The ULTIMATE Guide - How To Build Budget Gaming PCs

this is the ultimate guide on how to build cheap gaming PCs if you're the type of person that likes saving money and are willing to take it one step further this video can save you an extreme amount of money I've built maybe 300 computers in my life and these methods have saved me roughly $75,000 most YouTube videos that showcase this skill only show one facet of what it takes to do this and the reason I'm showing you everything today is because I don't really upload anymore so rather than sitting on this information I'm going to make this something that you all can access whenever you want to so let's get started finding good prices on Parts requires a few things looking in the right places knowledge on part value and a little bit of luck before I show you how to do it you need to understand the first two things as far as looking in the right places goes the place that I look for parts are Facebook Marketplace offer up Craigslist Facebook groups eBay ricari r/h Hardware Swap and r/b builda PC sales surplus stores Micro Center and lastly B stock sales from known retailers I know I just threw a lot at you it's okay these resources will be explained later in the video as far as how I determine a value of parts I use a comparison method for example let's say I wanted to compare an RTX 3080 to an RTX 360 a assuming they're both used parts I would First Look up the retail value of an RTX 380 it looks like it goes for $500 new so now I know that anything that I have to consider a deal needs to be under $500 for it to be worth it so let's say someone is selling a used 380 for $420 and I also happen to find a used 360 for $250 which one is the better deal the first thing you need to do is compare the specifications of each card to see how much performance you can expect out of each of them if you don't understand these metrics a simpler way of of doing this is going on YouTube and finding a benchmark test with the parts you were looking at to review the FPS let's say you want to play fortnite and the 3080 gives you 200 frames per second while the 3060 gives you 120 frames per second now you just need to do some simple math at $420 and 200 FPS the 3080 gives you about one frame per $210 at $250 and10 FPS the 360 gives you about 1 frame per second for $28 in this specific example the 3 60 is technically better value for your dollar but now you need to ask yourself a few questions is spending the extra $170 on the 380 worth it for me can I save that $170 and put it towards other parts in the PC is spending the extra $170 better for me because I plan on playing more demanding games in the future maybe you plan on getting in content Creation in the future and the extra Cuda cores of a 3080 would be helpful for you when you edit in Premiere Pro once you answer these questions it becomes a lot easier to understand what is the better choice for yourself and what is the better value for your because ultimately while building something for as cheap as possible is fun it doesn't make sense to do that if it won't work for what you intend on using it for now I'm going to show you how to do it there were two ways I would try to tackle this and I'm going to show you both the first step would be to find something Bare Bones this means something that's almost already built or can be upgraded this saves you the effort of having to do multiple purchases and in some case is the better option for you financially I'm going to show you the method of finding an Old Dell Optiplex or other pre-built system and throwing a graphics card inside just so it's good enough to be considered a gaming PC there's a lot of videos that already already showcased this on YouTube but I'm going to show you how to do it here anyways to start this I would suggest by going on eBay go ahead and search Dell Optiplex and start reading through the description of the listings if you don't understand what any of the specifications in the description means this is a great time to teach you what to do figure out what games you want to play now go Google the minimum specifications in order to play that game once you see what parts you need to have in order to play you can use a website like user Benchmark to compare what you're looking at buying versus what you need in order to play this is a good enough way of figuring out if what you are looking at is good enough for what you need it for but you do need to be careful of comparing parts that were made many years apart for example if you were to compare an AMD fx8350 to an i58600k there would be some issues on paper the AMD option might seem like the better choice because it has two more physical cores however the fx8350 was also made in 2012 and has far inferior architecture compared to an 8600k and then you could also look at the single core performance and understand that it's not really a comparison now let's say you don't want to use eBay or you just want to save even more money here's another option I've become aware of through the years of being a cheap skate if you live in a town with a college or High School these institutes often times have something called a surplus store most schools have a mandate that requires them to update their computers and other Hardware every certain amount of years for me in Las Vegas there is the University of Las Vegas Nevada and if we take a look at these prices they're even lower than what's offered on eBay and so for the sake of this video you should already know what that means we're going to go do we are here let's go find out see if they have anything [Music] good monitors oh here we go here all right let's see Delo stros Optiplex we got to find which one has the right specs I5 4590s 4 said wait i7 4790 100 bucks for an i74790 wait that's actually really good holy [ __ ] wait that's insane actually for me right now it is between an you can't really see that but an i54590 with 8 GB of RAM for 60 bucks or an i7 4790 with 8 gbes of RAM for where is that $93 both of them could play the games that we want but a four core eight thread processor allows us to do so much more in the future if we ever choose to do something with it so even though it's $33 extra I just can't refute the value of this processor even though it's a tough choice we're going to go with this one I can hope you test it if you want yeah that would be great if you could thank you so much we also just give you the cables too oh nice yeah cuz we have we have you weren't looking for a monitor just the computer yeah no just this is fine sure this is 80 90 okay and would you want to print it to seat uh sure yeah that works okay thank you so much oh God no oh God I ended up spending more money than I was expecting to but in exchange I got a substantially better processor than I was anticipating on getting not only that the guy knocked down the $93 price tag to only $80 flat because there was no DVI port on the back I'm not sure why that would warrant a discount but I'm never going to say no to saving money so now for this system we have everything we need except for a graphics card and the only thing we have to do now is go and find one unfortunately for a system like this we are actually limited in our options most of the time you can put whatever graphics card you want in a system so long as you have the power to support it but for this un like most Dell pre-built systems the power supply doesn't have an extra cable to support a graphics card so we need to find a graphics card that will run off of the power that it receives only from the motherboard if you're not sure what the best options are this is the best time to practice when we talked about before check the minimum specifications for what you are trying to play and then try to find parts that fit that in this situation since it's a more specific search what graphics cards work without external power will help you find what you are looking for find what fits your budget and then you need to make a choice is the security of a warranty worth paying full price of a retailer for you or do you want to save money and risk buying it from somebody else if you want to buy it from Amazon or some other store go for it if not what I would do in this situation is identify the model that you are looking for and then start looking for it in other places now I'm not going to lie to you I started looking already through Facebook Marketplace and offer up and I assumed that I would be able to find this relatively quickly after about 3 hours of searching my local market is actually pretty dry right now wait no what for him I went through offer up extensively until I got to the point where I was actually looking outside of Las Vegas unintentionally because I had scrolled that far down the page eventually there was an absolute hero who finally responded to me on offer up my boy ernin was holding on to a Zotac 1650 which doesn't require an external power source and he is willing to meet up and sell it for only $100 so it is 10:30 and the guy just reconfirmed that he still down to meet us at 11 for the graphics card that's good and while we're on our way to do that let's talk about negotiating for example in this video I was willing to take the price of what was originally $120 listed and then offer $100 plus pickup that is is not a bad deal however I believe that if I wasn't in a little bit of a rush to get this video done I could have got it for substantially cheaper when it comes to negotiating you always want to be willing to walk away from the deal if you are not willing to walk away from something that you want or something that you need in order to finish your PC build you are never going to get an amazing price what I mean by that is there are people who have had listings up in my area for let's say a few months if I send out an offer and they say no that's too low and I don't respond I just let it sit a lot of the times those end up being some of the best prices that I end up getting on Parts because things that are lying around like a graphics card collecting dust people realize that there is a market for it but it's not something that people are just like exploding out with responses trying to get it every single day the reality is when it comes to older Hardware there is a demand for it but it isn't great so you shouldn't be willing to just pay whatever is listed as the sell's price or even what's even a little bit lower than that because a counter offer doesn't necessarily mean that that's the lowest price that that person is willing to sell it for so long story short don't get too attached to something that you think you need even if it fits your build perfectly be willing to walk away or you will pay more than you want to you mind if I take a look at it real quick what you mind if I take a look at it so what' you use the card for um I for de or three months thing I sa by the one okay nice so it takes 1650 cool how long did you use it for what how long did you use it for uh 2 3 months thing I bought down on holding this all right there you go apprciate thank you so much appreciate day yeah have a good day all right so all we got to do is pop this in there and we should be good to go build so simple you can do it with one arm and in 45 seconds okay so Windows is finally done installing as well as some games and we are about to test it don't ask me why I'm using a 55 in curved monitor it's what we have lying around in this house why the [ __ ] ly why Always ly we're just going to play a few games valerant Power World hell divers all right so I'm dead but with some pretty active gameplay for valerant at high settings 1080p getting 120 frames I mean that's definitely playable for an esport I mean look 180 bucks you're not happy with this should have spent more money okay so lited up hell divers it's it's on the lowest settings at 1080P and for some reason fraps and steam doesn't want to show me the exact frames per second right now but if I had to guess I mean this is without even actually having any gameplay maybe 30 FPS it's it's bad if you were desperate to play this game you could do it right like it's dual if you were really really desperate but maybe at a lower resolution than 1080p which honestly actually hold on let I mean it $180 budget right like wait this is kind of play wait wait wait wait wait hold up wait this is kind of playable okay maybe I spoke too soon you know at $180 maybe my expectations were higher than they were supposed to be at 720p on the lowest settings this is actually playable so we're probably getting my best guess 50 frames I could do this on $180 budget 720p 50 frames for a game like power world I mean this is fine like you really don't need anything higher than this to be able to play a game like this I I I think it's [Music] oh maybe this is like a valerant league OverWatch type PC okay so today we are going to be building a computer again by seeking out deals except this time we're not going to be looking for a specific pre-built barebones model before we do that though I'm going to go into the resources I mentioned earlier in the video of what I try to use in order to build something for myself secondhand I'm going to explain the use cases of each different resources and which ones I personally prefer the most so this is probably the best information out of the whole video number one for the resources I like to use are Local Deals Facebook Marketplace offer up Craigslist all of these are amazing tools Facebook Marketplace is one of my favorite tools because it's real people using real names I know a lot of times the fear with Local Deals is that you're going to get scammed and when you have your face and your name out there it is less likely that someone is going to SL you in that way OfferUp is a great tool in the same way you can hide your identity on there if you choose to but from my experience a lot of people on there have been good since there is the review system where if you do scam somebody you're probably not going to have your account for very long Craigslist is still a tool I use from time to time but it definitely has been phased out over the course of the last five years in my experience anytime I'm using it to meet up with people for parts deals not trying to be rude but if I'm being honest I'm normally meeting up with people 40 45 years old or older that's not to say it's something that you should avoid because every once in a while I do find a gem on Craigslist this next resource is kind of in a group of its own but it's definitely not something you should sleep on and that is Facebook groups this is going to vary on the strength of a community within your hometown but a Facebook group in my area called 702 gaming has gotten me some of the best deals I have ever gotten on computer parts I know for some of you it may sound a little bit lame to be actively looking for a community with shared interest but I am not joking when I'm telling you that if you can find something in your hometown maybe even start it of a collective of people who enjoy computer parts part of that interest is buying and selling you will get a group of like-minded individuals who want to do the same thing that you do and then if you can get those individuals to buy and sell you might build rapport and you might end up getting something down the line that helps you out in a great way and you might be able to to provide that same service to somebody else the next group of resources is online secondhand deals so websites like merari and eBay I won't lie I have button some things off of merari but I am very turned off from using the platform because after all the fees and the shipping the secondhand deal becomes a lot less of a deal that's not to say I haven't bought some things off the platform my personal opinion of it though merari is a little bit dog [ __ ] now as far as eBay goes it's not bad I'm not going to say it's good and the preferred method but depending on what you were looking for and the time that you're looking for it eBay can be a very valuable resource to buying something used so long as you already know what you're looking for the beauty of the other online marketplaces that are more cater towards Local Deals is if you know what you're doing you can look for things that are actually not necessarily what you had in mind but still fit the use case for what you're going for eBay is very much a resource you use when you already know exactly what you were looking for and then trying to get that for a good deal and my personal opinion it's just less fun it's still a good thing to use this next resource requires a little bit more knowledge to understand how to use it and that is Reddit two subredits I use in order to get deals are called r/h Hardware Swap and r/b build a PC sales r/h Hardware swap is exactly what it sounds like it's people who are posting on their Hardware whatever it may be and are looking to either trade it for something or exchange it for cash I've had about 10 total transactions through that subreddit and in my personal opinion it is helpful if you follow all the rules and guidelines it is an amazing resource and you can get things that you a wanted to get anyways or B like I said before didn't know you wanted but end end up getting anyways however I've kind of already alluded to this I do know some people that have used that subreddit and end up being scammed however from my understanding from the people that I know that did use that service and get scammed they were rushing through and didn't necessarily follow the rules the best case scenario I could see for you to use r/h Hardware swap is let's say you don't live in a big town I live in Las Vegas it's 2 to 3 million people that's enough of a backyard to have Local Deals if the population of where you live isn't that dense while then going online through Hardware Swap and then being able to see all over the country that would would be a better scenario as for the other subreddit r/u a PC sales I like this one a lot back during the first Bitcoin mining boom it was one of the best resources that I could have ever asked for when it came to trying to get a 1070 or 1080 card when there were people who were buying them immediately and then flipping them and scalping them for more basically what the subreddit does is there are collective users who post deals that they think are good value that other people might be interested in for PC parts the downside to this resource is that the really good deals that get upvoted to the top of the subreddit normally get bought out immediately and so if you're not on that subreddit refreshing it fairly regularly you might miss something insane what a lot of people don't actually know though is that this subreddit also has a bot that puts the deals that get pushed through and approved onto a Twitter account which you can set up notifications for on your phone this is something that I have set up for me and if a good deal pops up I'm immediately alerted to it on my phone this is the type of resource that I would say is best used for the person who knows exactly what they want they're just waiting for better deal to show up the next research to talk about we kind of already showcased but that is surplus stores or thrift stores figure out what in your area sells secondhand used PC parts I'll give you an example something I learned that exists here in Las Vegas Nevada is called The Blind Center in order for the Blind Center to conduct their business and race funds something I found out that they do is accept secondhand electronic donations PC parts laptops whatever you name it they then take those things and sell them through eBay I found them one day while I was searching through something specific on eBay and when the seller said in Las Vegas Nevada I asked if it was something that I could come check out in person every once in a while that is a resource that I use whenever I try to find something locally in town and want to avoid a shipping fee the next resource is probably something you've already heard of before but that is Micro Center this video is not sponsored by them but I cannot help but stay that every once in a while when I do need something from a physical location micr Center prices do occasionally surprise me one of my favorite deals that they have had for the longest time is a CPU and motherboard bundle it is not uncommon for them to knock off 20 even $40 off the price of whatever it is you're buying if you get a CPU and motherboard together check to see if you have one in your city because if you do get their newsletters when they come out there is always some type of deal in there the last resource is one of my absolute favorites but it is incredibly difficult to utilize and that is B stock sales in case you don't know there are retailers online that do accept returns from products from their customers in case of any damage or just a general return where the customer decided I can't afford this those returns a lot of times get held on to in a warehouse and then sometimes they get resold on the same website except in a category called bck back in the day when EVGA was still making graphics cards they had an amazing sale every Wednesday called midweek Madness I check this every Wednesday because every once in a while you could find a power supply for $20 a graphics card for 60 midweek Madness isn't really a thing anymore these days sadly but I will say this check any of the online retailers that produce PC parts like Zotac gigabyte whatever around the time new products get released and see if their stores will let go of some other old product for a substantially lower price than what they used to sell at now that you understand how all the resources work I have just come through OfferUp Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace to see what is available in my area and this is what we are looking at for the two options right now this $250 barebone system which if you read it has a CPU motherboard and Ram with a cooler already attached so that's four of eight pieces that we need this setup is pretty decent and 8700k is a six score 123 processor it can be overclocked the motherboard does allow for that and so we could get some pretty decent performance out of this he wants it for $250 I offered him $200 and he's willing to accept for the second one we have another barebone setup for $300 included in this we have a CPU Cooler motherboard RAM and a case which means the only things that we would need are a graphics card power supply and storage device this one is also an overclockable six4 processor but it does not have the 12 threads that the 8700 K does I will say what excites me about this listing is that this comes with an h500p case which is one of my favorite Cooler Master cases they're absolutely beautiful a slight detail that I'm picking up on right now is that even though normally MoneyWise I would usually go for something like this if it was for personal use this guy seems to take better care of what he builds you can tell from the photos whereas this one was kind of thrown on the ground and looks a little bit Dusty I did offer this guy $250 and he did accept it and five out of eight pieces for $250 seems like a pretty good deal I think we're going to go with this I think $250 for this is pretty solid it is a nice looking system and performance-wise 16 GB of RAM is enough overclocking is definitely something that we can do if we don't feel like we're getting enough juice out of it so yeah we're going to do this okay I'm going to get the money and we are going to head out and we're going to go meet up with this guy hello how's it going Chris hey hey I appreciate you taking the time yeah there she is oh God this is so big all right have a good one stay safe have a good night back home safe and sound the only thing that we need to worry about now is the graphics card SSD and power supply which we're actually going to take care of easily here from the comfort of my desk I almost never get power supplies secondhand and the reason for that is because if you put a bad power supply in a system you risk damaging all of the other parts since we got a pretty good deal on those parts I do not think it is a bad idea at all to spend a little extra money on a power supply brand new and ensure the safety of our parts one of my favorite options for mid-level PCs when it comes to power is actually this thermal take smart it's a 500 W 80 plus white certified power supply it's only $40 so it's definitely a budget option but it is also a smart option because again I do not want to risk a bad power supply in this setup the next thing that we can get is actually a little bit of a cheap option which is this Patriot memory 20 40 gab SSD now look I know if you are using this tutorial for yourself you're going to end up wanting to get something a little bit bigger this is mely going to have enough space for Windows and a few games that being said it is only $23 if you have an Amazon Prime account if you don't have one I'm sure you can find one of your friends that'd be willing to buy it for you it's good enough for what we're going to do so we're going to use it right now and now with those two things purchased we have one final thing that we need to get this computer running and that is a graphics card and to show a little bit of variety but also to practice what I preach let me show you where we're getting it from this this is a receipt that I have from a Zotac bck sale I have my Gmail account subscribed to notifications from the Zotac store they actually have a little bit of a reputation for selling their aftermarket gpus for a little bit lower than the competitors a few months back they were getting rid of some B stock graphics cards so I took a look at what they had in stock and they had some really good prices and what we are going to be using for this setup is actually an RTX 2060 that I was able to get for $120 it's not the most insane deal I've ever gotten on an RTX 2060 but I think that this kind of performance that we're going to get out of this for only $120 is not a bad deal in the slightest so now if we want to add up the total of everything that went into this computer we have 200 $250 for the Bare Bones $63 for the SSD and power supply after tax and then $130 for the graphics card after tax $443 for the entire setup all right so as you can see the computer's been assembled we reapplied some thermal paste on the CPU the 2060 is installed and everything is working as intended okay so I kind of have to die to show the frames but I mean it is infinitely better than what it was with the last computer 350 frames 1080p High settings I mean this is pretty solid now we have power world running at 1080p on low settings and I'm an idiot cuz I didn't realize that this game automatically hard caps it at 60 frames but uh the performance is pretty smooth uh I've done a little bit of running around a little bit of action in the game and it stays pretty solidly at 60 it maybe dips to like 52 53 at times but the performance is really good so last but not least we're ending it with hell divers and this is the menu right but we're at 1080p mixture of high to medium settings it's incredibly tough to play and try to shoot this with one hand but I mean we're we're we're pretty solidly at 60 frames I mean even with there's a ton of action on screen we dip sometimes to like 55 it is definitely playable and yeah that's pretty much it that's my last 5 years on YouTube right there that is an example on how you can build yourself a very cheap computer for better than anything else you're going to get online from a retailer I mean I I think I've always thought this but the risk of buying secondhand not only makes it more fun cuz it's like treasure hunting for me but it also just saves you a ton of money I hope that you guys got all the information needed from this video I hope that um if you watch it it ends up being helpful to you and that um you know it's something that uh you guys will be able to use if you ever need in the future I don't ever see computers being something that we don't need so have fun go crazy and uh if you end up learning how to sell them to I hope you make some money and uh hope you have a good day and it's going to sound a little sad but you never hear from me as far as the YouTube stuff goes going forward in the future just know um you know I I really enjoyed my time and I had fun and I learned a lot so hopefully hopefully you guys learn something too and uh you know if I do I'll see you later