 Recently, we built this AMD budget gaming rig for just $500, and it's pretty good. But here's the thing. Everybody knows when it comes to getting the best bang for the buck, Intel is where it's at. As long as you don't mind having no warranty, having an exposed die on your processor, and using some pretty sketchy BIOS hacks. Yes, my friends, this right here is the heart and soul of what we're dubbing the roofless economy PC. So tighten up your sandals, ladies and gentlemen, because this... It's gonna be one wild ride. And it's brought to you by Private Internet Access. PIA is the VPN service that encrypts all your internet traffic and uses a safe, protected IP. It's got a ton of other cool features as well, so you can check it out at the link in the video description. Let's start with explaining what you guys were looking at before. This is the QQLT-ES, an engineering sample chip with six cores and 12 threads that's clocked from 2.4 GHz base to 4.1 GHz boost that was supposed to be destined for a laptop, but has been Frankensteined by the one and only Mr. Sue so that it can be installed in a desktop. One of these is gonna run you just $125, which is pretty good for a six core. So between Mr. Sue and Lisa Sue, I think I'll take Mr. Sue any day of the week. Again, as long as you don't mind having no warranty whatsoever and buying engineering sample chips. Really though, the main value add here is not the CPU itself, but rather that this CPU allows us to get one of these. The H110D3A is a mining optimized motherboard. You can see it's got all these PCI Express slots here for those little mining GPU adapters that can be had on eBay for as little as $30 and happens to, we hope, work perfectly with the QQLT-ES. It's not even the same shape. The installation process for this abomination here, very straightforward. You go ahead and you take this buddy here with the little notches. You line them up with the little notches right there. There you go. A little something like that. Oh, yeah. You pop this little like carrier slash hold down plate puppy on here. And then you just, yep, you just screw these screws right into the motherboard. No problem. There's actual tapped holes on the back. Oh, oh, okay. I thought we were just screwing into the PCB. Well, that's a little better. No, yeah. It's like kind of legit. Okay. For cooling, you'd be surprised how cheap we can go. This right here is an Intel stock cooler. You can probably scavenge one of these for nothing, but if you do have to pay for them, they go for about $9 on eBay and that's not a lot of metal. That's not a lot of cooling there. But the good news is that because we're using a mobile processor, it also doesn't output a lot of heat and compared to the space constraints that you would have to deal with in a laptop, this, uh, yeah, it looks, you know, downright frosty. One thing we want to be careful of when installing the CPU is that we're not putting excess pressure on one corner and we're applying it evenly because otherwise we could crack that exposed die and our CPU would be very dead at that point. Now when it comes to storage, we never recommend cheaping out and going secondhand because when you think about it, what's $10 or $20 compared to the value of your precious family photos? But this is the ruthless economy PC, isn't it? So for our boot drive, we went with this Samsung 840 series off of eBay. It's just over $20 and does have a DRAM cache, so we won't expect the slowdowns that can happen with DRAM-less SSDs. And then because 120 gigs just plain ain't enough to store any modern games, like warfare type games, you know what I'm talking about? We also went with a 1 terabyte Baracuda that was $19. Yeah. The great thing about this is that by spending only $40 on our storage, we were able to get 16 gigs of RAM. I mean sure, it's from a brand that even I've never heard of, TimeTac. But theoretically, I mean, those are RAM chips on there. SK Hynix, like, should be fine, right? Right? Right? Yeah. Yeah! 60 bucks for those. 60 bucks. Now it's time to start building this thing. Neat! Computer case. It's got compelling features like steel and front panel. It also happens to be extremely lightweight. So light, I can't even get it out of the box. All of this and no more can be yours for just $30. Which happens to be $30 more than we're willing to spend on a case in a ruthless economy PC. Meet the N-Tech P180 Side of the Road Edition. We got this for free on the side of the road. It has features like no front panel. Look at that unrestricted airflow after we removed these cakes up. Fan filters. It might even have bugs. It's not a bug, it's a feature. The craziest thing about the P180 SOTR edition is that it's not even the most defunct thing about itself. RIP NCIX. To go with our vintage N-Tech case, we got a vintage N-Tech power supply. This is an EarthWatt 650 watt and we would describe it as old reliable. You know it's reliable because someone's been running it in their gaming rig for the last 10 years. It might have uh Something kind of rattling around inside it, but it was only 20 bucks on eBay. And I'm sure that'll come out if we shake it hard enough. It's hot glue. I wonder what it was holding in place. I gotta say it's been a spicy minute. I think the last time I built in a P180 series case N-Tech was still relevant. Not Strat накan It's cool it is so dirty and like look at this. Oh my god Ew, it's dust Oh, I thought it was like a mark from the heat of the cpu or something gross. You can actually read the brand. It's a Zalman LGA775 cooler. All right. When did these guys go so wrong? All right, I never installed the RAM. Ha ha. All right. And, there we go. I guess I'll need some screws. Those screws are actually from the not working system that was in that case. Beautiful. Recycling. If your side of the road P180 doesn't have these screws, you too can check your hope and a prayer bin and hope and pray that you find some of them in it. They're not wide enough at the head. I would need like a washer or something instead. Hopefully they hold it in well enough to at least finish this video. Hey. Look at this class A cable management we got on this case here. Look at this. There's your little cutout right there. Kind of put that through there. Plug that into the back of your hard drive right there. A little something like that. Oh yeah. Boom. Done. And you just hope it stays out of the fan. That fan is so freaking dirty. I also found a screw in it. The top fans apparently connect via molex. So we'll go ahead and I really don't like touching this. It's just really very dirty. Like it smells. I did it for the views. This is the most dead fan that I have seen in some time. Check this out. You can actually see it's popped out of the frame. That's okay. This one spins. That one's spin. Does that just loosen it? Now older cases like this one don't have anywhere to properly mount an SSD. So we're gonna go with right there. One time I threw my SSD in the drive bay area and it fell out and shorted the back of my motherboard. I have a solution. We're gonna cable manage it to hold it in place. Okay, see. Now it cannot fall. See? Perfect. Here's a pretty modern feature actually. GPU power cables coming up through the basement. This case really was ahead of its time. Now it's time to put the cherry on top of our feces Sunday here. This GTX 1070 cost us about $200 and should deliver anywhere from 30 to 40% more performance than the 1650 that we put in our all brand new parts with warranties gaming machine. Isn't it beautiful, Andy? Yeah, it's a slipper. It's more than a sleep. It's like blackout drunk. Wow. Genuine Intel CPU, 0000 at 2.4 gigahertz. But hey, turbo's working. It's 14 nanometer, which for Intel means it's either very modern or quite old. It's coffee lake, which tells us more specifically what era it's from. So I'm expecting pretty decent performance from this thing. And it identifies as a Xeon 2400. So like a mobile Xeon. Fascinating. This is a 45 watt chip and wait, is this one unlocked? Yeah, that might not be the CPU that I thought it was. Yeah, we put the wrong CPU in. That's why it wasn't showing up as one that would be unlocked. So it needs to be one of these in our defense. They all kind of look the same. So while we swap out the CPU, it's a good time to point out that with a bare die chip like this, it is extremely important to have thermal compound covering absolutely everywhere on it. If you have any part of it that is not thermal pasted, there is a good chance it will die. It won't die. It'll just do really bad. No, it could die. Cause some part of it that doesn't have a proper temperature sensor. Oh, true. Yep. Yeah, I don't know. It's easy for me to say as someone with a full-time job and who's an adult and all that, that this is scary and I wouldn't recommend it. But teenage me would probably say, well, you're an idiot for buying this when you can get more FPS with that. Of course we need to figure out if it actually gets more FPS first. It's gonna crush it. Minor details. Absolutely crush it. Look, that's what we think, but let's just verify it, okay? Well, let's open up XTU here. Oh, it says thermal throttling. What? That's weird, we're not even doing anything. Oh wait, it's better now. What'd you do? Did you just give it a little wiggly wiggle? Yeah. Did one of the clips not go all the way in? Yeah, I think that you just missed one of the clips. Do you wanna turn it off and fix that? Sure. Sorry there, little CPU. Oh yeah, so it clicked in, but it didn't click into the motherboard. Give it a little wiggle. Wow, I get a cloud of dust when I press the power button. That's exciting. I've got XTU open, and I don't actually know if applying anything is going to work yet, but it appears as though everything is completely unlocked on this puppy, so that's cool. Our temps are good. We're idling at around 30 degrees now, which is exactly what I'd expect, which means it's time for a quick Cinebench drag race run. You ready? Genuine Intel CPU 0.0.0.0 versus Ryzen 3 3100. And go! Ooh! Dang! It may be sketchy, but it sure sketches this scene fast. Oh. Wow. And it's the same price for these machines, eh? Yep, exactly the same. Exactly the same. Dang! 2,800, 2,300 points. So that's a Cinebench win. Now, to be clear, if all you were after was Cinebench performance, you could also go pick yourself up a first gen Ryzen 7 8-core, and it would beat the stuffing out of this. But remember, we're after an all-round good experience here, and that includes gaming. Take that, Alex! Boom! Who's got more FPS now, baby? Oh, shoot, oh, my control key just came off. Oh, you have a lot more than me. Wait, why is there a control key here? That's not control. This is, there's two controls on the left. You're gonna have to plant the bomb at some point. Oh, no! No, I'm not! No! Okay, cool. So let's just like stand here and follow our team around. So we're anywhere from around 10, 15, to as high as 20% faster on our Frankenstein machine compared to all new parts. Let's try one more game. Before we do that, Alex really wants to try overclocking this thing. So what do you think? 4.5 gigahertz all-core? Yeah, we might be able to do 4.7. Not all-core. That's really aggressive. Yeah. All right, there's 4.5 all-core. Do you wanna give her? Hey, it's dead! I was about to say, give her a bit more voltage. 4.5 all-core? Didn't crash yet. That's something. Do you wanna run a Cinebench? I would love to. It's definitely on the struggle bus a little bit, but it's running at 4.5, boys. Dang! 96, 95, ah, it throttled! Okay, so we need better cooling. I'm 1.15. It's dead. It's not. Okay. We're done. You're done, bud. It's off. It turned off. That's weird. Our hard drive disappeared. Our partition is gone. Okay. That's why Doom Eternal won't launch. I mean, we did say that using used hard drives was something we don't recommend. At least all we lost was some games. That's crazy. So running 3DMark, we're looking at as high as 25, 30% difference in performance going from our $500 value rig to our ruthless economy rig. Making this one even more appealing is the fact that it has double the system memory, which, I mean, might not be useful in every game, but could definitely come in handy. So there you have it, folks. She might not look like much. She might not last for long, and she might smell real bad, but she's got it where it counts. The ruthless economy build comes out on top. You can find the links to where to check out all this stuff in the video description, as usually happens when we make a video about this kind of stuff, though it'll probably all be out of stock by the time you look at it, but hey, it's worth a shot. You know what else is worth a shot? Checking out our sponsor, Micro Center. Actually, that's great, because that's probably where you're gonna end up going when you look at this and go, yeah, no, I don't want any part of that. You can get the PowerSpec G435 computer at Micro Center. You can shop online or in person at any of their 25 locations across the US, and the PowerSpec G435 features an Intel Core i7-10700KF 3.8 gigahertz processor, Nvidia RTX 2070 Super graphics, 32 gigs of RAM, and it's packed in a Li-Ion-Li 205 ATX computer case. So basically, it's better than this in every possible way. But of course, it does cost a little bit more, because like, you know, warranties, little conveniences like that. Thanks for watching. If you guys enjoyed this video, maybe check out our previous exploration into Mr. Su's crazy Frankenstein CPUs, where we go a little bit more in depth into how they are actually made.