Die Shrink Telegrams: Crazy Budget Builds

The first PC upgrading I ever did... Oh my god this was so stupid. I had a thin Acer prebuilt thing with integrated graphics, and bought some really cheap Nvidia card- I can't even remember what it was. Anyways, the case was too thin to fit the card properly, so I took the card and used side cutters to cut off the bottom metal piece from the back with the I/O so it would fit and had to leave the side of the case off. It worked for like, a year before I finally built a proper system when I had money haha.

Dystopiat

When working with used hardware, why are people so worried about cards that have been used with mining? As far as the components go, generally, miners use less power compared to gaming, and the only mechanical component is the fans which can be replaced. I have bought about 30 mining cards for builds and have been doing it for about 2 years now and not one customer complained about the video card failing.

Vipast

The cheapest builds that I have made for people almost always come in the form of dell premade being sold off and throwing graphics card into it for the kids to play, easily under $200 purchase. Making low budget builds, that are actually decent, requires more knowledge about compatibility and performance than building a new PC. Getting the most out of your build on a low budget requires you to fit all your parts together so every dollar you spend has on-par performance with other parts in the system, so everything bottlenecks at roughly the same point. When you work with older equipment you need to make sure all your parts will be compatible. I like making low budget builds that can perform well, it is just as fun and sometimes frustrating as making high end builds.

Vipast

I've built a few ultra budget PCs for charities to use as gaming PC. they've mainly been Core 2 Quad 8GB ram, small SSD, a GTX 550 ti or similar and I've been sourcing these for less than £50. My favourite one though was a FX4100, 8GB RAM, 240GB SSD, GTX570 and a 500W Bronze PSU, they tell me on a monthly basis how happy everyone is that uses the PC.

My current computer is a Dell OEM with a Xeon 1660v3 with a Quadro M4000, 256gb sata SSD, and 16gb DDR4 ECC RAM that I got for ~$220US ( $300AUD) that I got off ebay in March just as the lockdowns started rolling in after my laptop started having power issues. I know it's a boring answer but older OEM systems with parts that aren't recognized by your average consumer are usually where the best bargains are to be found.

Zach J

for my first gen ryzen system when i was in high school with hardly any money i stretched as hard as i could to get an r5 1600, a b350 motherboard and a 4gb stick of ddr4 and i could afford literally nothing else, i think that was around 300$. so my solution was to take my dell xps with an i7 920 and strip out the motherboard and put what i had in there with zip ties because the mobo standoffs didnt line up and connect the oem psu and hdds just so i could use my r5 1600, also the front panel headers didnt work so i used screwdriver to turn it on. and even with 4gb of single channel memory it ran circles around my old pc. later my dad saw my suffering and let me pick out the rest of my new parts as a graduation gift. the gpu was a gtx 960. almost went with a pentium g4560 system ( a complete system) and in the end im glad i didnt. i *really* wanted a ryzen cpu since it was such a nice ipc uplift over the i7 and i got so many more threads to use for hobbyist rendering and video editing

Josh Law (adn)

Id say my Mark 1 ryzen system. scooped the board of FB market ( B350 gigabyte) for 80 dollars from a guy that thought it was some old AM3. the DDR4 from a broken HP from work. 256 NVME Samsung boot from a busted laptop , Re used My 1060 6 GB from previous bulid. Ended up buying a 1400X off the guy for another 80 dollars ( nz pesos) And got the entire thing going with a Evga PSU I got brand new for 120. So all in all very cheap system.

Kiwi Phil

where do I start? Feel free to read some, all, or none of it. I challenged myself to do a full system loop using only the cheapest of aliexpress parts. cost me 62$ altogether, and it ended about as well as you would expect. I didn't bother to disassemble it before I left for winter break, and the thing was already half-empty and corroding when I got back. I got some jaguar/bobcat motherboard off ebay for like 9$, put a 2gb stick of ram in it, and set it up in the cardboard box my xbox 360 came in. I endearingly called it "The Xbox-box-box." Later on, to keep the spirit alive, I bought several broken 360s, and carved up the case of the one with the most stickers to serve as the new home of the Xbox-box-box. I scotch-taped an 80mm fan onto the heatsink of my reference rx 480 because it ran too hot. like 5 years ago, somebody sold me a gtx 690 for 100$. I got it for the novelty, and after making the mistake of selling my rx 480, the 690 was the card that got me through the mining boom. It ran hotter than the 290X that followed it, was much slower, and chugged more power. I finagled myself a dual socket 2011v1 server board last year. Added a 15$ pair of cpus off ebay and 32gb of ECC for 32$, a 40$ rx 580 ("as-is" mining card), and a pair of rgb aliexpress heatsinks for like 25$. I threw it into cobweb-coated, IBM case that formerly housed a pentium 4 server. you might be thinking "but there's no tempered glass side panel. how will you see the RGB?" Worry not, because the coolers were too tall for the case, and it had to be run without a side panel at all. Between the server board, and the 5 half-failing hard drives in RAID, the system was clearly not meant for desktop windows 10. it would max-out fan speeds and panic any time it was powered off or put to sleep. I held onto it for as long as I could, but sadly, it was not very good at being a VR pc for the living room, and was subsequently condemned to the attic. https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1vhmOqRbpmlbxomheoTkJGCtWBIGhy6tl

45€ was the cheapest I built. Got a dusty prebuilt from Fujitsu for 25€. It had a Core "i5" 650 (the 2c4t one, but it had an iGPU so they called it an i5), 2x4gb ddr3 1333, a decent cooler and a power supply that has a pci-e 8pin and a 500gb HDD. It took about 3 days to clean because it was full of cigatette dust. Then I added a 7770 for 15€.

Meritorius

The Pentium G3528... What can I say? $65 I paid for it... Dual Core, UNLOCKED! Grabbed a $30 Cougar case, found the cheapest board I could with OC support, a Biostar on an H81 chipset if I recall correctly. Anyways grabbed 8 gigs of random ram sticks an HDD and PSU I had lying around, dropped in my 8800GTS from 7 years prior, overclocked the crap out of the CPU and was off to the races. All in all I’d only spent about $150 since I had leftover from other systems. (I hoard spare parts... not ashamed). Eventually the 8800GTS exploded on me and I splurged on an EVGA GTX970 SSC, but it lasted me for years and that Pentium kept chuggin along. My son still uses the GTX970 but I put it into an Optiplex 3020 I salvaged from work (with the PSU from my original system). I still have that G3528 in storage somewhere... that chip has a special place in my heart. I couldn’t believe the price to performance. It seemed to have a LOT of overclocking headroom and I ran that thing hard... For me, keeping it cheap is all about recycling. Hard drives, power supplies, memory... KEEP THAT SHIT! Use it til it blows up! I donate a lot of my really old parts to friends and random people who could use minor upgrades. Thanks Tom, that just brought back a lot of really great memories from years past at a time when I really needed the distraction.

When I first got interested in pc hardware and following it, I had a family pc which used a celeron from around 2004-2005. I upgraded to a Pentium D 920 in 2007, my first dual core and later that year the ATI 2600XT AGP released and my brother bought it for my birthday. Looking back now, I had such a bad build. I did what my motherboard could support to try and improve gaming performance. The 920 could overclock pretty well and of course I had one of those copper zalman donut coolers. 775 socket was used for so long it made it easy to carryover some components without a full rebuild. Don't have images of that first system, but I have a gallery of those early years 2010 - 2014: https://imgur.com/a/UEfIN

Paulenski

Back in 2015, I found a computer with an FX-6300 and 8GB of RAM in a motherboard I never bothered identifying at the side of a road. I replaced the hard drive and PSU, added a DVD drive, then spent all of my computer budget on an R9 Fury. It was my first non-laptop computer, but it was also running FX, so I have mixed memories of its performance.

Ourous

I got a free collage pc that was a dell optiplex with a core 2 duo and 2Gb of ram through a volunteer program In 2013 (they also sold the same systems for 100$ if you didn’t volunteer, includes monitor and peripherals). Then all i had to do was buy another 2Gb of ram for 30$ and an old R7 280x that was used for mining for 160$. And boom a budget build that had a decent gpu

I Dude

My dad works in IT and fixes computers, sometimes there would be scraps and I remember one day he was given a 8800GT at work because they didn’t need it anymore, so I saved my pocket money and was able to complete with part scraps part used parts a pentium /4GB of system ram around 2010, my 10 yo self was amazed seeing how smooth everting ran in that beast after playing most of my life at that point at sub 20fps, to this day I still have some of the parts. I probably spent like 60bucks and later I upgraded the gpu to a gt630

I used to work at CompUSA and got parts for our cost price. I was able to get parts bundles from Intel's retail edge program. My last one was $220 for a q6700, a micro-atx DG33TL motherboard and Windows Vista 64 bit Home os. It would have cost over $550 if bought separately at retail in 2007-2008. My best Black Friday deal was EVGA 650W G+ psu for $50 in 2018.

Brian Steiner

I ran my main pc (z97 itx, 4790k, GTX 670) on my desk for a few months when I moved into my flat for uni... Though my cheapest build is not a gaming setup, rather my NAS system, it's running a A10-6800k or something, some FM2 motherboard with a dead memory channel, I intended to run it with some old elpida 2GB sticks but due to the lost channel I ended up using my brother's old 2x4 DDR3 kit, case I got for free, drives are 2 WD 500GB laptop drives (came raid 0ed in my first gaming laptop), 2 Toshiba 500GB drives which have bad sectors, and 2 250GB drives from an old family desktop. Only thing new in it was the power supply (be quiet 400w) which I think is most of what I spent on it.

qhfreddy

a z400 workstation with a 50 dollar work station quadro graphics card with 2gb of vram, total was 80 shipped Canadian bucks and could play fortnite at 720p 60 fps

https://pcpartpicker.com/b/ZXhypg Building a sub-$450 potato gaming build during the mining boom with a 2200G.

The Immortal Cameraman