I built a $500 PC that CRUSHES everything.

There's nothing I love more than a good old gaming sesh on my gaming computer with my homies. But what's happened with AI scooping up all of the SSDs and the memory and the GPU allocations, the hobby is becoming obscenely expensive. And it's something I've been hearing enough that I started to question myself, my own beliefs. I mean, the last PC I built probably costs more than a used car. Maybe they're not wrong. Maybe PC gaming isn't affordable anymore. So, I spent the last two days scrging around on Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, eBay, all those good places to try to see if I could build a good gaming PC for that $500 budget. Maybe even better than some of the other PCs I've seen around this price point. And I'm talking like real $500. This total PC, all the parts I've got sitting in front of me here should be an absolute monster for 1080p and perfectly capable at 1440p gaming. And if you're willing to be scrappy, maybe a use a cardboard box as your case, even less than $500. What's wrong with using a cardboard case, Andrew? So, let's build it. And it starts with the motherboard. Oh, yeah. This is MSI's A520 MA Pro. It's not a great motherboard. The features not fantastic. The IO not fantastic. Build quality seems okay. I mean, it's basically just a PCB, but that's really all we need it to be. We just need something to plug components into. It's not going to have much of an impact on your performance. And because it's only $65, I'll take it. If you're trying to save money, pick a reputable brand, find whatever is the best deal at this current time because it kind of fluctuates. But you might want to look at going for something that's B450. You're going to get slightly better features and overclocking support. So, if you're inclined to, you can maybe ek out a little bit more performance from your CPU. And speaking of CPU, we have one. He's going to use a bad cut of this. We have what is hopefully still a working one. This is AMD's Ryzen 55500. It's a six core processor with 4.2 GHz max boost, 3.6 GHz base clock speed. It's on the table now. And the main thing here is that you can pick these up so cheap used. And while it's by no means the fastest CPU in AMD's lineup, nowhere even close, especially for gaming, it should still game pretty good. And it was only $65 on the used market. And CPUs are one of those things that are totally fine, at least in my book, to buy used. They typically outlast the rest of the components by a long shot. And it's it's honestly pretty rare for a CPU to die unless you're doing some crazy stuff. Now, we're just going to line up the little triangle on the corner there. Wh they don't make it nearly as obvious as they used to. I swear it used to be like silk screened big triangle, but there is a little dot. Either way, let it drop in nicely. Give it a little wiggle. Make sure it's in there. And boom, we have a CPU installed. That easy. The other thing if you're buying a used Ryzen CPU like this is you want to make sure that it comes with a CPU cooler, unless you're buying your own. But the stock AMD coolers, like this Wraith one right here, they're pretty solid. You can get a bit more performance by upgrading the thermal paste if you got some fancy stuff kicking around. But these are totally totally usable. This is a part of the build I was a little bit hesitant on. I mean, the 5500 is a very performant CPU by a lot of metrics, especially in terms of like how much you're getting for how much they cost. But if you're buying new, the 5600 has double the L3 cache. It's also, at least on the used market, double the price. But we're on a budget, baby. We don't just get to throw around money like it doesn't exist. Okay, we're going to tighten all four of these in a little X pattern until they stop. And if you're wondering why I didn't go with Intel, it was just more expensive in terms of like what you can get versus the performance you get. At least right now. Your mileage may vary. Do some hunting. Just wait for a good deal, you know. And while you're waiting, you need to check out boot.dev, who sponsored this portion of today's video. They basically cracked the code, so to speak, on making programming fun and engaging to learn by basically turning it into a video game. I know it sounds crazy, but just picture it. You're learning to do back-end web development with Python, SQL, and Go. And at the same time, you're earning XP. You're leveling up. You're completing quests. Heck, you're even doing boss fights, all while learning. They have courses for developers of all experience levels, even noobs, with curriculum that goes super in-depth while still being easy and engaging to follow. And they even teach you the tools of the trade, like this entire course on how to learn and master using Linux command line, the file systems, permissions, all that good stuff. And since they give you all that course material on their website for free, you can start to learn how to build real web projects without any risk to your wallet. And if their interactive learning style works for you, like it's been working for me, you can use code Jaku to get 25% off an annual plan that gives you all those fantastic interactivity features for all of their courses down at the link in the description. It's freaking sweet. I highly recommend checking it out. We'll plug in our CPU fan up in CPU fan one. And then in a rare show of grace to later Jake, we're going to put the screws and the little stock brackets back in the motherboard box. Some CPU coolers need these. and if you don't keep them, you're going to have a bad time later. Speaking of things that you can get a better deal on locally than on the internet, I managed to find this A Data PCIe Gen 4 512 gig SSD for around $30 US locally. I think it's pulled from like an HP laptop or something like that. And if you are buying used storage, there are a few things you can do to try to help yourself be a little bit more on the safe side, like checking the remaining health on the SSD. There's lots of free programs you can use to do that and uh it's a really good metric to see how abused the SS they have finite life. You can only write to them so many times IO shield. That'll be useful later. For RAM, I picked up 16 gigs of Crucial Ballistics, 3200 mega transfers per second, CL16 DDR4. DDR4 like this hasn't been nearly as affected. Definitely still more expensive than it used to be, but not quite as bad. I picked up these two sticks on eBay for 50 bucks. I also even saw a 32 gig kit for 60 bucks. So, you know, there are deals to be had. Speaking of cheap computer, do [snorts] I have some cheap computer for you? This is, I think, the least expensive computer case I have ever purchased. Even though I bought this new, I wouldn't necessarily recommend you do the same. It's not a great case, but my god, it's $39.99 US and it doesn't get cheaper than that. Unless, of course, you buy used, which is probably what you should do in this price category. Or just use a cardboard box. Who cares, man? This isn't even glass. This is plastic. I haven't seen a plastic side panel in ages. If you're thinking you might upgrade in the future, by the way, just uh consider that this is an MATX case, not ATX. So, full size ATX motherboards won't fit. You know what? For how cheap this thing is, it does have fan filters, but the front one fell off. >> Yeah, that's not very typical. I'd like to make that point. Oh, there's a fan filter on the bottom, too. Look at that. Ouchie. Those fan filters are incredibly [snorts] sharp. Oh, it has feet. It's got features. If only the case also came with fans. Our power supply, the MSI M A550BN, is non-modular, but at the crispy new price of $52.67 with a 5-year warranty, great reviews, and 80 plus bronze rating, I can't really complain. I would caution going any cheaper than this power supply, but check out what deals are going on around you. And to be honest, you can buy a power supply used. However, I've definitely heard some horror stories of people buying perfectly working used power supplies where the only reason they were being sold is because they were having problems. So, stay safe out there, y'all. Yeah, I am going to stick the power supply in fan up because a lot of my house has carpet in it, and I don't want to have to think about it. Now, our case has two functional fans. It's going to get serious. It's just you wait. You don't want to put your motherboard in without putting in the IO shield. I've made that mistake so many times. And now our motherboard can go into the case. I really hope all of our eBay components work. If I were smart like you, I might have tested our main components on the motherboard box outside of the case before I put it in there. But like clearly I'm not as smart as you. Good on you. You're you're a smart cookie. And also, if you haven't yet, hit the subscribe button. Oh, it's GPU time. How do I get these out, though? Take the screwdriver in. You do a little bendy bend. Try not to cut your fingers. And last, but not least, the thing I am most proud of in this computer. This is a Power Color Red Devil 6750 XT. We snagged this absolute monster of a GPU on marketplace for the equivalent of 200 USD. It's a massive chunk of the overall budget, but my god, you can get so much more bang for your buck buying a used GPU. Oh my god, does it fit in the case? Oh, just barely. The 6750 XT has 12 gigs of RAM. I would highly recommend trying to find a card that has at least 12 gigs in this day and age, but 8 gigs will suffice if you have to. Oh my god, the power button. Because of how small this case is, putting the power supply fan upwards was probably a mistake. That's a problem for later, Jake. Cable management time. I made a rookie mistake. I didn't plug in our front panel connectors before I put the GPU in, which means putting them in is going to suck now. Feels so gross. CPU power connector. Easy. And then our GPU. Where does the audio one go? Oh my god, it's all the way in that corner. Uh, if I took the last PCIe bracket out. This is one of those things where you end up spending more time trying to screw around doing it the wrong way than you would have just taking the GPU out. Girl, we don't need a speaker. What's the last one? HDD LED. I saw a form thread that one time it was like, do I still need to plug in the HDD LED if I have an SSD? You know what? That's actually a fair question. Huzah, super secure. We got all these lovely tie down points here. Let's use them. Pro tip, cable manage your computer after you test it because what if it doesn't work? Why would it do that? I really don't like how much this GPU is sagging. GPU support. It's kind of bending. It's way more straighter. Power. Look at that RAM. Oh, it's RGB. I didn't even realize. Wow. This motherboard does have debug LEDs. So, if it's not booting, you want to take a look over there and see what it says. Yes. Woo. But look at that. We're in the operating system. But before we do anything in our operating system, to get our BIOS update, head to the motherboard's product page under BIOS. We should see the latest BIOS [music] versions. We are on I think that's August 2024. Like a few new versions since then. This ASUS Q OLED monitor, 500 Hz. It costs more than that computer. >> [laughter] >> Make sure you don't unplug the power or shut it off while it's updating. The BIOS update is complete. We still have one more thing to do, and that's enabling XMPP or DOCP. You can actually see it right here. XMPP profile 3200 mega transfers per second. 16 18 36. Those numbers represent the speed that this memory kit was designed to be able to run at. If we don't enable XMPP, it's going to run at this speed right here. You see current DRAM frequency 2666. So, we're just giving up like 534 mega transfers per second if we don't enable XMPP. So, we'll turn that on. Click the exit to save. And hopefully, it's just going to work. As the computer's rebooting, it might take a minute or two to train the memory, which is basically just making sure it is actually able to run at that speed. If you're building a system on AM5, the newer Ryzen platform, it can take like 10, 15 minutes, but AM4 is pretty fast. It's already done. And now that we're in Windows, we can make sure it applied properly by just checking in task manager. We are indeed running speed 3200 MGHertz. Nice. Look at all six of those cores, baby. Wow. Wow. We woo. Very nice. I like We've got our 512 gig SSD. We've got real tech PCIe gigabit Ethernet controller. And the only other thing you need to do once you're in Windows is install the requisite drivers. The main ones you really want to pay attention to are the AMD chipset drivers and your GPU drivers. And you can get both of those drivers from the AMD website. For chipsets, you can just type A520 chipset drivers. And they have the latest one up here. And then you can do the same thing for graphics Radeon graphics driver. There you go. Easy peasy. And then since Windows is such an absolute dumpster fire, I'm going to go in here and just clean a couple things up. Uninstall one drive. And then can we remove co-pilot, too? Yes. Please get out of my life. All of this garbage. I don't want to. Team spy. [laughter] Now we game. Starting with Counterstrike. Updating Steam. Oh, come on. People that play Counterstrike, really play Counter-Strike, are not playing at high settings. So, what I like to do is go off the low preset with 1080p. Enable a touch of anti-aliasing so it doesn't look so jagged. And then just make sure fidelity FX super resolution is disabled so that we're actually rendering at 1080p. We have our max FPS set at 1,000, anti- lag on, VSync off. I don't think the side panels are going to make a ton of difference, but I will stick them on. So, in Counterstrike right now, dust two. Oh god, this dynamic crosshair is the worst thing in the universe. Wait, wait, wait. Yeah, I got a frag, guys. With a little bit of anti-aliasing here, we're getting like somewhere around 180 to 200 FPS. Not like the craziest FPS I've ever seen in Counter-Strike, to be honest, but this is one of those games that's really, really dependent on CPU performance. And the fact that we have a CPU that has like half as much cache as we'd probably like with the 5500 instead of the 5600 given our budget, it's to be expected. But this is still like way more than playable. This is high refresh rate gaming territory. 200 FPS, you got a 144 hertz monitor with your $500 PC, you're you're cooking on that. And we haven't even overclocked it or anything. Why does it say the GPU is only being used 70% though? I don't know. Counter-Strike is one of those games that just like was built in the 1930s or whatever. So guys, if I don't get a frag in this game. Oh god, I got a frag. I got a fragr. He knew where [music] I was. I didn't know where he was. Oh, I got two. Actually, my teammate help. Ah, he knew. He knew. How does he know? Does he play Counterstrike? Sorry, I should have ran the Counter-Strike benchmark. Regardless, we have an average FPS of 293.3 and a 1% low of 133.3. Pretty damn good. The benchmark result is substantially higher than what we're actually seeing in the game. And I think that just comes down to the fact that this build does have like a bit of a CPU bottleneck. It's not running too hot, but it is making a bit of noise. Like, and in games that are a little bit less CPU dependent than Counterstrike, we should be able to see a little bit better numbers and find out exactly that with a little bit of Overwatch. All right. It's going to be a lot harder to end up in a situation with like a super optimal optimized PC where you're buying stuff used and you're kind of at the mercy of the market. And that's just the reality. To be honest, I don't think I've ever had a computer up until the Titanium PC that was fully new parts. I've always made use of used parts in some capacity because you just get way more bang for your buck. So, for me, I'm looking at like, hey, if if I built this PC, I'm thinking in the next couple months, I got a couple more paychecks. I got a little bit of extra cash. That's the power of gaming on PC. You can upgrade, you can make it better, and you can make it yours. We're getting around 300 FPS at 1080p in the high preset in the practice range here with a $500 PC. This is a like a very well optimized esports [music] title and we're only playing at 1080p, but like you're playing at 1080p and you're playing competitively. Very nice. In Doom: The Dark Ages at 1080p high with just TAA anti-aliasing, we're getting an average of 6246, a max of 95. I don't know if this is a very AMD optimized game, but we are very clearly GPU limited in this case. Still perfectly playable and you can always drop the settings down a bit. Battlefield 6 1080p also in the high preset at native resolution. TAA anti-aliasing. Man, not having audio is brutal when you're trying to [laughter] revive me, [screaming] please. Now we're even on fire. There's jets fly. This game is actual insanity. At 1080p in the high preset with the TAA anti-aliasing, native resolution rendering, all that good stuff, we are getting 85 to 90 FPS. It runs pretty great, especially considering how nice it looks. Dude, this thing is sick. I like this computer. As for our temps and power consumption, we're right around 50 watts on the CPU with the temperature hanging out around 778. And then our GPU actually in the game while we're running around is somewhere in the neighborhood of 140 to 160 watts. Good GPU utilization. Our temps totally reasonable around 6667. The computer staying reasonably quiet even though the case is kind of a piece of crap. At least it's so vented on the top that all the hot air just kind of comes out here. We're not overheating. We're running good. If you want to get a little bit more out of a computer in this budget, a little bit of Windows optimizations you can do. You can try Linux depending on the game. and that might be better for your performance. You can also do a bit of overclocking. Download MSI After Burner, bump up the power limit a little bit, play around with stuff. You might crash, but you might also learn something in the process. At the very least, you can game pretty freaking well. So, thanks for watching, guys. If you like this video, hit the like button, get subscribed, and let me know down in the comments what you would do differently. I mean, would you have specked a different computer?

Check out Boot.dev at https://boot.dev/?promo=JAKKUH and use code JAKKUH to get 25% off your first plan! Support me on Patreon! https://jakkuh.com/patreon Building a gaming PC has gotten SUPER expensive this year, so I wanted to see with a bit a resourcefulness, if I could still build a sick PC for $500. The answer, is yes. This $500 PC is AWESOME, and you can build one too! ► Products Featured in this Video! ◄ Buy a Ryzen 5 5500: - on eBay: https://jakkuh.com/ryzen-5500-ebay - on Amazon: https://jakkuh.com/ryzen-5500 Buy a Ryzen 5 5600: - on eBay: https://jakkuh.com/ryzen-5600-ebay - on Amazon: https://jakkuh.com/ryzen-5600 Buy an MSI A520 Motherboard: https://jakkuh.com/msi-a520m Buy an AMD Radeon 6750 XT on eBay: https://jakkuh.com/6750xt-ebay Buy an AMD Radeon 6650 XT on eBay: https://jakkuh.com/6650xt-ebay Buy 16GB of DDR4 on eBay: https://jakkuh.com/ddr4-ebay Buy a 512GB SSD: https://jakkuh.com/512gb-nvme-ebay Buy a Cooler Master MasterBox Q300L Case: https://jakkuh.com/cm-q300l Buy an MSI A550BN Power Supply: https://jakkuh.com/msi-a550bn Buy a 500Hz QD-OLED Monitor: https://jakkuh.com/500hz-qdoled Buy a USB-C Charger: https://jakkuh.com/8S2Yu Buy a MacBook Pro: https://jakkuh.com/2FjTr Buy a Lego Porsche: https://jakkuh.com/iSri8 Purchases made through some store links may provide some compensation to the creator. ► GET EXCLUSIVE CONTENT ON MY PATREON: https://jakkuh.com/patreon ► COMPANIES THAT SUPPORT US: https://jakkuh.com/partners ► MY GAMING PC: https://jakkuh.com/gaming-setup ► MY HOMELAB GEAR: https://jakkuh.com/homelab ► MY CAMERA GEAR: https://jakkuh.com/camera-setup My Socials: - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jakkuh_t - Twitter/X: https://x.com/jakkuh_t Chapters ------------------------------------------------- 0:00 - Intro 1:04 - Motherboard 1:54 - CPU 3:05 - Cooler 4:00 - Boot.dev 5:10 - Doing Future Jake a Favour 5:26 - NVMe SSD 6:04 - 16GB of RAM! 6:27 - Case 7:26 - Power Supply 8:47 - Graphics Card 9:37 - i am an amateur 10:19 - Cable Management 10:42 - DOES IT WORK? 11:02 - BIOS Update & XMP/DOCP 12:32 - Drivers! 13:11 - Counter-Strike 2 15:00 - Overwatch 16:05 - Doom: The Dark Ages 16:23 - Battlefield 6 16:56 - Temps & Power Consumption