 Thanks to grandma you are finally one step closer to your dream of eSports domination She just gave you her old computer. You know the one she bought it seven years ago on Clearance, but that's not important. All that matters is you've got your valorant invite and you are ready to tear up the battlefield There's just one small problem your new computer Is really really slow so it's time for a quick and Dirty upgrade on the cheap Brought to you by glassware instantly see your current and past network activity detect malware and block Excuse me. Oh, that's dusty and block badly behaving apps on your PC or Android device use offer code Just to get 25% off glassware at the link below. Excuse me It Truly is a Fantastic time to be a PC gamer pretty much all the biggest games in the world right now can be enjoyed on relatively attainable hardware and Okay, your grandma might not be the type to bequeath you a PC mine sure isn't but we specifically chose this machine because it is the kind of thing that even if it wasn't given to them a student could obtain for him or herself without spending a lot of money and We also saw a pretty reasonable upgrade path for it So we went with the delightfully mediocre Dell Optiplex 90 10 a newer version of the classic gray Dell tower of yester decade now poke around the insides We've got a core i7 3770 now that's not the unlocked K variant But quite honestly you're not gonna be doing any overclocking on this Dell special motherboard anyway to 4 gig sticks of SK Hynix PC 3 1600 megahertz memory. Okay. Oh, what's is that a gt? gt6 40 graphics card oh that is nasty. Oh wow This might actually use a standard power supply moment of truth here we go Man I do not miss hard drives look at this Even the images for the shortcuts on the desktop take like 18 minutes to load in Let's start with something. It should be able to handle. Let's play some League of Legends, huh? Well, I finally got in and now that I did dang it's running just fine look at that 150 170 FPS I always forget just how easy it is to run this game Hmm, we're getting dips though. I mean that is sort of a function of this being Barely up to spec hardware. I'm seeing some stutters as I'm panning the camera around a little bit Certainly better than I would expect any other modern game to run on what was a bad video card You know seven eight years ago, and it's definitely playable I mean you're probably gonna you know you're probably gonna get ganked at some point if I'm getting my terminology right because of a leg spike, but It is what it is all right, so this game is running and aside from some chug. It's running pretty well This says that 1080p medium quality Finishing loading it needs a separate screen for finishing loading. That's how you know you're using a hard drive All right, let's go boys. Wow. This is not as good an experience Definitely running at a lower frame right now not to the point where I'd say it interferes with my ability to play the game though Like this is still a solid you know 45 to 55 somewhere in that range FPS It's usable one thing. I haven't noticed is cool. Never mind there. It goes. Okay. It's it's chugging. It's struggling Is that GPUs fan even spinning? Oh? Yeah, it's working. Okay. Oh, oh, there's a hero Wait, I'm a hero. Are you a hero? Oh what there was another hero there? He was hiding How is the easy AI so smart? Okay, well anyway, that's enough of that game Wow it's really chugging We're getting down as low as 30 plus FPS, but those frame times you can really see them spiking so just cuz you got 30 FPS doesn't mean that you're actually getting reasonable frame times and And every time your frame times jump that's when you feel like a leg or a or a spike or like a stutter Okay, hey partner. How we doing here bud? Oh, we not doing so good Neat yeah, yeah, yeah, and we're dead. Well that was quick This is shocking Hey Colty buddy pal How does Valorant work Oh Lordy I died um how many rounds do I have to play I joined a server so I could benchmark a graphics card I'm trying to quit and it's like hey you're harming the experience of the other players you shouldn't do that How long do I have to play this for? It could be upwards of 24 rounds What? Yeah, so it's whichever team gets to 13 first 13? Yeah, it's kind of crazy I'm not playing for you I'm not playing for you I'm not playing for you I'm not playing 13 rounds what who's got time for this? Yeah, you could just I mean you know gamers but you could just leave I think one of my teammates is already gone because they're just standing at the spawn so could I could I guilt free leave at that point? Yeah, you could probably go for a leave yeah Okay cool I mean they're probably gone because I'm terrible so it's still my fault They gave up, you'll be fine don't worry about it Alright thanks if anyone asked why I bailed on the match I'm gonna let them know Colton said it's okay For fun we're gonna try something a little more demanding we've got PUBG running at 1080p sort of Because the render scale is 70% of 1080p and we've got everything cranked to very low There we go whoa okay that is not a lot of FPS And this is not a good looking game at all low I can barely even tell where like the towns are In fairness to the GT 640 this looks terrible but is running relatively smoothly Run forest run Now there's a dated reference Ow ow ow why would you do that? What's wrong with you? Ow ow Okay alright Well there you have it unsurprisingly almost all the games we tried were at least functional If we were willing to sacrifice visual quality on our GT 640 So if all you want to do is play these games then go ahead and check out the eBay links below and get out of here Just go for it However if you were hoping to turn the details up to high or get a smoother experience in the games Because what we noticed was that even the ones that were running at high FPS were stuttering and hitching a lot of the time You're gonna want to watch on Step number one is definitely for the sake of my sanity to install a bloody SSD in this thing Let's get it shut down here Going from a spinning disk to a solid state drive is a monumental improvement Now a 1TB SATA SSD from a well known brand is gonna run you about $100 these days But if you don't need that much capacity which you might not And you're willing to just kind of take a gamble there are some deals out there Just make sure that you grab something with a DRAM cache So for example the Fatty Dove Racing 120GB that we checked out recently That did turn out to have a DRAM cache only cost us 20 bucks Now in terms of mounts well this case is pretty old it doesn't have 2.5 inch mounts But the good news is that SSDs don't have any moving parts and we can just chuck it there Now for system memory 8GB of RAM might be enough If all you're gonna do is play basic games with pretty much nothing running in the background But a cheap brand name 16GB kit like this HyperX Fury set that we had on hand Will go a long way towards running more demanding games and improving multitasking eBay, Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace are all good places to find fantastic deals on DDR3 From people who are upgrading whether it's to Ryzen or something from Intel right now We were lucky our cheapo Dell motherboard happens to have four memory slots So if all we wanted was 16GB of RAM we could just slot in two more 4GB sticks and it's off to the races But we don't have any matching memory and we want the best chance at compatibility here So what we're gonna do is what a lot of people would have to do Because they might end up with a motherboard that only has two slots on it Is we're gonna take out what we've got and we're gonna replace it with our new RAM As for the GT 640 graphics card in here, it's pretty tired In fairness to it, it was born tired As soon as you fire up something much more demanding than League of Legends, you know, it starts to struggle The good news though is that the Core i7 3770 CPU in here is still a very competent gaming processor even to this day So we can add a lot of graphics muscle to this machine before our CPU becomes the bottleneck As long as we stay within Ryzen Our GPU upgrade ambitions are going to be somewhat limited by the 275W power supply that's included with our system And while we could add a new power supply, especially with this system that does seem to use standard ATX By the time we add a power supply, we're getting dangerously close to new system kind of money And besides, opening up that can of worms can cause more problems than it solves Even some proprietary motherboards that look standard might have different pinouts or specialty connectors for example That make them a hassle to deal with Now, we did go secondhand for our memory and that is totally an option for graphics Something like a GTX 960 is a great choice for under $70 But if we want to max out our machine without having to upgrade our power supply The two GPU options for the most FPS per power consumption are the GTX 1650 Super So this one right here is 100W and starts at about $170 And the GTX 1660 Ti, this is 120W and starts around the $250 mark Now since both of these graphics cards require external power And this power supply doesn't have PCI Express power connectors We're going to use these SATA to 6-pin adapters I know the saying, Molex to SATA, lose all your data, etc. etc. etc. But either of these cards is going to pull 75W from the PCI Express slot leaving less than the 50W that the SATA connector can handle To be drawn over the PCI Express cable So we should be fine Now I'm going to install the 1660 Ti because the point of this video is to show you guys with some choice upgrades What a machine like this can be capable of But if you don't have the budget for that right now You can always get something else for now and then pick up one of these later on down the line once they fall in price Another point by the way guys, if you don't have any extra power available Or you were only able to find one of those half height desktops You do still have an option The GTX 1650 has a low profile variant, this one's from Zotac That does not require any external power making it a simple drop in upgrade And most of the time they'll include a low profile bracket so you can install it in one of those slim towers Now here we are, half an hour later and depending on what kind of deals you can scrounge The cost of a game console or even less And we are ready to boot up our system with that next-gen technology of solid state Man I can already tell how much more responsive this thing is just from opening up control panels Like resizing windows, makes a big difference Let's kick it off with League of Legends shall we? See how long this game takes to load on our SSD Wow, I bet I could even have Chrome open in the background LTTstore.com Get your water bottles here, get your hoodies The classic stealth hoodie processor t-shirt Wow we are right up against our FPS cap here How about no FPS cap? How about that? What do you think of that? Alright, hey 370 FPS And you can see as I'm scrolling around here we're not getting those jutters and stutters You can see that it's nice and smooth Even though I'm recording at only 30 FPS you can still tell there's a marked difference Wow those frame times, 3 milliseconds, 300 FPS in the loading screen Now that shouldn't be that impressive but compared to what we saw last time it is Well that really is a lot better We're ripping around on the map at what? 250 frames per second, it really is amazing how much game These old third gen core i5s and i7s have in them Even in modern titles like this What a difference Not only is it running way smoother, like you can just tell But we've actually turned the details up to medium so the game looks a lot better as well View distance in particular in this game makes a big difference to your potential success So the bottom line is you pair a machine like this up with an inexpensive 120 or 144 Hz display and a decent mouse And you're going to be clicking heads all day long in games like Valorant and CSGO And even getting a pretty darn good experience in heavier titles Now the thing is this setup isn't going to make you a better gamer Only you can do that But as we explore it in our does FPS make you a better gamer series It will make it easier for you to get better Now even if you don't go for the GPU upgrade for grandma's old rig I would still recommend the SSD one Just because it will make the experience that much better as you're rising through the ranks in the lighter titles on a really tight budget So if you guys like this video maybe hit that subscribe button to see us upcycle an old laptop into a pretty snazzy home theater PC I don't remember actually green lighting that project Nicholas but apparently we're doing it now And we're also doing this segue to our sponsor Blinkist Thank you for sponsoring today's video Blinkist is the app that takes the best insights and info from thousands of non-fiction books and condenses them into just 15 minutes It's basically like speed reading without the annoying learning to speed read part You can listen to audio summaries or read them for yourself in a wide variety of categories Such as business, finance, parenting, psychology, and self-help Or hey, if you're a really broken person maybe all of them They've even got full audiobooks that their premium subscribers can get 65% off the retail price on And some of their most popular titles include the AI economy which explains how the rise of artificial intelligence will affect society So take a look at all of that The first 100 people to go to blinkist.com slash LTT are going to get unlimited access for a week to try it out So do that by clicking the link below Thanks for watching guys If you're looking for another fun video to watch Maybe check out the last season of Scrapyard Wars where I basically did this to Well, I'm not going to spoil it for you We're going to have that link below