 A portion of this video is sponsored by IBM. With inflation running rampant, PC gaming has gotten out of reach for millions of people around the world. Or has it? It's been four years since we built our last hyper-budget $69 gaming PC. And I think you guys are going to be shocked by what we were able to achieve with some savvy shopping and a little bit of patience. We're talking quad-core CPU, 16 gigs of RAM, and enough GPU horsepower to play the latest e-sports titles with your friends. And yes, no joke for the grand total price of just 69 US dollars. Sounds great. Let's build it. What are we waiting for? This message from our sponsor. Thanks to IBM for sponsoring a portion of this video. IBM believes what business needs most to drive progress in this next era is creativity. Yes, you heard that correctly. Creativity. I'm not talking about creativity in the traditional sense of artists and musicians. No, I'm talking about the developers, the data scientists, the visionaries who are creatively applying technology in business to drive change. IBM calls them new creators, and you can learn more about them later in this video. Thanks IBM for sponsoring that portion of the video. The $69 we spent last time around is more like $82 today. So by sticking to the same dollar value, we're going to be working with a lower overall budget than the Dell-based machine that I built with Riley back in 2018. The good news is that consumer electronics continue to be a terrible investment, meaning that that 380 tower that we used last time fared even worse than the cash stuffed in our mattresses. That means we can do better. Meet the Z420. It's a 2012 workstation from HP that for its time was blazing fast, and that considering our budget still blazes to this day. It was primarily marketed to industries like VFX that require fatty processors to optimize their render times, which is why its hardware is fit more for a server than the desk of an office worker. It's got an Intel Xeon processor, up to eight sticks of error correcting DDR3 memory, and typically an Nvidia Quadro or AMD Fire Pro GPU. Let's take a closer look at it. Wow, this is definitely feeling pretty 10 years old though, to their credit. That is damn clean for 10 years of dust buildup. There's a lot to talk about in here. You won't find support for modern features like M.2 NVMe drives or multi gigabit LAN, but what it does have is standard PCI express Gen3 slots. So you could load it up with any kinds of expansion cards that you would want. It supports a whopping 10 drives with these SATA ports down here. It's got USB 3, both in the front and in the back. And this, look at this. This is a 20 pin ATX connector, I think. Wait, is it even 20? What the hell is this? 18 pin motherboard power with what appears to be a more standard EPS connector in the top. HP, why you gotta be like that? Just use a 24 pin connector like everyone else. This cooler is pretty funny. It uses three heat pipes and an aluminum fin stack, but normally you would just bend the heat pipes in a U and you would put the fin stack right on top of the socket. I don't know why they did it this way. And this is cool. They've actually got this little memory cooler that clips on on top of your RAM slots. Assuming I can actually, hello? Oh, this is cute. Angela B signed the back of it. Stop Angie. Guess this was your workstation. There it goes. Jeez, okay, there you go. Got a total of two sticks of RAM in here. Four would have been optimal given that the CPU has a quad channel memory controller, but budgetary constraints. Conspicuously absent is a hard drive. This was probably shredded due to the data security policies of whatever organization this machine came from. There's a 600 watt power supply. Pretty deese, nothing about 80 plus or anything about efficiency anywhere. And it doesn't seem to be standard ATX. So thanks HP, I guess. Here's a benefit to their proprietary nonsense though. This seems to be a 92 millimeter fan blowing directly through the power supply. It kind of reminds me of Antec's attempted CPX form factor power supplies. That's probably a pretty efficient way to cool it. Honestly, the power supply and maybe the RAM are probably the best cooled parts of this computer. Looks like the entire rest of the chassis gets a single 92 millimeter fan here at the back. And there's nothing in the side panel that, oh my God, did you put this here? Nope, that was there when we got it. This was already here. I love it. This says November 22, 22, wait, November 2022. What year is it? Not 2023 yet. Oh yeah, so what is this? It's from the future, dude. It's from the future. Ha ha, the RAM is installed wrong. Convenient little diagram here showing you which order to populate the slots in. It doesn't really matter though. It'll still be operating in dual channel mode. So if it works, it works. It's just to help improve compatibility. Overall, I am super impressed. This is a ton of computer for a few stems more than five Canadian dime bags, which translates to $44 and 49 cents of real American money leaving us with $25 and 20 cents remaining. If you're inspired by our thriftiness, by the way, and you wanna purchase a unit like this for yourself, don't be surprised if it takes a little while to find one at the right price. The availability of these most chronic workstations can be a little bit boom or bust with nothing on the market for months at a time. And then a big office or a school upgrades flooding the market and crashing prices for a week or two giving you the perfect opportunity to sneak in there and make your move. It's also not the only option. So keep your eyes peeled for other models in the HP Z line like the Z440, 620, 820, et cetera. And Dell and Lenovo also have similar workstations from this period that are worth watching out for like the Precision T3600 and the ThinkStation S30 respectively. If you know of anyone that uses these workstations currently, it also might be worth getting in touch with someone from their organization to see if they're planning to upgrade soon. With a little bit of luck, you might even be able to convince them to give you a heads up when the units are about to find their way out the door. And if you're a lottery winner lucky and build good rapport, they might even sell you one directly for a low price. This is the kind of benign social engineering that we don't often talk about on this channel, but when you're bargain hunting it can be the difference between tens of dollars and hundreds of dollars spent to achieve your goal. On the topic of social engineering, let's talk about the sponsor for this portion of the video. This portion of the video was sponsored by IBM. As mentioned upfront, the new creators are the visionaries creatively applying technology in business to drive change. At Linus V Group, we're always trying to find ways to further our business and craft through creativity, much like the new creators. And one of the new creators that we resonate the most with is Stephanie Crothers, the chief people hacker for X-Force Red team at IBM. She's responsible for overseeing a global team of hackers hired to break into organizations and uncover risky vulnerabilities that attackers may use for personal gain. Stephanie pokes and prods organizations for security gaps through social engineering, the most fun kind of engineering. She's driven by her natural curiosity and that's why she's always asking, how can I take this step further? How can I test them? And we here at LMG relate to her approach because there's not a day that goes by where we don't think, how can we design or engineer a better reaction? If you wanna learn more, check out IBM's YouTube channel or a new creator's homepage at the links below. Thanks IBM for sponsoring that portion of the video. There's $25 left in our coffer and two parts we still need. A hard drive, cause we don't have one and a graphics card upgrade. This NVS 510 is a lower end Nvidia Quadro that's designed more for CAD or CGI work than playing video games. To be clear, it can play games. Overwatch and CSGO ran at 1080p low settings. Well, I shouldn't say ran, but they definitely walked and bumping the resolution down to 720p actually gave us better frame rates than the OG $69 PC. That's thanks to our much faster CPU. But in rocket league, a game that might as well be running directly off the GPU, our precious Z420 here gets walloped. We can't have that. And unfortunately, while it may not be 2021 anymore, graphics card prices down at the very low end haven't actually dipped that much, at least not yet. We had wanted to pick up a 750 Ti to benefit from its more modern Maxwell architecture compared to the rest of the 700 series. But every time we attempted to buy one on eBay, the listing vaporized. So we took our search local. To avoid a later season scrapyard war scenario where the seller recognizes us and gives us a deal, we had our faceless probationary employee begin scouring local listings to find something legit. We found this listing for an R9 270X, only 30 Canada Federation tokens. And it had been up for a month and got an update just over a week ago. Writer boy even talked him down to 25 loonies. We were in luck until we weren't. The luck was a pipe dream. The seller told us he was out of town for a week. And then we messaged him on the day he was supposed to return and he had already sold it. Somehow though, we had missed a perfectly good GTX 760. $30 Canadian, and we weren't gonna make the same mistake we did last time. Sent the email and picked it up. Hit me. Good throw. Conveniently, our workstation already has the, okay, tool-less mechanism for installing the GPU. One potential challenge you might run into is that this older power supply only has six pin PCI express connectors. And you might find some modern GPUs that have a single eight pin instead. So we did need to use an adapter, but many eight pin GPUs, especially from this era, actually did come with dual six pin adapters. So it's quite possible that it'll be included with your GPU. Not a bad little upgrade. So after our conversion to Freedom Bucks, how much do we have left? $2.07. A hard drive for $2.07 capable of actually storing games at a speed faster than a turtle covered in molasses. No problem. Let's check eBay. On the one hand, this one is $2 and 250 gigabytes. That'll hold Warzone. On the other, it's a spinning disc and it's from 2008. That's gonna be a big fat boatload of nope, let's move on. Five bucks, 250 gigs, but still spinning disc. And somehow this one is even older. $8 maybe? 320 gigs, spinning disc, 2011, too slow, too old. Okay, forget eBay. Let's go back to the local listings. How about Craigslist? How are people selling these used drives for the same price as they cost brand new? Maybe Facebook Marketplace? More expensive than new? All right, we'll head to Amazon, I guess. The ADATA SU635 240 gig. That seems good enough, but how do we actually fit it in our budget? Where do we get $21 from? Is it still a $69 PC if we have to do a special brownie bake sale in order to raise funds? What do you think, David? Seems like the kind of rule bending you would engage in. Oh yeah, sell the GPU. We've actually got behind the scenes brownie eating and more available on floatplane.com, by the way. Go check it out. But wait, we can't bake brownies, but what we do have is this extra workstation GPU with two gigs of VRAM that, ooh, is capable of running four displays. What's that worth on eBay? At a price of $19.92, that gives us $21.99. Dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun. And there it is, the final piece of the $69 gaming PC. Okay, doesn't exactly have an SSD mounting point, but that's okay. We don't really need that. We're just gonna do that. We don't really have any budget left for double-sided tape, so we're just gonna chuck that in there a little something like that. Oh, gorgeous, beautiful. Truth be told, if we really tried to maximize our budget, we probably could have gotten more like 30 bucks for our GPU. And with that extra $9, an SSD with a DRAM cache, like the ADATA SU760. Or maybe we could have picked up a lanyard from lttstore.com with our extra budget. Now the only question that remains is how does this thing perform now that we've got all the parts? Oh, she goes. Okay. Ooh, escape key for startup menu. I mean, I'm just curious, right? Like, do you wanna, do you guys wanna see the UVFI application? Device configuration. Our drive shows up. Cool, cool. SATA mode IDE. That was default back then, I guess. So you can turn up the idle fan speed. Well, there's really not a lot to change in here. You can turn hyperthreading on and off though. Wow me, CSGO. Okay, this is gonna be awesome. I'm stoked, because we are definitely getting over 120 FPS on 120 Hertz monitor on a $70 freaking gaming computer. This is absolutely playable. How are there so many enemies? What is happening here? Is this death match or something? Oh, we're playing death. Wow, did I set it to death match? This isn't even just a little bit usable. This is completely, absolutely playable. 130, 140, 170 FPS, like, like what? Oh, I love it. I'm being penalized for leaving my last match early. Wow, this is, what? This is running great. What is it? Control Z, alt Z. Do you not have G-force experience on here? If the point is just to see how it's performing, it's very clear that this is running well enough for me to play the game. Did I kill that guy? I don't know what's happening here, man. I stepped in his gross blood. Where'd she go? There's a turret. I don't know how to play this game. Wait, is this set to high? This is running awesome. Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. What just happened? I died. But that's okay, because damn it, I died in style. Look at this. 90, 100 FPS. We were running at high, 1080p. Okay, dipped down to like 80 there for a bit. Still though, come on. If I'm getting kills in Overwatch, it's a good computer, okay? Because I do not know how to play this game for crap. Did I get him? I got him. Ha ha ha ha. This is freaking awesome. We managed up to triple the frame rates compared to our last $69 PC in some cases, even being able to crank the settings in some of these games while still getting comfortable frame rates. It can even run Shadow of the Tomb Raider and almost play it stably, clocking an average of 30 FPS. I think with a slightly better GPU, recent AAA games could be in reach. Maybe one that's still getting driver updates rather than just security fixes, for example. That would also be a big help running newer games that require DirectX 12 or more than two gigabytes of VRAM. Titles like Tiny Tina's Wonderland or Elden Ring won't run at all out of the box. Though there may be some workarounds available, like this hack of Elden Ring that lets you run it in offline mode. It actually runs pretty well for a game that costs nearly as much as the hardware it's running on. It might be 720p on low settings, but it's only stuttering occasionally. Certainly not a bad enough experience to justify such a quick death on such an early level. Maybe this section is just less demanding. But hey, this entire gaming rig cost the same as the LTT screwdriver at lttstore.com. I'd say the fact that it can open Elden Ring at all is pretty freaking impressive. So everything said and done, with a little bit of patience, it's clear that getting a modestly competent gaming PC for under 70 US dollars is completely within the realm of possibility. It's not gonna play the latest AAA games at ultra settings, but what it will do is get you up and running in common e-sports titles at 1080p, and even at high frame rates that will allow you to be competitive. Go check out our last $69 PC build if you haven't already, and hit subscribe so you are in the know right away when we upgrade this bad boy, because yes, we are definitely going to do that again to push it to the limit.