Building A Tight Budget Light Gaming & Work PC With Great Upgrade Options - £250 Ryzen / Build Guide
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- Опубліковано 15 лип 2024
- In this video I put together a PC for a family friend with a very tight budget of around £250. This build was assembled December 2020 when parts were overpriced and scarce. The criteria was to have something which performs well enough for now, with plenty of affordable upgrade options in the near future.
All components in this build are either brand new or used with a good warranty.
The main use case of this PC will be school/college work with light gaming on the side.
The base of the system is made up from an AMD Ryzen 1300X processor in the AsRock A320M-HDV R4.0 motherboard. This gives a great upgrade path for the future to a Ryzen 3, 5, 7 processor from the 1st, 2nd or 3rd generation when it's needed.
I used a single 8GB stick of Corsair Vengence LPX DDR4 2400Mhz RAM. This means the RAM only operates in single channel mode at the moment and a little performance is lost. However upgrades will be cheaper and easier, as there is no need to replace existing RAM, simply slot in another 8GB stick and off you go.
The system also features an Asus GeForce GTX 760 2GB Direct CUII graphics card which was donated from a member of their family. Although dated by today's standards this was a free component for the build and will suit light gaming use for the time being.
I used a EVGA 600W 80+ White power supply as it was the only unit available in stock brand new for a reasonable price when building the PC. It is a good value for money option and gives plenty of power for future graphics card upgrades when required.
Storage ended up mechanical hard drive only due to budget constraints and capacity requirements, however the motherboard has onboard M.2 PCIe connectivity which allows an SSD to be installed in the future and used as a boot device.
=[ PARTS LIST & SYSTEM SPECS ]=
CiT F3 Black & Green Micro ATX Tower Case
AsRock A320M-HDV R4.0 Micro ATX Motherboard
AMD Ryzen 1300X Quad Core Processor @ 3.5Ghz
8GB Corsair Vengence LPX DDR4 2400MHz Memory / RAM (1x 8GB Sticks)
Asus GeForce GTX 760 2GB DirectCU II Graphics Card
Seagate "Barracuda LP" 1.5TB / 1500GB Hard Drive
EVGA 600W 80+ White Power Supply
AMD Wraith CPU heatsink and fan
System Running Windows 10 Home x64 (64-Bit)
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-TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 - Intro
0:05 - Parts & Justification
4:12 - Build Process Begins
4:28 - CPU & Cooler Installation
10:28 - Memory Installation
11:50 - Case Initial Preparation
13:49 - Motherboard Backplate Installation
14:40 - Motherboard Standoffs Test Fit
16:48 - Cable Management Planning
17:50 - Front Panel Cable Management
18:57 - Power Supply Installation
23:56 - Motherboard Installation
25:45 - Motherboard Connections
31:38 - Front Panel Wiring
33:42 - Front Fan Connector
34:35 - Internal Speaker / Buzzer
35:04 - Hard Drive SATA Cables
36:24 - Final Cable Management
38:12 - Finished Cable Managment
40:00 - Hard Drive Installation
41:54 - Graphics Card Installation
44:58 - Cable Tie Reuse Trick
45:27 - Finished Build Overview
46:20 - Power On Test (Fails)
47:15 - Troubleshooting
52:49 - Motherboard Swap
53:45 - Power On Test (Again)
55:03 - Successful Post
55:20 - BIOS Setting Tweaks
56:27 - LED Light Strip Addition
58:00 - Finished Lighting Showcase
58:43 - Within Windows 10
59:11 - Outro
Recorded using an iPhone 6S in 4K Ultra-HD. - Наука та технологія
Extremely helpful, especially with the unfortunate trouble shooting required.
Thanks for the great help! I've never done this before and the step by step timestamps were a life saver! I picked your video because I chose the same case lol
Wow, you did an amazing job with this little box. Shame the motherboard was dead at first but glad you got things worked out.
Nice
Keep it up ☺️
Thanks! Glad you enjoyed the video. :)
--Nathan
Thanks! I have parts for a low end gaming PC for a friend also on a budget, about 350 quid whcih includes ~80 for the Windows 10 license, and I've taken the same approach, make sure that the PSU and motherboard have headroom for future expansion and start with a lower end CPU, Gen 9 Core i3, smaller amount of RAM, 8Gb 4Gb x2 value RAM, and a repurposed GPU I had lying around, AMD RX460. Did splurge on a 250GB SSD mind you as life's too short for spinny disks, IMHO.
Great tips on routing the wires for a clean build will be definitely stealing some of those ideas!
Thanks for the feedback! Glad you enjoyed the video and found something useful. Knowing someone found it helpful makes it worth the time and effort I put into these silly little things. :)
Yes I would have definitely gone the SSD route and always go that way myself these days, however it would have meant limited storage space without a hard drive. I brought this up and they made the choice to go for space over speed for the time being and add an NVME drive a little more down the line.
I made use of an older Windows 7 key for cheap to activate as an upgrade to the Windows 10 licence which saved a bit.
Sounds like you've got a nice little system going there! I would have probably gone the 2x 4GB sticks route and had dual channel from the get-go if the motherboard had four slots. Not many in this price range did though unfortunately. They'll be looking at adding another module soon though and it is mainly light gaming for now so won't be a massive hit luckily.
--Nathan
@@NathanPH Yup, I think in my case the owner would only play a few games initially (Fortnite) and as 2 or 4TB HDD drives are fairly cheap I figured I could go small-ish SATA SSD to get a nice fast system out the gate and then add the bigger disk to turn the PC into a 2 spindle box for a relatively small cost later on and just have to retarget the Steam or other game library default folders to the new drive rather than reimaging Windows onto the SSD which could get tricky moving a big disk to a smaller one. Mind you having just moved my wife's 320Gb laptop HDD onto a 500Gb SSD today that's not a terrifically onerous operation TBH, Clonezilla is my friend. I also had extra headroom in my budget for an SSD so I'd probably have gone the HDD route too to keep the other components if it'd been a few pounds lower.
Good deal on having a spare Win 7 license you could use, almost surprising how large a chunk a Windows retail license is on a budget build, almost makes a decent Linux distro appealing apart from the fact so few people would be able to run all the applications they want on it.
Think I lucked into a refurbished ASROCK board in my case, 4 RAM slots, hence the dual channel memory kit, and an included WiFi / Bluetooth mini-PCIe card which I didn't even notice when I selected it and turns out is something that the owner wanted. What's that old saying about luck favouring the oblivious? :)
Thanks for the videos, nice to see someone else building PCs, and the other projects, on a realistic family budget, rather than some price no object bleeding edge pieces of kit you often see, and facing similar issues to ones I've run into, like trying (and failing) to get an AMD Ryzen based system to boot with Intel "optimized" RAM sticks and glitchy motherboards.
@@NathanPH And one final follow up (shamelessly boosting your YT engagement metric? :) ) the system came together really nicely, looked clean thanks to your cabling inspiration and blew away the recipient as to how well it runs compared to his 8 year old hand-me-down PC.
I've just seen these comments, UA-cam didn't notify me of your first reply for some reason. CloneZilla is most awesome. Moving from smaller drives onto a larger SSD is super easy these days, it's great. I have moved installations previously from a larger hard drive down onto a smaller SSD, It isn't so bad to be honest though once you get the hang of it. I keep meaning to make a video on the large drive to small SSD process - I'll get it done eventually at some point! haha..
You did well with the motherboard then - definitely must have been some luck! :)
Really appreciate the nice comments and feedback again, I like to keep things real-world and my whole channel is just a vlog/blog of things I would be doing on the day to day anyway. Strangely it seems to upset and infuriate some people though that have to tell me how wrong I am and that I'm not blowing enough money up the hoo-hah.. You wouldn't believe some of the comments people feel the need to leave.
Only real world problems with real diagnosis and (hopefully) solutions here. :)
I enjoy doing the UA-cam side of things as well and if it helps somebody else out or saved them a little time then that's great.
Would love to see a picture of the finished rig if you have one!
All the best and a happy new year to you, too.
--Nathan
Im I able to put a gt 1050 in there
Did you find that the cooler that comes with the CPU is a bit loud? or are the people i've been talking too saying bull.
It really isn't bad to be honest, especially for an included stock type cooler.
Of course it will also depend on your case and how good it is at preventing sound escaping.
I'm using a Wraith cooler on my personal rig at the moment, which has a Ryzen 5 2600X in it. It can be noticeable when the CPU is under a full heavy load - like when rendering a video for hours on end - but in gaming scenarios it's very much tolerable and not really any more noticeable than graphics card fans.
--Nathan
@@NathanPH The case I'm getting is the Corsair Carbide 275Q . They claim it is good at keeping sound in. So from your understanding, it would basically be completely quiet. If not i'll just buy a 3rd party cooler.
Yes you've got nothing to loose, since the cooler is included for free it is worth trying it out. There is always the option to change it out for an aftermarket one down the line if you wanted.
What type of motherboard is that