannot sell them cheaper.

[@mrrobot4840]

i'm using e3 1245 v3 and it's working perfectly with 1660 super it runs all games at medium high settings

[@theHardwareBench]

I built a geniune gaming PC from a Dell Optiplex for £250 but it needed an extra £75 spending on it afterwards to make it play games like Fallout 76 and PUBG at a solid 60fps 1080p at low settings. At the £250 price point it would play but frame drops did affect the game. I also had to overclock the GTX1070 a fair bit in the build, the original i5 was a bottleneck, the i7 is on the edge of bottlenecking the overclocked card. I did a couple of videos of the build.

[@thescryingpool]

I did this and it's entirely possible. Though it helps if you have a computer center around you that sells old office pc's. Also, trying to get a skylake for under $100 is going to be tougher. Yeah you might get lucky and find a 6th gen or 9th gen platform for a good deal but after having to put a GPU you will be over. I got a Dell XE2 (fancy optiplex) with LGA1150 motherboad, came with a 365 watt PSU but with a weaksauce 4570S, picked up a Xeon 1270 V3 off ebay (equivalent of a i7 4790, not the K) and then just threw in a Radeon 6500 XT. Yes the 6500 XT doesn't have a decoder and people hate it blah blah, but this rig isn't for content creation and the power requirements are crazy low; the whole point of a build like this is to build a cheap gaming rig that can play modern games made in the last 5 years to today. Sidenote I would have gone with a GTX 1650 super instead but none were available when I was building it and prices for it too high that did have it. Anyway I painted the XE2 up nice for my son and gave it to him for Christmas. I would have killed for a PC like this at his age lol. He can play anything modern he wants on medium to high settings and gets a smooth 60 fps.

[@Coolit2683]

An AMD RX570 goes for cheap these days... the only issue is many of them are bios modded, which needs an extra step after installing the driver for them to work nicely

[@andrewmcewan9145]

Any optiplex with a oland 128bit amd gpu like the (w2100) can usally be had for close to $50 usd but that is hard budget. Purely esport or older aaa at 720p (don't expect warzone to run well at all) i do recommed buying separately and its usually 8gb and a hdd for a optiplex in that range a 2end to 4th gen i5 is usually had though. The w2100 is usally a sff gpu so you can get the cheeper optiplexes. Any decent midrange kelper gpu can be had for less than $50 usd pritty often so that would be my $100 almost anyone can find picks. Giving you a bit of room to get to 16gb of ram or a hdd upgrade. Or a cheep ass psu to get rid of the splitters to power it. A rx 460, 1050ti may be a good option but there usally a bit overpriced. Same wirh a r9 380, 285, 290, 390, fury but these may require deal hunting. 290s are peitty bottemd out on price tho.

[@maladamedialabs4214]

When I buy ram I boot from Hiren's Boot CD and run MemTest... usually overnight. I found a bad stick that way.

[@aChairLeg]

Oddly enough, I did test it, just died randomly for no reason. The stick I bought with that one died last year, so might have been from a sub-par manufacturer.

[@soundt3ck274]

I actually went this way when getting my first actual PC after having a thinkpad for a couple of years. In my case, I managed to get a secondhand optiplex 3020 (i5 4590, 2TB HDD, 8GB RAM, GT 430) for 90€, got extra 8GB stick of ram for 10 bucks, then decided to go for something that packs a bit more of a punch on the GPU side and bought a R9 280X for 70€ (this was peak GPU mining time, no cheap polaris cards or their nvidia counterparts available at the time). Since original PSU was way too weak for the card, I got a brand new 650W PSU for roughly 55€ and one of those "sketchy" adapters off aliexpress (it works just fine). Added an extra 120mm fan in the front for extra airflow. Total build cost: cca 230€, satisfaction level 10/10. So yea, 100€/dollars is a bit unreasonable demand unless you get really lucky with your deals, but in the 150-200€ range you can get a decent 1080p rig, especially with how cheap GTX 10 series and AMD polaris / vega cards are nowdays

[@aChairLeg]

Yep, I'm actually working on an updated build that's about $200. I have actually used one of those motherboard adapters, and it worked fine for me, but I was wary to suggest other people use it until I do some more thorough testing on my own.

[@soundt3ck274]

@@aChairLeg As for the adapter, I have been using it for a couple od years now, with CPU load often at 99/100% for extensive periods of time, no problem so far. But you need to account for the fact that it is not OC'ed and relatively low power draw. No idea if it would be as stable as it is now with an i7 with a slight OC

[@eliahdude1411]

something that might help... See if you have any old computers lying around, and see if they have hard drives. you can use multiple of those.

[@ZERARCHIVE2023]

Also, high end DDR3 is still pretty much usable nowadays and wont bother you too much. It's really all about CPU and GPU performances and games

[@EweToobUsername]

I will never deal with Dell Optiplexes again. Through the 3rd gen Intel Core processors, they were solidly built and lasted forever, and used industry-standard sized parts (though the Core 2 and Core socket 1156 BTX form factors were a little annoying). I’ve flipped 4th, 6th, and 7th gen Optiplexes though and between power supplies, faulty PCIe slots, and bad RAM channels, I lost more than I made on those machines. HPs from the 4th gen and onward are also proprietary when it comes to boards and power supplies, but they seem to be built far better than Dells.

[@bored7975]

deal hunting is really good in my opinion. i got a i7 2600 with a motherboard and 16gb ram for £10 then i paid £30 for a psu case extra mobo and an extra 16 gb ram and a gt 710. the build cost £40 and i only need a gpu upgrade to make it a beast. im thinking about getting a rx580 for £60 making this a valid £100 pound pc.

[@robertharker]

A better a little over $100 gaming PC is the HP Z420 Workstation. This is a high end engineering workstation from about 10 years ago. For $108, I got mine with an Intel E5-1620 3.6GHz CPU, 8GB DDR3 ram, 2TB HDD and a Quadro 2000 with no Windoze COA. Not a problem for me since I run Linux on all of my computers. This was a tip from Linus Tech Tips. Thanks Linus.

[@princevinny0073]

😊😄 was a kool fun project i bet wow $100 still goes along way hehe yey :D

[@default1647]

That is one ok pc I have e3-1220 v3/r7 260x 2gb/12gb ram/480ssd/1tb hdd/and I am satisfied :)

[@ZERARCHIVE2023]

Not bad at all.

[@TheScepticalThinker]

Great video

[@MMillerPCs]

You could also use a quadro k620 as a GPU it’s about like a 1030

[@LifewithJames]

I built my spare setup using a optiplex for pretty cheap and after all was said and done, I have less than $200 in everything. Will it match my computer at home? Not even close. Will it play apex legends at 1080 low with playable frame rates? Yes.

[@kierenalvarez]

I have a WindForce 650ti 2gb I got on fb just to see what it could do. Advertised for 40aud offered 20aud and took it new in box. Runs Far cry 3 at 1080p ultra 50fps with a slight OC ... Just sits on my shelf now. About 14 bucks US

[@sheldonkupa9120]

Yeah, good video. I think the elefants in the room are not mentioned by the more noisier youtubers. I trust in my old pcs as i didnt use them a lot, and even then one psu exploded for no other reason than age and dust i think. I bought an old dell pc which came refurbed with warranty, but this thing ran day and night at an enterprise. And the psu exploded on day 2☹️ mobo is not atx standard, case is not standard and so on. Honestly, spending a bit more for new hardware might be more future proof. Minis Forum um 350 is at discount sometimes. And the asrock deskmini x300 is a good base for a cheap built. I have one with a Ryzen 5600g.

[@theHardwareBench]

You can sort a console streaming rig for under £100, I bought a Lenovo E73 for £45, added a cheap SSD, the i5 from my Optiplex build and another 4gb of ram.

[@johnmine5609]

I built a optiplex 980 3gz xeon Amd HD7600 gpu 16 gigs ddr3 ssd 240 gig boot drive 2tb sata programs drive 4tb storage drive 450 watt thermaltake psu is it the fastest no... but plays all games from 2004 to 2014 on max setting at 1360/768. so that is a huge amount of games and being I have not bought any new games does what I need it to. for about $250 all in. Spending $300+ for just a motherboard for the newest tech just does not agree with my inner Skin Flint!

[@bodytolson7390]

Probably going to do something like this to replace my parents 2009 Mac all in one 🤢 they complain about it all the time, but refuse to replace it because it still "works"

[@aChairLeg]

Throw in a cpu with hyperthreading if that's the case!

[@bence.gabor.slezak]

Upgradability isn't really a thing for used budget pcs. Let's say you start with a 6th gen i5, best you can upgrade to is a 7th gen i7, then it's new motherboard time. But to stay with the low budget theme, you'd want to sell as many parts from the old pc as you can. Best to sell the whole pc and build another, so a major upgrade means new everything anyway, no matter what socket you're on. Other thing seagate drives are cheap for a reason, they're crap. I've built and repaired many pcs, but the only dead drives I've seen were all seagate. WD sells refurbished drives with warranty. They're cheap, sure they don't have all kinds of drives all the time, but yxou can find some good deals there.

[@floydlooney6837]

I have a Strix ROG G512 with 16GB of RAM and a 2070 and BeamNG takes a while to load. I cannot imagine why you thought it'd be a good idea. I also have a 2TB external SSD drive.

[@theratking180]

I got an actually good pc on amazon for 150$, had 16gb ddr4 ram, an intel i5-6500 cpu, and a 1tb ssd with a 500gb hdd, integrated graphics are kind of mid but it can play warframe, i ordered a gtx 1050ti off ebay for 80$ after shipping/taxes, really amazing pc for only 230$

[@jblcharge3_basstester]

Ive gotten myself an xeon e3-1231 v3 for 20€ including shipping so i think ive gotten myself an great deal and upgrade over my i5 4460 (beam in my case isnt cpu limited at all its more gpu limited in my case im getting 50-60fps maxxed out settings 1440p using an rx 570 8gb and the xeon e3-1231 v3)

[@sephirotic87]

Veeeeery tight budget, Good thing you showed the issues no youtuber is willing to talk about: The increased risk of failure and scalating cost associated with it. We have a saying here: "The cheap ends being more expensive" Not saying not to do it, (if you don't have the option) But platforms older than 10 years are in deathrow, already, motherboards hardly survive that long without something going wrong. Also, 4/4 cpu, and less than 4gb VRAM nowadays is relegated to Retro gaming IMO. I used to play warzone 1 on a 3770 non-k at confortable 60~75fps. Wz2 drops to mid 30s with the same cpu, yikes. 4/4? Forget it, maybe fortnite? But then again, that GTX 650 is slower than a Vega 6 igpu.... not sure it is even worth the 30 bucks.

[@aChairLeg]

It's for sure tough, because some people really can't stretch past $100, that's what they have they gotta make it work. But I think just bumping it up to about $250 will give you a wildly better experience. Especially if you can swing a DDR4 system with something like an RX 480 or GTX 1650 super. DDR3 and LGA 1150 is at that age where there are just a lot of failures when you try to daily the system. I've had far fewer issues with newer AM4 or LGA 2011-3 motherboards along with DDR4 memory. Especially since DDR4 can still be bought brand new.

[@WhiskerBiscuitGaming]

I have a optiplex 7020 i5 4590 and a gtx 1060 lol works pretty good for now! cost around 250 ish...

[@addyyang5691]

The Xeon e3 1226 v3 cpu is not meant for gaming. I'm running a i7-4790K CPU on my Dell Optiplex 9020 with Zotac GTX 1660 Super, 16GB Ram ddr3, 1TB SSD SanDisk plus, Evga 500 watt power supply, and Cooler Master i71C RGB heatsink. If I were you I'll spend little more.

[@jeremybaynhampd5936]

Give us that link to the 6T hard drives

[@DominantingMind]

Do the parts work for all types of dell optiplex?

[@juanmassiosare9850]

What Dell model do you have exactly?

[@retrotech2020]

I'm running a 1060 6GB in one on the stock power supply with no issues.

[@tyhorton2443]

r u selling this pc or another pc?

[@Peiperkatt]

God damn I love your videos so much! I always like youtubers who has a lot less subscribers than theyr videos are way more quality oriented. For example big names like MKBHD, LinusTechTips, JerryRig and Austin Evans dont provide that quality content anymore, they are just posting random videos just to earn views. Im also an IT specialist with 10 years of experience and thats why I love to watch your content! Love from Estonia! Keep up the good work!

[@Jdjsksjdhdj]

At least the parts in it a dirt cheap. And those things normally last for awhile.

[@pilotstiles]

More like $200-$300 for a decent 1080p gaming pc. A 4 core cpu, fast ssd, at least a 4gb gpu.

[@chaseonthecase9191]

Damn I need more money

[@Cynth72]

I built a pc for about this price, had 8gb of ddr3 in dual channel, a gtx 1050 ti 4gb, and an i3 3220, a 120gb ssd, and a 320gb hard drive

[@aChairLeg]

Not a bad setup, that'd still run a ton of games

[@madcat4563]

He he, I actually got a pretty good deal on a dell optiplex 9020 on our local ebay equivalent. For that price I would not have gotten something so well speced. (Locally) without looking forever and having to drive somewhere to get it. Oh and shipping costed $1,66 so cheaper than fuel and I don't have to talk to sellers.

[@chaseonthecase9191]

Would this work for vr games?

[@aChairLeg]

I don't have much experience with VR, but I highly doubt the GTX 650 could make any sort of playable VR experience unfortunately.

[@ZERARCHIVE2023]

Got an ITX with 18 7650K 4*2GB DDR3 1600mhz SSD and HDD 315W, for just 80 bucks. New ? It would've costed me 280. And since i'm not a power-hungry guy, It suits my usage I got it on Facebook Market :)

[@ZERARCHIVE2023]

If you go for parts from 2015 and older, dont expect it to run more recent video games.

[@ShiaGaming88]

6:13 one of my favorite games

[@HortyPanda]

Please help me I want to build a PC and only have a budget of €500.What would be the best component to buy to get the best PC I can

[@aChairLeg]

I have a video on a $500 workstation pc. Just put a xeon e5-1650 v3 instead of a 2697 v3 for better gaming performance

[@joelferguson625]

As long as these videos touting an old office pc being made into a budget gaming pc are out there people are going to try to get by with a set up like the one you've shown here. There's nothing wrong with that but it does degrade to resale value on everything else in the used market. I'm an AMD FX enthusiast, for several reasons, for one the FX series can run from Windows xp through Windows 10 without tricks, intel doesn't really do that. For a legacy gaming system that can run from Windows xp through Windows 10 the AMD FX series CPU are exceptional. DDR3 ram is actually available in volumes as low as 1GB, making the pinacle compatibility for xp (3GB) possible. For Windows 7, no problem just run 8 or 12gb ram and bam $25 old gaming gpu run everything Windows 7 has. Want to run it for Windows 10, ok so 8GB ram is realistically a minimum but it you have 12 or 16GB RAM to rum you can play almost everything ever made with a 680/770/960 gtx or better on everything in the AMD FX series. So realistically if you want a legacy gaming PC get a 1,2, 2x4 and either a second 2x4 or a 2x8 kits of DDR3 RAM an FX base system and you can run 2 decades of operating systems. Granted it's niche, but for broad compatibility nothing beats the AMD FX series CPU. A lot of fanboys will say the FX lineup nearly ended AMD to which I refute it's actually the A series that almost buried AMD. The reason is that the A series debuted using the same architecture as FX and by naming it as a new series without a new architecture AMD almost lost dedicated AMD fanboys, yes we exist. Another reason the FX series is legacy gold, overclocking. Nothing in history until 13th gen intel i 13900K has anything beat the AMD FX 8350 in overclocking. If you're interested in performance tuning nothing has more potential to train your skills in overclocking like the AMD FX series CPU. Right now overclocking is dead in the water for Ryzen 5k and 7k cpu, and for Intel good luck getting anything to stay stable unless you fork out real money. So if you want to get your feet wet in overclocking on something that wont break the bank and dabble in legacy gaming FX is awesome. I recommend the FX X3+0 (Piledriver) over the FX X1+0 (Bulldozer) chipset. Ex. FX 8350 over FX 8120, seriously the bulldozer chipset is only good to use in extreme overclock testing as a burner you intend to fry to determine your initial top clock. For real world use the FX 6300 to FX 8350 can be of great use for a good value.

[@Mr_Toodles]

I bought one of these dell pc's from a local guy last year for about 60 bucks. came fully functional..more or less. I added more ram and turned it into a network storage server for my house. I would never even consider TRYING to game on one of these terrible pieces of tech lol

[@aChairLeg]

haha some people have no option unfortunately. If this was my first PC back when I got into building PCs, I think I would have been pretty happy if my other option was nothing

[@splashboi898]

You have to be willing to talk to people and pick up in person if you're looking for a deal. If you're building a cheap gaming pc you can't be picky on how you build it. $100 is also way too cheap, in my local area I have gotten really good deals on x99 motherboards and 5700 xts without as you say "spending an entire salaried work week" to find good deals.

[@cybersamiches4028]

I stopped purchasing from netac and adata, both use shit silicon and I have had drives arrive with 1 percent health right out of the packaging, just go with a crucial or samsung!

[@UTFapollomarine7409]

dude i did the same exact thing on my platform, if your extremely on a low budget then yea you can make it work on the dells, but come on as a main gaming rig its totally not worth it.

[@aChairLeg]

Hey if all you got is $100, all you got is $100. Sometimes you just gotta game with what you got

[@BlitzkriegGT]

i cant understand why the people cheap out on the most important if you buy a lame ssd where all the work its done (install os, install apps and config all) then all its lose in a minute

[@aChairLeg]

All I can say is it had decent reviews haha, it's tough fitting all of this into a $100 budget, not many options

[@banana_ytka3947]

i wish i had that pc my pc is going blackscreen while im playing and game kicking me out or i need to restart my pc sometimes and i think its gpu because its really old and if anyone knows how to fix it reply to me

[@aChairLeg]

Before assuming your GPU is bad, try reinstalling drivers, and check for any overheating issues. Re-installing your OS could also solve the problem potentially. Wouldn't be a bad idea to go ahead and replace the thermal paste and pads in the GPU as well. My 1080ti was having really erratic behavior, and showed no signs of over-heating, after replacing the paste and pads it started working perfectly again.

[@eixeon395]

another great option would be the rx6400

[@aChairLeg]

I may actuslly test that in a future video on this pc