EASY $350 Gaming PC Build 2022 

nice little build bro, that sounds like a decent budget build!

Sounds like a good computer to flip back then and nowadays. Imagine how much you could flip this for during the GPU shortages. But if It’s for personal use and I made something like this for myself, I would’ve been so proud of that build.

@@tenshi1333 Lenovo ThinkStation S30 / ThinkCentre M900 with a GTX 1060 6GB is the new Optiplex.

basically what my friend used to have before his pc stop working now he got a new pc

what are the use of the pc you built so far?

Will have to give that a shot!

@@ToastyBros note, you will need 2x SATA to 8 Pin for power hungry cards as the PCIe power is 6 pin. But it's a GOOD little rig. I have one for guests when they wanna come over and game with me.

Xeon for the win. The real og budget beast

Lenovo thinkstation s30 are 600$ and up

6 core xeons run awful with anything above an Rx 570. Paired em with my 1080 and it's nothing but input lag and bottlenecks. But overall such a good value

250 is EXCELLENT for a 1080p gaming rig! great stuff!

do you have some data ? any FPS ?

I got a SFF HP 600 G1 with a 4770 and 16GB of RAM for $40 cash. Bought a RX 550 for $32 after shipping, and I got a surprisingly potent build for $72. I might upgrade the storage to complete the build, and add an SSD. Not bad for a 2nd PC I can leave at my parents house for when I go visit.

​​​@@jorgemaldonado2199It plays well, you can run almost any game at 1080p 30 fps, and a lot of games that are a couple years old at 60 fps. Esport games run very well, 120 should not be a problem on most of them. The 6400 is gimped by the PCIE 3.0, but make sure you do have PCIE 3.0. If you use a sandy bridge CPU or older, ie: 2nd Gen Intel (I7 2600, etc..), those have PCIE 2.0. I believe some ivy bridge OEM boards may be PCIE 2.0, but Haswell should be safe so I would definitely recommend that gen or newer. Check local pricing in your area, but for me I find the price of a RX 550 generally way more favorable than RX 6400, for only a bit less performance. If you can fit a 2 slot GPU, I would consider going up to the RTX 3050 6GB or even an RTX A2000. I have both of those and they're a lot better than RX 6400, none of them use power connectors, but I do give the RX 6400 credit in being a single slot card, I just find it a little expensive for what it is. If you have a very new build, I would consider Intel ARC A310 or even A380, those are priced extremely competitively and perform extremely well when they do, but know they won't work on anything older than 10th Gen Intel.

@@memesyandhorrorshorts it seems to be a standard or near standard full atx board. Any case that can support atx or Eatx will work. I used an antec 900. A classic.

what if you already have a 3020 SFF, that you got before you knew about such issues? I have one with a GT 1030 (2GB GDDR5) and am looking for its "last upgrade" card. There are very few choices that are better and will work with this case. I've tried RX 550; not impressed. Sidegrade. The only upside was VCE, and that's not spectacular. Unfortunately the RX 550 I had became semi-functional recently, meaning it will POST and show a Windows loading screen but not come up with a Windows desktop. IDK. Could be a driver issue. The only sized-right RX 560 (which would actually be a pretty good pairing for my i5-4590) I've seen is from a shady Chinese seller rebranding what is quite obviously a Yeston, so I'm not even convinced it isn't really just an RX 550. And they want more than the RX 6400 goes for shipped domestically. So being that the GT 1030 is PCIe 3.0 (forced down to 2.0 by the H81) x4 anyway, none of these cards would be a downgrade here... I'm thinking either the RX 6400 or the Quadro T600 might be good options. The nVidia card has 16 lanes and NVENC, so there are at least two bullet points in its favor. It is, unfortunately, much more expensive than RX 6400. But it should be nicely matched to the processor, and a decent bump up in performance from the GT 1030. Maybe not worth the price, though, but what is? I can't slot a GTX 1650 and the one SSLP GTX 1050 that ever existed is very hard to find now... T600's are easier, but look out for the 2GB model. Don't want that. Even higher up the price scale, at around $300+, there's the T1000, with 896 CUDA cores so it should be similar to GTX 1650 Super. But I'm not sure about the 3020's weaksauce 255W power supply and supposed 50W PCIe slot power limit... that's funny, I thought the spec was 75W... or is it just that there were no high-watt videocards to validate with it at the time of manufacture? I think that could be the case. I've already gone past the original RAM validation (it was only validated for 1, 2, and 4GB DIMMs and I put 2x8GB in it, but that's widely known to work plus 8GB sticks weren't available yet) so I've already exceeded Dell's validated specs once already here.

@@SeeJayPlayGames Wow! What an awesome response. This is tricky because I know it's really hard to find a single slot card these days, let alone one that's also low profile. I didn't even realize the 1030 was also limited to 4 lanes with a 64-bit bus. However, you won't be in the same boat. Even the GGDR5 version of the GT 1030 has less than half the memory bandwidth of 48GB vs. 128GB per second. There's more to this than just lanes and bus width. If you have the DDR4 version of the GT 1030, you're at about a whopping 17GB per second. So, with the GT 1030, the bottleneck is going to be less of an issue. You're not going to to notice it nearly as much. Especially since it's such a weak card to begin with. The 6400 is much more powerful and the effects of putting it in a Gen2 slot is going to limit you to 2GB per second. It's going to choke the communication between the system memory and the video memory. The single slot Quardo cards would be better in a PCIe Gen2 slot, but even the T600 is a $250 card right now. The T1000 is stupidly priced. The single slot, low profile RX 560 that I've seen... with the purple shroud, is legit as far as I could find. But they're as much as a T600. But regardless of which route you go, the 255W PSU is going to be fine. If it doesn't require dedicated power, it will be enough. In my testing, you'll likely pull no more than 160 watts from the wall for the total system, and that leaves with about 100 watts of headroom. I wouldn't worry about the power supply, and they're well built PSU's with things like OCP. As for the power limit... I've not seen any OptiPlex models with a power limit on the PCIe slot. I'd expect that from the consumer models, but not the business models. But now you have me curious. I bought a 6500XT to see if I'm being too hard on them to test them in some older Opti's, and the results should track with the 6400, but it would be interesting to test the 6400 as well.

@@TheGameBench wow, awesome reply from you, too! That's uncommon to find on RU-vid; a lot of creators don't engage their audience to that degree! I'm impressed. Anyway, I have the GDDR5 version so yeah, 48GB/sec bandwidth. I was at least careful to not make the mistake of getting DDR4. Although I've overclocked the (3004MHz) memory by 650MHz with Afterburner (it can take it; it's good Samsung stuff), so it's up to 58.5GB/sec bandwidth. Wow, 13.5GB/sec more and it'll equal my old HD7770, LOL. IDK if it could do that, though. IDK if that makes much difference; haven't tested before and after. I might have to check that some time. The real problem with the card right now is that the fan gave out so the core can't stay at a high clock rate once it thermally saturates the heatsink. Airflow in the case kind of sucks and it's loud enough already. Yes, I know it's possible to do a case swap. But that's the easy way out. I kind of like working with constraints, it's a challenge. But I might be getting to the point where if I can find a good mATX motherboard for LGA1150 cheap I'll slap it in an old Vostro tower case I have lying around (nothing nonstandard on it) and transplant the CPU/RAM/SSD/HDD into it, get whatever graphics card that will fit (only limited by length in that case, not width) and get another processor (at least an i3-4130, which is arguably the perfect match for a GT 1030) and rebuild the 3020 for my wife, who is currently out of state without a computer. I have some extra DDR3 from when I went from 8 to 16 on this; 8GB will be fine for her; I'd just need to get a CPU and SSD for her. The real question is, do I want to go that route; buying what some might consider e-waste? Eh, if it's still got life left in it, and it's still cheaper than reasonable alternatives, sure. A platform upgrade to Ryzen 5 with 16GB, I've priced at around $400 (5600G APU/MB/RAM/SSD). I think I can get used 4th gen cheaper? And the 4th gen intel chips were good enough that, yeah, they're still okay as long as you manage expectations. Try saying that about an 8 year old platform 10 years ago. Nope. Moore's Law has apparently slowed down. The GT 1030 has a pretty high boost clock especially if you overclock it (I've set mine to +175MHz, raising the base from 1228 to 1403, and boost from 1643 to 1818), but only if you can keep it cool. I've researched replacement fans but one guy allegedly fried his video card with one; IDK how that would happen, but whatevs. Maybe he ESD'd it. Looks like I can get a replacement fan for around $17 or so, but it might take some time to ship.

I’m getting handed down a 3020, luckily I’m not gonna use it for long and it’s only until I save up enough to build a pc with my 3090

A Dell Optiplex sff 3040 is fine?

Yes all that is true, but IMO nobody in their right mind upgrades a Dell Optiplex without a new PSU. That is the first thing one does. Otherwise you are holding everything back. In the states btw, used Optiplexs are running about $80 to $120 with SSDs, 16Gs of Ram, and 500 HDDs, and all that is needed is the new PSU and GPU and it's done.

Good to see a Linux user in Here :)

@@pog2824 👆hitme claim now

yeah, most lp cards are nvidia so this is going to make sff possible on linux!

Do u game on Linux if so what distro and have u tried gta 5? And does it work? What are your specs? 😮

the witcher 3 fortnite apex legends (fortnite uses a littlemore than 2gb on high settings) gta 5, they run well

Thanks for watching 🤗 Send a direct message right away, I have a suprise for you..🔝🔝🔝

did you buy exactly this one? i also wanna buy this

I’ve been trying to sell my 1050ti, selling it for 125$. Would’ve saved yourself a good chunk of change

@@joshuagaona1274 I mean that's only $25....and Idk about your 1050ti , but the MSI gaming X is a factory Over-clocked version that will get you about a 10% boost in FPS. Plus it was brand new. The market is shifting as GPU prices steady out and new GPUs start to get introduced.

@@CaptainIanFace true

That seems like an awesome pc for gaming and editing

@@plixrplays Well, it is ok. But 2 gigs of Vram is MAJOR BOTTLENECK. A 4 gig version of the same card would be better. But I can't find any for a great price. 😕 😅

@@hovanthecool1995 tbh the only games I would play on this pc is like the og version of Skyrim and fallout 4 at max settings

@@plixrplays Oh, ok. I only really like Fortnite. That's it 😅.

I have also brought one idk I am feeling little nervous

@@subhyoyogg2394 Its not a bad card for starting out

I have an rx6400 at home and an old Intel CPU I should test with streaming just to see if you can still tell OBS to use quicksync.

Hello guys, I can confirm, this works. My setup : i7 4790s, RX 6400, enabled both GPUs in Bios and set OBS to use Hardware/Quicksync encoding.

Less than 75w. Rated at 55w IIRC.

Errrr

Duddeeee we'll want to do this lol😂😂

On low or high settings? How git runs yours when only browsing on internet or playing g games like valorant or overwatch

Apparently the XFX one runs hotter due to a weaker cooling solution.

As long as it's the low profile 6400, yeah

The reason why RX 6400 is the best for optiplex gaming is because they consumed 53 watts, one of the lowest I ever seen in any GPU. It’s even lower than GTX 1650, which consumes 75 watts, and performs the same level. Anything around 180-250 watts should be enough

These dell optiplexes are a pain to case swap with proprietary connections. F1 errors on start up no front io you can buy some adapter's, but it's not super cost efficient really can build better system for same price if you willing to go that far. They're decent as is to upgrade especially for some one just getting into PC building good starting point to play with, and get familiar with hardware, and possibly mod the case to give it more of a gaming style

I'd guess software used to display/benchmark system performance was MSI afterburner

yes, as long as you get the low profile version

Did you upgrade the PSU?

@@crownthychamp3184 Yes i did, standard fit well. 500W is more than enough.

Have the same build but the difference I didn’t not upgrade the PSU and stick with stock one and works perfectly

its not as much performance as you'd think...

Did you even watch the video we addressed this

@@ToastyBros yeh im watching it now :)

I have a DELL Optiplex 7010 Desktop (You know only low profile cards), and originally it had a i5 3570 (3rd gen), the CPU I chose to upgrade was the Xeon E3-1340 V2 (i7 3770 equivalent, but at half price), it lacks the integrated GPU. For GPU I decided for the Nvidia Quadro T600 (similar to a GTX1650), or if you want more in low profile the Quadro T1000 is great. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-torNoHC0tEQ.html

Know this is a a month old, but just to advise. I am currently running an XTX - RX 6400 in a PCie 3x16 (x4) slot and it works brilliantly. This is embedded in a Dell 7050 7th Gen i7-7700 Mini Tower.

@@robertpelton2119 does the x4 lane become problems with the gpu speed?

Well lucky for you those are the most powerful cards they'll take anyway lmao

@@SlowHardware Exactly, If I would've had a SFF PC with PCIE x4 gen 4 maybe but since most SFF PC's are with PCIE gen 3 it's not worth the performance loss.

@@Teksers I actually sold an sff pc that u used as my main rig while my x58 pc was down not long ago. It was 16gb ram, i7 2600 and a gddr6 gtx 1650. Performed well but was well slower than the overclocked old 6 core and r9 390x, fun times.. now on a Ryzen 7 3700x and an RX 6700 xt with 32gb ram

@@Teksers also putting together an optiplex 390 with a gt 1030 atm

the GTX 1630 sucks; it's a cut-down TU117 chip and every one I've seen thus far is standard form factor. Full height, two slots. How useless. Unless they've made a SSLP version I'm not aware of... a T600 is still better.

The gtx1650 works also... might have to upgrade power supply if you have the 255watt version to the 315 watt version not hundred on that but it would cool your Temps anyways so it's worthwhile anyways to upgrade.

Did you have any problems running a 180 psu with a RX6400?

@@FilthEffect I have had a couple of games that were less than optimal...not sure if it's CPU bottlenecking or possibly a power issue...I'll eventually swap the PSU and see if that resolves it