 It's build log time again, but this one's gonna be a little bit different. Instead of trying to put a computer under liquid or in space or anything like that, we're actually gonna be building something a little more down-to-earth. It's only around a thousand bucks for a gaming rig. And you might kind of go, okay, well, Linus, what could be interesting about this? And I'll tell you, this is actually based on a challenge that was issued to me by the folks over at AMD, who kind of went, 4K displays are becoming a lot more affordable right now, but the perception among gamers is that you can't really drive games at that resolution, and to a degree, that is correct. In the latest AAA titles running at Ultra Res, you're gonna need like multiple of the highest-end graphics cards in order to get a playable, enjoyable experience. But, they also continued, what about the titles that people are actually playing all the time? Your free-to-play games like League of Legends or Team Fortress 2, or your more mainstream or eSportsy titles like CSGO or StarCraft 2, what could you build an affordable computer that can run those games at 4K, now that the price of really nice displays like this Acer I've got right here are coming way, way down all the time? Well, let's find out, shall we? Going back to my purchase of a ViewSonic P95F Plus B, I've believed that a display can last you through several of these bad boys, if you choose one of sufficient quality for your needs now and in the future. My old Dell 2405 FPW actually got retired from use by my wife only a couple months ago, when she saw LG's 29 UltraWide. So, the component choices for this rig were a little different than normal. We didn't overbuild the PC in an attempt to run every game at 4K, but we also didn't want to build the most budget cheapo gaming rig ever either. It was meant to be a reasonable bang for the buck sweet spot, so around 900 to a thousand dollars, gaming and multipurpose AMD based PC with some upgradeability and with the ultimate plan of passing it along and replacing it with a new sweet spot rig when the time is right. A strategy that can actually yield much better value for the money in the long run, versus trying to spend, you know, twice as much on a machine in the first place in an attempt to get it to last twice as long. Not to mention that this way you end up with two machines, so you can repurpose your old rig for a friend or family member or server or whatever else down the line. So at the heart of the rig is an FX6350 6-core CPU, although a 6300 is also a great choice if you don't mind doing a little bit of overclocking. We could have stuck with the 8-core that AMD accidentally put in the motherboard that they sent us, but given how many threads modern games support and the growing support for lower CPU overhead APIs like Mantle and DirectX 12, I don't feel like spending a bunch more on a CPU is a great investment for a sweet spot PC today. Let's throw away the ore. Okay, I don't know the words to that song. Our motherboard is an MSI 970 gaming board. It looks nice if that matters to you. It's reasonably well built. It includes support for two-way crossfire if you wanted to add another graphics card in the future, although it should be noted that sweet spot rigs usually live their lives with a single graphics card, and it's got a solid I.O. layout with four USB 3 ports. We kitted it out with eight gigs of the heaviest memory that we've ever seen. Now, I'm just kidding. It wasn't heavy, but we had to justify needing two people to build one computer somehow. We used an AMD branded kit, but any dual channel DDR3 would work just fine. If you're a heavy multitasker, you might opt for 16 gigs right off the bat, but RAM upgrades are one of those things that's easy and inexpensive to do later on down the road, when and if you need more. That's where all my print jobs went. I mean, what's a print job? I couldn't do it. Print jobs. Our drive, power supply, and case choices aren't terribly important for gaming performance, but I'll let you know what we used anyway. We went with a 240 gig Kingston SSD that we had lying around the office, although you could pick any value SSD for your boot drive these days. A two terabyte WD green for mass storage and for large games and programs, a Seasonic 400 Watt 80 plus bronze power supply, and an NZXT S340 case for its solid airflow, clean looks, and great price. Which leads us to the last key component for any gaming rig, the graphics card. We chose the Radeon R9 285 because at under 250 bucks, with some available for as little as like 200 and change on promo, it stays within that FPS per dollar sweet spot that usually exists between about 120 to 280 dollars. And it also has, at least we were hoping when we spec'd this thing, enough horsepower for the games that we're going to be running on this rig, with graphics settings turned up even at 4K. So here's the finished build. And with it done, it's time to benchmark all the games for me, and by me I mean Luke, and by all the games, I mean we took anything that had over 10,000 viewers on Twitch TV, so like the mainstream and competitive stuff, added in a couple choices of our own, fired it up at 4K on an Acer B326HK, a gorgeous IPS monitor, and cranked the details to see how they would run. And actually, the results surprised me a little bit. Across our test suite of Dirt Showdown, StarCraft 2, Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike Global Offensive, League of Legends, Dota 2, and wow, only World of Warcraft, likely thanks to its recent graphical update with Warlords of Draenor, needed the details turned down at all in order to spit out not just playable, but actually very enjoyable frame rates at a massive 3840x2160 resolution. Now this won't be the case across the board. We didn't make a magical computer here. If you're going to grab the latest AAA, OMG photorealism titles from a series like Assassin's Creed, Battlefield, Crysis, or the like, then you'll need to run at a lower resolution and deal with the interpolation that comes along with that, unless you want to step up to some seriously more powerful hardware. But not everyone is interested in that, and I was still, I don't know what the right word is, so I'll say, amused when I realized that the most popular games that gamers are really spending the bulk of their time on these days just aren't that demanding, and there's no reason that a reasonable modern gaming rig can't run them cranked on a 4K monitor today. So thanks AMD for sponsoring this fun little build, log, and experiment. Thanks to you guys for watching. Like this video if you liked it, dislike it if you thought it sucked, as always, check out the links in the video description to support us. You can buy a cool t-shirt like this one, you can give us a monthly contribution, or you can change your Amazon bookmark to one with our affiliate code, so whenever you buy CPUs, graphics cards, motherboards, heatsinks, SSDs, or whatever else, we get a small kickback, that kind of thing helps us out a lot. Thanks again for watching, and as always, don't forget to subscribe.