I Bought a $300 Amazon Gaming PC!
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- Опубліковано 26 лют 2024
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I bought an affordable $300 gaming PC from Skytech Global (not to be confused with Skytech Gaming) on Amazon! Is it any good? Let's take it apart, discuss component choice, and put it through a small mix of games to assess its viability in today's tech market!
Check out this STG gaming PC: geni.us/yiZh
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This is close to my current computer. I have an i5 2400 and a gtx 1650 (the non 6 pin card) along with 8 gigs of ddr3 ram. Runs fine but is diagnosed with asbestos
It’s way more powerful though.
Mine is i7 2600 and a gtx 750 ti with 8 gigs and still really good at running games at the moment
@@iamarabicandiloveamericanp7137I mean I'm pretty shocked what can be run on pretty piss poor graphics cards, you can still game on a GTX 780m laptop pretty good, I think anything lower though starts skipping so many VRAM, Vulkan API, and Dx problems, but ultimately there's basically little sense in getting something less good than an RX 580. Which is still perfectly fine btw, Like I don't get people's upgrade priorities, I seen some people replace whole systems including the CPU and board, this guy got a 2600 to 7600x rather than a 5600x and then went form 5700xt to 6750xt for instance. Then you got people like this guy who still on a 750ti for some reason. I mean, don't get me wrong when you're going as close to "it was Free" as you possibly can a 750ti is fine. Won't run tons of shit, but you'd be shocked what it'll still do at 1080p. But the thing is it gets to a point where like a GTX 980 is under 100 bucks, a RX 580 is like $80, you can more or less get a new graphics card for a day of flipping burgers or waiting tables at that point it's seriously a huge absolutely massive upgrade. For you like a 580 or used 5500xt or 1650s or GTX 980 or something to that effect would go from having framedrops on really old games, like 30-44fps on Witcher 3, to being able to play The Division 2 online.
@@iamarabicandiloveamericanp7137
i take my hat off to that 750ti, HOLY SMOKES that little fella refuses to die
i have my i7 3770 overclocked to 4.1ghz(no not the 'k' variant) with 32gb ram and a rx 580 and im happy with it
Any pc at this price that can play games at a playable fps is a win
I recently sold a 3770/1650 build for $350 and it didn't have any crappy stick on RGB. But a random GPU tossed in a random old workstation with some random sticks of RAM by someone who is moving large volume is a great way to get a crappy worn out old system. I doubt they spent several hours benchmark and stress testing this PC. So caveat emptor. you don't wanna see what an old Xeon does when it has been running constantly for years in a workstation with insufficient cooling. It isn't pretty.
This is probably a B or C grade machine with a cheap remanufactured GPU. I want to know if it will run on stock drivers. I bet it is a frankencard with a mobile chip.
ewaste peripherals are for people who hate the environment. Just cancels out any good that comes from repurposing an old workstation.
Especially if you got kids. It's perfect
oem ones uhhh
If $300 is all you can afford this is tough to beat. It gives you something you can really play games with plus do actual work, which you can't do on a console.
I would say get a console unless you need to work like you said otherwise yeah this build is fine
Doing work on this would be a terrible idea
@@sol-hb8zgdoing work on this would be terrible
@@oneshot1kill158 If you are just using Office apps and browsing the web it would do fine.
How? It’s more than powerful enough for browsing, Microsoft office, even video editing wouldn’t be too bad due to the gpu doing the encoding work
That technically a win in my book, I see pcs like this alot. It's a soso base to start on, lots of *cough* room to grow
room to grow how? What better CPU can that mobo support? what kind of RAM can it support?
14:50 Greg even says that criticism points out there is no upgrade path
15:10 greg says you shouldn't prioritize an upgrade path
@@soccerguy2433 WOOOOOOOSH
4:30 - Great placement of the sticker, blocking 90% of the exhaust port.
That does not exhaust anything. It is not a turbine video card.
@@dizy82 Some air will come out there, if you notice the aluminum heatsink at minute 3:45 some aluminum fins are directed towards the GPU backplate. On a 1660 ti it may not make any difference, but if it were a more powerful GPU it could add a few degrees.
Figured most would know to remove such trivial stickers prior to first boot :-)
The best RGB is shoehorned RGB.
Grabbing an i7 Haswell/Devil’s canyon will greatly improve the performance. Friend of mine is still rocking 4790 and a 1070, all he needs for 1080p 75Hz
4770 and 4790 are great chips. Plenty of cheap cooler upgrades over the OEM ones.
but i7s are fare more expensive just for that i7 badge only. Just get Xeon instead. Same or even better performance for a fraction of a price.
Yup, just recently I have build PC with i7-4770 and GTX 1660S + 16GB 2400Mhz RAM and it's rocking. But - gtx 1660S is probabvly like the best GPU that this CPU can handle
@@subbookkeeperi7 4790s are usually $30 on eBay. That shouldn’t be too bad
THIS ! and the mobo can handle 32 GB
This PC takes the $15 E5 1240 v3. Worth buying and selling the i5 for an equivalent amount.
E3-1240 V3, it also has an ATX psu and can be upgraded with an inexpensive adapter cable.
I'd grab a used i7-4790k and throw it in there and it would be a way better pairing for that 1660ti.
i am aslo thinking the same thing
You know its a good video when Greg buys a PC from amazon.
A cheap Xeon E3-1230 v3 upgrade would balance this old PC out quite nicely.
That being said I literally picked up that HP without the GPU with a Xeon E3-1271v3 for £70, and has a 256GB M.2. SSD and 1TB HDD.
Thanks Greg ... this video was really well done and I appreciate the fact you kept referencing that this a budget gaming PC that just gets the job done for the money.
I enjoy these videos for the nostalgia element. There was a time when I had to "Budget" my computer setups like this one. They did the job as needed. Glad I am much more fortunate now but know a lot of people can't afford custom systems. Happy people have a place that is affordable to jump into my passion for PC's. If all you have is $300, why not?
Please, Crystal Mark disinfo or something similar so we can see the amount of hours used on that hard drive and any smart errors.
That HGST Ultrastar is an enterprise drive so it likely has a lot of hours
Will do for future videos!
Here we go again down the old rabbit hole of pc lol
Thank you for covering stuff like this Greg, always interesting, and always a pleasure.
I have done this multiple times and came out on top BIG TIME. No issues what so ever in any components. I need to do something like these videos.
Nice video Greg great value for your money.
Enjoy the content keep it coming Greg!
I bought one a year ago. Mine had a i7 4770, 16Gb ddr3, 1660 Super, 256SSD, and 3TB HDD for $330 + Tax. As long as you know what you're getting it's fine. I'm primarily using mine as an HTPC. I added a Blu-ray drive and 4TB of SSD storage...and I swapped out the OEM PSU. No complaints.
Good video. The computer was better than expected.
Nice crunch sound from the mouse. 11/10, would run over it again.
Also the pc is pretty nice. for 300 dollars, thats still alot of pc to make use of.
Looking forward to the next video.
Thanks for watching! :-)
Hi Greg! I appreciate videos like this not just because it's better to re-use older equipment when possible but also because most people looking for something to game on are on a budget. I mean, my son is happy running roblox and minecraft and something like this would be perfect for those titles.
Really enjoy these videos. I thought I was getting a great deal when I was getting a desktop for around $200 until I started to play games. Keep up the great work and thanks.
Glad you like them!
Best youtube tech chan so under rated
This is a good find. You did it again.
Nice video. Nice performance for the level of machine this is.
Nice truck Greg
Not sure why, c but did NOT expect Greg to be driving as TRX RAM lol Nice truck, dude!
Did i get ripped off......probably. i love it man. Great videos.
I actually really like the hp prebuilds. My girl games on an elitedesk that came with that cpu.
Got it local for super cheap. Does really well for what it is
I own a bunch of those HGST drives. I use them in my NAS. Good drives, just loud.
It absolutely has an upgrade path. You could put a Xeon of i7 strength, probably go up to 32gb RAM, definitely newer storage, a 1080ti will run most anything you can throw at it. 4th gen is shockingly solid still, today.
I mean at that rate what good is 32 gigs lol. I mean yeah if you can avoid the CPU bottleneck on old enough hardware that becomes a serious issue, a 1080ti is freaking amazing you can literally play the newest games at 1080p. Not sure how DDR3 is gonna do it for yah, I mean DDR3 is fine, what I meant is 32gb isn't that important for what you're doing.
4th gen CPU will bottleneck a 1080 Ti so much
don't waste your money on 32gb of ddr3 there is zero point. you'll max out any cpu of that age gaming before you run out of ram lmao. and a 1650 is more a match for this rig as you could see the CPU bottlenecking the 1660 ti
Sure 4th gen was still used when the 1080ti came out but I don't care what argument you have it will bottleneck a 1080ti like no tomorrow unless the game is 99 percent GPU dependent and Windows isn't checking for updates
@@mitsuhh I have that same setup and it sure doesn't.
Explain how I got massive framerate boosts going from a Ryzen 5950X to a 12700K with a 1080 Ti.
Lies.@@thedungeondelver
I watched a free Greg Salazar video.
It was great!
I use to have a PC like that as my gaming rig. Got an old optiplex from Free Geek with i7 4770 in it for around $200 then slapped a GPU in it. Was good to go. I've upgraded far and away since then and converted it into my home server till the motherboard finally died.
I really enjoy these cheap purchase videos.
This is like a slightly upscaled Optiplex refurbish.
Hey Greg, I love the channel and content! I guess you can talk about upgrade paths although from a prebuilt perspective, check out the Lenovo P520's preowned if you don't know about them already. There is at least some upgrading available. There is a little configuration needed but well worth the price. I had come across this and picked mine up off online for $212 w/o HD, GPU or OS. It was manufactured in 2020. It is Windows 11 compatible as well. It's a Xeon W-2135 6 core 3.7ghz - 4.5 processor with quad channel memory support with a 900 watt platinum power supply. It supports M.2 and PCIE 3.0. I was able to get 32GB ECC DDR4 2666 ram in quad channel included. This was a few months ago so keep this in mind. I paired a Samsung 980 M.2 1TB,$50 on sale and Zotac 1080 card $50 off of online. I know this is a tad over the $300 mark, but worth noting. This is just something to think about that can run AAA titles. If you can or have the means, I would love to see this thing benchmarked with a 4070. Keep up the great content!
I laugh so loud when the video switch to you getting in your truck 😂
I feel like Greg really wanted to show us his truck.
Thr bad frame rates could also be a result of mixed ram speeds. Just one ram chip being slower even by just a few mhz could also give you the stutter you experienced
The mouse crush was satisfying 🙏🏽
I think he improved it 😉
I'm still using one of my HDDs from around 2013 in my current build as a data sink, and it is doing perfectly fine, showing no signs of nearing the end of its life.
Nice work Greg. These project can be a real gateway to hobbyist pc work. Learn to fix these old pre-builts, realize there's a good cheap market of 115X parts and systems out there, collect and build and tinker. Oh! ddr3, that's gonna be the hard part soon unfortunately.
8:20 bro's just casually flexing his TRX 😂
Those prebuilt computers are awesome for surfing the net, watching videos, downloading and storing drivers for other builds, email, retro games, going to not so secure sites etc. Just never enter important data and burn a disc with all the drivers for simple restoration when needed. I have some hard drives that are 20 plus years old that are still running. Just back up data on optical media or thumb drives. build one for the kids and let them play and learn the ends and outs of pc building, maintenance, etc.
Nice PC for the price. V-sync is must have option for systems like this. I use it even in my RTX 3060 Ryzen 5 5600 build. FPS is SO stable.
You're curiosity just saved someone's $300 Greg you're a hero!
also consider that if you have a quest 2 and a link cable, you can do some more in depth VR stuff, like VRChat not in quest mode. (more worlds/avatars full game access )
I have a similar setup , "prodesk G1 hp" same case and motherboard but a I5 4670 and i have 1050ti, still does what i need, but leaves alot to be desired . CPU and the slow ram is a big hit I feel, and yeah 100% you really would have to replace everything, to get into a newer platform. maybe save some sata ssd 's ? or if you have any like usb hub/audio cards installed those can be some what use full in newer systems depending.
awesome video, felt like it was aimed at me and my dumpster fire pc.
thanks greg
Can you guys do a video of budget game controllers for PCs? (Currently I'm looking at one called Fantech gp13 pro but I don't know if it's good or bad. PS I've never had a PS or a Xbox this will be my first time using a controller)
Sick truck
Beggars can't be choosers, decent entry rig.
With such a powerful video card you really need some kind of frame-limiting to help keep frame pacing in check. These older games were not run back in the day with draw distance so far or at such high resolutions, so you need a really fast load/decompress to get the assets in quick enough. You may see best results in future by running on Proton/Vulkan/Gamescope because a lot of work is done to get frame pacing even. You know this is the way because with ARC Intel is supporting DX12 native, and then translating everything else to DX12. And it makes a ton of sense, it's way more compatible and much less work.
Honestly this is dollar for dollar better then my first PC was as a teen if inflation is taken into account. For a teen or someone on a budget looking for a decent rig this is not a bad choice.
Its usable in newer titles with some graphics fiddleing and will still rock older titles beside. For $300 you would be hard pressed to find any gaming system console or otherwise on par.
Bout the only thing id be leery of is the HDD as that sounded like it was pretty close to going kerdead. And seeing as you can get a brand new 3TB drive for around $40 they shpuld have just upped the system price $20 and done that.
i still own a pc from 2015, still going strong. HP Envy 700 Series with an Intel Core i7 4790, RTX 2060 Super, and 12gb RAM. made some minor upgrades to it and still happy with it
That RGB on the first start up had me blown away.
Definitely a WIN baby! $300! Incredible. Pretty clean system too. Love seeing these retro's come back to life again!
HP power supplies ARE top lol. Great vid 👍
I mean i will not criticise this pre-built. People can only afford what they can afford.
Although, this day an age, for an extra 100-200, you could get a much better newer build that could be upgradable. I don't think pointing that out is a bad thing.
Could you maybe include a bios settings check to see if any improvement is possible in future videos of this type
There are 3D-printed universal I/O shields for motherboards that you can buy, mainly from eBay.
Takes a while to snip the holes for ports, but at least you have something there rather than nothing, and the cost is a price of coffee (maybe 2 coffees, the second one for you to drink while snipping)
3:45 Did a bit of searching online and the 1660ti seems to be an oem lenovo model.
I would be curious to how viable this is to target for extra gaming computers, such as for a family, how do you target the ones you do, include the EBay or Amazon process would be good information.
Greg is the motherboard able to handle a little better cpu? I mean for like another $40 maybe bump to a higher one in that family?
SWBF2 really requires 4 cores 8 threads or more, so not surprised
I have something similar, but with an i7. Currently running all my homelab docker containers.
Alternate title of this video, "Florida Man drives over PC Mouse with his Ram TRX in the name of destruction." :)
Not a bad deal especially of an e-sports gamer or a younger kid wanting to play Roblox or Minecraft. Will be able to do those tasks for a few years, and it's still a pc to get work done for a job or school. Overall, not terrible maybe replace the hard drive.
@GregSalazar
I think you nailed the conclusion. Spot on in my personal and professional opinion. Although, I will say, in this particular case, that HP does have a few upgrade options. For example an i7-4770 is not expensive and would give a reasonable boost to performance. Also, even though this system is very CPU bottlenecked, an RTX card like a 2070 or 3060, would be doable as the workload would mostly be on the GPU. A bigger and faster SSD and HDD would be possible too. Each of these upgrades could be done over time and would be inexpensive. Last point, that HDD is fine. Many of the HGST line up sound like that. They work fine. I have a 6TB model that "sounds" even worse. Been running it for years, no issues.
Fun video. I personally don't love it for $300. Would rather suck it up and throw a bit more cash at it if I were in such a position. I feel like once you start explaining limitations and showing some performance that the joy of getting a PC is sort of sucked out of the situation.
main upgrade for this would be a matching 16GB kit vs the random sticks they tossed in, and dropping in a 4770/4790 would open some things up. In all if that's what you have in budget, it's not that bad to get started as a jumping off point.
I had a GTX970 in a Medion prebuild that also didn't have MSI branding but it did show up in hardware info as MSi (SuperTechGroup)or something like that.
I guess it's pretty common to find hardware that's none descriptive and yet still mysterious when you dig deeper.
We all know what HP stands for, Hope and Pray. I love the way the PSU is mounted high in the case and swings outware. You don't need to worry about your apps crashing as this case will crash before that happens.
I have an all new respect for Greg. We need more destruction in videos. Start a poll and you will see most will agree
Adding xeon with 8 threads to this build may do ressurection.
All that needs is a cpu it takes with hyper threading and i,d bet that utilisation would come down alot on the cpu and let the gpu run slightly better...
I like this style of video
Thanks!
tip for anyone who buys something this cheap
load nvidia control panel go to manage 3d settings go down to max frame rate turn on and limit it to 60FPS.
no matter the game you will not see over 60fps and as you seen in the GTA test it will help a lot.
some game's do not have vsync or a fps cap and my way will limit them games as well including minecraft.
I have my i9 12900k rtx 3080 limited to 144fps the same way because my monitor is 144hz so anymore than that is useless.
i have my games hard limited to 160 fps with gsync on because my monitor tends to get gsync flicker if i go above 160hz. In games like minecraft though, i like to keep my frames unlimited because having the game locked at 160 gives me frame time spikes when i would usually have a buttery smooth 500-600 fps with no latency or spikes
my default settings in most games are vsync off but using gsync to hard cap to 160
Those old HP systems are surprisingly stable and play games well. I have an HP 800 G1 SFF that I swapped into a new case with a larger PSU and a GT1030 (GDDR5) and I am very happy with the operation. I probably would not have swapped into another case but picked up a very nice AZZA case for $30 (tempered glass) which was a bargain.
Dear Lord, your truck sounds like it could eat raw steak when you rev it up. Love it.
I did this essentially on my own. I got an old hp workstation from her company, bumped up the cpu to an i7-6700k, Radeon rx 580 and switched the hard disk to ssd. Thing basically runs everything I throw at it. Paid about 280 bucks for everything.
As far as dead platforms go everyone loves AM4, I went the 2nd hand Intel B560 route and got an i3 10100, an Aurous B560M Pro AX motherboard, EVGA 600GQ, 64GB (32GB x2) DDR4 3600 Patriot Viper, Silverstone NAS case, and a couple of Optane SSD on fire sale, Oh and don't forget the ARC A380 LP from ASRock, A beast of a server/NAS for quite cheap. Even got a google TPU in the wifi slot.
For Storage I went with high capacity CMR HDD's, high-capacity consumer SSDs, and mid capacity HET enterprise SSD's along with an industrial SSD, a 32GB m10 Optane and a 118GB P1600X Optane.
I bought all slowly when everything was on sale or second hand/ EOL products. I can upgrade to 10 cores on the same Skylake architecture, or I can upgrade to Rocketlake with gen4 PCIE + extra lanes and AVX 512 support. Not bad for a dead platform.
I agree you shouldn't think about an upgrade path too much at this price point. But I would try to avoid systems that use proprietary components. Even being able to reuse a case would help in the future. Admittedly at that price point you probably stuck with a pre built from Dell or HP or something similar.
Your only other option is to buy used stuff.
Might be fun to see you try to put together a budget system from ebay/facebook marketplace. A lot could be learned from it.
Upgrade path, 32gb of ram, better psu as this is an ATX and only needs a $20 adapter cable, it will boot off a Nvme in the pci slot using clover boot and it also will run Xeons so you can get 4 cores ,8 threads and 4ghz on turbo boost.Solid and reliable.
hard drives have unlimited life. as long as they are use good and thrown around. I have hard drives I still use from when Sata first began, nothing wrong with them, I use them as storage
I have an i7 2600k and a gtx 1050 , i mainly play e sports titles don't see myself upgrading and only use pc for those games and nothing else and they run pretty good ngl
This one interested me specifically because I'm in the market to replace an old Inspiron 660. Knowing support for Win 10 will be ending in 2025 makes a Win 11 system the must buy in my mind. Got any opinions or feedback on that, Greg?
Greg, did you SMART test the hdd to see how many hours and how many power cycles it had on it?
Probably a lot of hours (likely 40k+) but not many power cycles since it's an enterprise drive
The drive is probably loud because its a data center enterprise type drive, not really meant for desktops.
I have a slightly newer 4TB HGST Ultrastar and it is very loud indeed. It's fast and has been very reliable, but loud.
Kingfast makes okay-ish ssd:s. I've ordered a few from aliexpress and they're a fine, low cost option for testbenches. IDK about the 512gb one, but the 250gb can often be found for around 13€
Hey, Greg I hope you’re okay.
I have a problem with my old Sabertooth x79 motherboard . I have an intel i7-3960x processor and I want to change it for an intel i7-4960 .
That’s where the problem is because the computer turn all the light up but I have no boot or beeping, I already tried 2 i7-4860 . I have the lasted bios 4801.
The computer works flawless with the i7-3960x.😮
What could be wrong with? Are the 2 processors bad?
That 1660 is one that Lenovo manufactures, I have the same one.
Id rarther put that 300 aside and save some more to get something half decent. I got a £700 lenovo legion few years back after my gameing pc from overclockers uk blew up actually went pop but was around 12years plus old . And after 6 month's to a year got really annoyed at the system itself so through watching channles like yours jayztwocents and pc centric gave me the confidence to finally build one with my own hands around £1200 later im allmost happy . Corsair 5000d airflow case mpg z590 gameing edge wifi motherboard i5 11th gen 1100k geforce rtx evga 3070 cx750f rgb Corsair rbg ram 4 sticks 32gb total 2tb m.2 fans ect . Never ever would have imagined me putting this together but watching you for years and others gave me the confidence so all in all thank you for all you do here on the channel.
Ohh forgot to mention I wall mounted the tower too solid brick wall nice and cool and less dust up high all in all loads of desk space too
Im rocking a 2tb SSHD from Seagate that ive had since 2013 when they first released and its still working great good health 3421 Power On Count and 19033 Power On Hours it used to be my main c drive for a long time until i upgraded to NVME now i used it for videos and games
I have one upgrade which would make a pretty significant impact in gaming performance. Chuck that i5 and spend $40 or so one an i7-4770, or even better a 4790. It will have slightly higher clocks out of the gate, and the added hyperthreading can make a pretty big difference in CPU performance when gaming. It also has I created L3 cache (8MB vs 6MB). I did something similar in two of my older Haswell systems and it gave them new life. 4 cores without hyperthreading just does not as not cut it anymore.
Easy upgrade path for this: upgrade platform entirely but keep the 1660TI, then upgrade the GPU later to accommodate the platform upgrade, simple as that.
What was the SMART info using crystal disk info for the HDD?
I recently sold my Ryzen ITX system for £250. MSI B450i, R5 2600x, GTX 1650 Super and 16GB DDR4 RAM. Oh and a 256GB NVMe on the board itself for the OS. You can definitely get better systems on places like marketplace if you're there at the right time but the one you just picked up is surprisingly good (and at least it isn't a dam GTX 1030 or worse for once!)
I upgraded a Dell Optiplex SFF 7010 to be a modest gaming system like this one performance wise. I'm not worried about an upgrade path. It plays my Steam library and that's all I care about.