 In the last episode of the $69 gaming PC saga, we bought a Dell Optiplex for 27 bucks on eBay, stuck in a $30 graphics card, and got playable frame rates in a variety of popular casual and e-sports games. That is, depending on your standard for playable. But we didn't stop there. It's dramatic, right? So for our second installment, we're actually taking a combination of our own advice, and some from our community to bring that standard, that playable standard up by upgrading our original system with a few more budget parts, and hopefully turning it into an actually decent gaming PC. So can we build it? Yes, we can, maybe. I actually, I don't know, I'm not sure. Is that about the building thing? Isn't it? Can we fix it? The new Be Quiet! Silent Base 801 offers great usability and utilizes noise dampening vents to keep your PC quiet. Check it out on Newegg at the link below. So here's the deal. Using current gen parts, the cheapest gaming PC that you could build today, and that would actually be worth building, is probably around $30,000. So if you're looking for a good price, you can get it at Newegg. And if you're looking for a good price, you can get it at Newegg. And if you're looking for a good price, is probably around 350 to 400 bucks. So in order to make our Frankenstein-ish collection of parts worth the time investment and the inherent risks that come with buying used hardware, we figure we've got to undercut that price by a pretty good margin while getting legitimately decent frame rates. So our goal here is smooth 1080p gaming at medium or so settings. So as a refresher, here's our original system. There are some things we can upgrade in here, like the cardboard, but there are some other things that we're gonna be stuck with, like the motherboard, the cooler, the case, and the power supply. Once we start replacing those core components, that usually means we're better off building something new. But that also means that we're gonna have to be stuck with the 255 watt power limit. So the most obvious component to upgrade here, given that our GTX 650, poor thing, broken fan, had us stuck at 720p and low settings for the most part, is the graphics card. But there's been a lot of generations of graphics cards since the 600 series, so which one should we go with? Newer ones are obviously gonna get us better performance, but they stand to potentially be bottlenecked, and they obviously come with a higher price tag. So to find the best bang for the buck, we hooked up our GTX 750 Ti, a GTX 950, and a GTX 1050 Ti and ran some tests. There's some good news here, for those of you who are allergic to jank, by the way. I mean, we're not, no, clearly, but some people are. And that is that many of these newer GPUs actually are so much more power efficient that we can get rid of that SATA to six-pin PCI express power adapter, because they can draw all the power they need from the slot. So no more of this weird cable nonsense! Yes! Like this one! Ah! Oh, great. Oh, oh shoot, actually, I'm sorry. We're still gonna need that PCI express riser. Okay, yeah, we should get that. Yeah, charge your right click, and then you're gonna get, yep, but you can't hold it forever. Yeah, life's tough. Oh, you're dead. If you pressed E there, you would have lived. All right. Okay, so that's Overwatch, looks pretty good. Wow, look at the CPU usage, though, 90%. Yeah. Get him! So yeah, with Rocket League, we're getting around the same frame rate, even though we've upgraded the GPU. So it's actually still very impressive. We're getting very playable frame rates here at 80 right now. Yeah, it's nice and smooth, 1080. Even as you went through a whole particle cloud, it was at the 90 right there. But we're not getting that much of an improvement. Yeah. Once again, CPU activity pinned above 90%. Yep. All the way, Jose. This is pretty much all we need to know, but why don't we open up one more game just for good measure here? Okay. So once again, we are now running at 1080p. What kind of details are we looking at here? It's low everything. Low everything? Yeah. And really no improvement to speak of. Yeah, still around like 40 something. Yeah, this is noticeably choppy. Yeah. We were at like, I think we got a, whoa, bad guy. No, that was a good guy. Was that bad guy? No, that was here. Yeah, I can't tell the difference in CSGO when they don't have big red markers above their heads. Like in Overwatch. They do, they have that in Overwatch. That's why I like it. So in summary, going with a 750 Ti, but leaving everything else the same, gets Overwatch more playable, and then similar results in CSGO and Rocket League, but this time at 1080p instead of 720p. So it's an improvement, but the issue here is that our frame rates are still not great. They're about the same. They dipped below comfortably playable. Exactly. So time to upgrade. All right, let's do it. Did I leave you hanging there? No, I just- Oh, that time I did. This guy's cheating. Definitely using net hacks. What is a net hack? I don't even know what that is. Net hacks are the strongest hacks. They're hacks that interfere with the network connection. Oh, nice. Did you see that kill? Even with a CPU, even with the system being CPU bound, I'm trashing the competition. Okay, you're only firing at the big guy. Yeah, but- Because that's all you can hit. He's a big target. 35 SES. I gotta reload. Let me reload. Oh, I just got my ultimate. Oh. All right, let's go on to the next game. Okay. Well, you're just gonna play goalie. I missed it. I mean, it shouldn't surprise me that much. I knew we were CPU bound, but I thought maybe. Yeah, and nothing's happening on screen. I'm just walking around. It's still at like, well, okay, now it's at 50, but a second ago it was at 40. Yeah, 40. And you dipped down under 40, 32 there. So in summary then, even with our first GPU upgrade, we saw limited to no improvement. And then because of a fairly obvious, significant CPU bottleneck here, well, we continued to have the same experience as we made our way up the GPU stack. So the next upgrade is obviously going to be our CPU. Not only is our original one here from 2007, it's also a dual core, which wasn't a problem for gaming then, but it definitely is now. So according to Intel's compatibility list, the most powerful CPU for this chipset, the Intel G41 Express, is the Core 2 Quad QX9650. It actually runs at a similar clock speed, but it's got twice as many cores. And we happen to have one. Oh. It's a good thing we did all the testing before I started filming. Jeez. Okay, I got a screwdriver. Oh, great. Thanks for being careful with that. I got a screwdriver too. Let's do it together. Can I always lead by example? Yes, this is not one of those times. I'm sure there was a time once when I led by example. Boy, it's nice how easy these upgrades are to get at here. It's just like a hinge. Yeah. Great. Great. What's not so great is the fact that there is more to CPU compatibility than Intel's guidelines, I'm afraid. It turns out Dell never validated the QX9650 on this motherboard, which I guess kind of makes sense since who would put an extreme edition in a business tower? That doesn't make any sense. Good morning, we're doing it. Maybe a crazy person would try that. Thanks. So we needed to find one of the processors on Dell's compatibility list. And our old friends at FreeGeek, a nonprofit electronics recycling outfit located here in Vancouver, came to the rescue. They hooked us up with an Intel Core 2 Quad 9550. It's a couple steps down from the QX9650 and it has a slightly lower clock speed than even our E7500, but it's still a quad core. So we're hoping for a big improvement. CS, go! Whoa! Go! Whoa! Dang! Buttery smooth. That is way smoother. Look at that. And like this- And this is with the 750 Ti. This is the 750 Ti and $30 more for a CPU, quad core CPU. Wow. I mean, I still can't kill anything, but you know. So you're hovering around 90, 100 plus right now. Yeah. Going up from 45. And far more importantly, if you're playing something competitive is when there's a bunch of action on the screen, we're not getting those same kinds of frame drops or dips or hitches. Like it's smooth when you pan around a corner, there's no stutter, you know? It honestly blown me away. This is very playable. Yeah. Boom, boom, boom, boom. Get him, get him, get him, head shot. Whoa! He went flying. You don't suck, Linus. I fire large bullets. Oh! You fire large bullets. When I play CS, go. I like to fire slightly larger bullets than everyone else. I closed it like an idiot, but we were sitting at only around 60% CPU usage. Were we? So there you go. Just not running into a bottleneck, just having a couple of extra cores available to it. Huh. So you ended up increasing your FPS, what? Like 70%? I'm bad at math. That's crazy. But it went up a lot. All right, let's see you pulling some noobs down. 204. Yeah, you're in the menu, smart guy. Let's go, let's go. This guy is really bad. But you haven't killed him yet. No, but this is on his heart. Oh man. Now you've got reinforcements. Missed the sleep dart. Did you get him? Eliminated. Eliminated. That's what I do to bad guys. You guys killed each other though. Interestingly though, that's our CPU utilization in Overwatch. So we were still running into a CPU bottleneck, which means that even though we only upgraded our GPU one more tier, we probably wouldn't get any further improvements out of an even better one. Because we had such a great experience with CSGO and Overwatch, we decided it's the cheapest gaming PC. We might as well add the cheapest. Free game. Most popular free game. How do you just like get rid of your stupid? Yeah, this is what's so annoying. You can't get rid of it. You have to land. Oh, you got him. Dang. I'm gonna take his stuff. You mined him to death. I like this game. Order? Yeah, that's true. I mean, it's somewhat playable. What are we running at here? So this is a 1080p. Medium. Okay. All right. Upgrading the CPU and the GPU got us excellent results in terms of price to performance. So far, our Optiplex here was 30 bucks. The quad core CPU was another 30 bucks. And a 750 Ti is about 60 bucks, making this a 1080p, 60 FPS gaming PC for 120 bucks. And the crazy thing is we're still not done yet. Now, we won't be improving gaming performance this time around, but going from a hard drive to an SSD is certainly a quality of life improvement, which is why we actually did it before we started running all of our benchmarks and filming this video, because otherwise we'd waste a lot of time waiting around for that hard drive. So pretty much anything will do you, but we chucked in a Corsair Force LE, and with Windows 10 installed, it makes this old junker of a machine almost feel like a new PC. Almost. So given that you can get a 120 gig SSD for about 30 bucks on Amazon, $150 gaming PC, boom! Got it! Not bad. I mean, look at the responsiveness here, whether you're just kind of switching tabs, you guys saw me opening up Photoshop there, let's launch a web browser. It doesn't feel like a decade old computer at all. The only thing that's left is to deal with this measly four gigs of RAM. But upgrading RAM on older systems like this one can be a little bit challenging, and it can even be pretty confusing to even get started. Now, according to the spec sheet for the Dell Optiplex 380, our system only supports four gigs of RAM, two two gigabyte DIMMs. But since we have some DDR3 lying around, we figured we just might as well throw in another four gig stick and see what happens. Come on Riley, don't screw it up again. Oh, I love the sound of that click. I'm not checking your work, I'm just appreciating it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure, sure, sure. Wait, are we expecting this to work or not? I'm not sure, I've never done this before, so. Oh wow! It worked! What, was it supposed to? Okay, not sure, really doing this for the first time, so don't know about RAM. Is it all detected properly? I thought you prepared this video. Yeah, it's all that, look at that. Yeah. Eight gigs of DDR3, baby. Eight gigs, oh, it worked. Oh, thank goodness. Okay, I really can't tell. Did you think this was gonna work or not? I'm not sure. Okay, do you wanna know? So there can be any number of restrictions on the kind of memory that you can run in these sorts of pre-built systems. What speed the sticks run at, whether they're single-sided or double-sided DIMMs, and even just straight up hardware locks so that they'll only work with certain brands or certain models. And given that our RAM upgrade actually didn't have that much of an effect on gaming performance, our take here is that if you have some four gig DDR3 DIMMs lying around, give it a shot, but otherwise it might not be worth it, especially since once you cross that $200 threshold, or once you need to do more than just game, like if you have to get actual work done, it might be time to start thinking about spending a bit more to get something more modern. With that said, a bit of frustration on the RAM upgrade doesn't change that overall, this was an incredibly successful experiment. I mean, we're not saying that we'd recommend that everyone tries this at home. Buying new PCs is dead. That would be the clickbait thumbnail. But it does show that contrary to popular belief, PC gaming isn't that expensive to get into, provided that you're willing to do some bargain hunting. Which I am. You hunted this. That's why it's dead now. It looks dead. My computer. It's like dismembered, you know. I can't recommend enough the Massdrop Sennheiser HD 6XX headphones. These are based closely on one of Sennheiser's all time best pairs of headphones. They're actually the ones I use at home. And they're one of Massdrop's all time best sellers with over 40,000 of their members picking them up to date. They have not changed the driver and sound structure compared to the HD 650s, meaning you get a nice balanced mid-range and natural sounding bass. They've got a detachable six foot cable though, instead of a 10 foot cable based on community feedback. And they've got three and a half millimeter and quarter inch jack compatibility for everyday use. It comes included with Sennheiser's long-term support, and you can check out the link below in the video description. So thanks for watching, guys. If you disliked this video, you can hit that button. But if you liked it, hit like, get subscribed, or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description. Also down there is our merch store, which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum, which you should totally join. Is that gonna be our thumbnail, please? Yeah, I'm thinking something like this. Are you editing our thumbnail on the machine? Wow, yeah. It's like thumbnail-ception. It's like it's good for work and play. That's very stylized. I know. Yeah. Thanks for watching.