Low-price gaming PCs, now and future

[SubCog]

My kids are getting old enough for lan gaming. Ages 13, 8, and 5. My youngest mainly just plays minecraft, but she's getting pretty good. 13 & 8 play minecraft, fortnight, roblox, and want to get into some esports stuffs. I'd love to introduce them to lan classics like Quake, UT, CS, etc. Over the next 18 months or so, I intend to install a permanent lan-gaming center in my home, with a computer for each member of the family (including my wife). That will allow us to run family game sessions, or allow my kids to have friends over for lan parties.

That means I will need to build/purchase 4 gaming machines (I already have one for myself, of course). They don't need to be power-houses, but should run modern games at reasonable settings and smooth framerates... but don't need to do 4k, ultra settings, etc. I already have plenty of monitors, keyboards, etc... so I'm only counting the cost of the computer itself.

I'm hoping to get machines for ~$500 each, but price is flexible. I could possibly build systems with whatever the latest generation of APUs happens to be... those are getting better and better all the time. But I'm also intrigued by the Steam Deck concept... Maybe just buy several of those? Or I can imagine something similar being sold in the $500 range, but without the portability (screen, controls, etc), maybe with more powerful graphics... basically a basic gaming pc in the form-factor of an xbox.

Thoughts or predictions? What's a reasonably-priced way to acquire 4-5 gaming PCs over the next couple of years?

[Trunks0]

Steam decks, or something comparable, is awfully tempting.

To do it affordably... catch some sales at the right time or go used? I'd agree that AMD APU's are likely the best route. Then if they ever need or want to upgrade, you have a path.

[SubCog]

I'm super tempted to go with something like this for ~$140: https://www.amazon.com/Dell-Optiplex...=15Z2RW6VWDC58



Just need to find a reasonably priced GPU to pair with it... One with a slim form factor and small power draw. Best thing I'm finding in the $200 range is a 6500xt... but that's pretty weak, even for kids computers.
https://www.newegg.com/powercolor-ra...82E16814131793

Maybe later this year, when the new GPUs come out, maybe the 3060s will drop in price? I think pairing a 3060 with the computer I listed above would make a fabulous lan system for my family.

[Meteor_of_War]

My son was using a GT 1030 in his PC for the last couple years until we just built him a new computer. That should fit in that case.

It worked great for 1080p gaming as long as you don't try to run any demanding modern games, and I assume the 6500XT would be similar. He played a lot of indie pixel art type games, Source engine games, and Minecraft. Would definitely also work great for fps classics like you mentioned.

But if you want to run more demanding modern games you'll likely need to go up to a GPU on par with at least the GTX 1060 or maybe RTX 2060, but then you might run into physical size constraints in that SFF chassis. Look into it though. If an RTX 2060 will fit it could be a good choice at around the $300 point.

[Trunks0]

I'm super tempted to go with something like this for ~$140: https://www.amazon.com/Dell-Optiplex...=15Z2RW6VWDC58



Just need to find a reasonably priced GPU to pair with it... One with a slim form factor and small power draw. Best thing I'm finding in the $200 range is a 6500xt... but that's pretty weak, even for kids computers.
https://www.newegg.com/powercolor-ra...82E16814131793

Maybe later this year, when the new GPUs come out, maybe the 3060s will drop in price? I think pairing a 3060 with the computer I listed above would make a fabulous lan system for my family.

I have had access to those for years. You hit the nail right on the head.

You need a low profile, low power draw GPU for gaming. The unfortunate part is those don't really exist anymore. Especially without a PCI-E Video connector(which these towers do not have).

You could try looking at old XPS fullsize towers or Optiplex fullsize towers. However you need to double check if they do or do not have the PCI-E videocard connector and how many pins.

[SubCog]

My son was using a GT 1030 in his PC for the last couple years until we just built him a new computer. That should fit in that case.

It worked great for 1080p gaming as long as you don't try to run any demanding modern games, and I assume the 6500XT would be similar. He played a lot of indie pixel art type games, Source engine games, and Minecraft. Would definitely also work great for fps classics like you mentioned.

But if you want to run more demanding modern games you'll likely need to go up to a GPU on par with at least the GTX 1060 or maybe RTX 2060, but then you might run into physical size constraints in that SFF chassis. Look into it though. If an RTX 2060 will fit it could be a good choice at around the $300 point.

The kids mainly play minecraft, fornite, roblox, etc. I'd like to be able to do esports games at 60fps, maybe Valorant or LoL... esports games are usually not too demanding though. If a $200 gpu could do that, I'd be happy with it.

[SubCog]

You could try looking at old XPS fullsize towers or Optiplex fullsize towers. However you need to double check if they do or do not have the PCI-E videocard connector and how many pins.

Good tip. I'll watch for that.

[Trunks0]

I used to recycle these Optiplex Slim and fullsize towers relatively often. Especially the 3000, 5000, 7000 and 9000 series stuff. And the biggest hurdles to using one for a quick n' cheap gaming rig is no PCI-E video connector, half-height cards needed OR the PSU isn't standard ATX(either in size or the connector to the Mobo). So swapping in a more powerful PSU's can be challenging to acquire.

[CurrentlyPissed]

Low price gaming? HA have you seen the price of gp..... Wait nevermind. Yes, you can.

For $500 though, I'd look on FB Marketplace. There are a billion decent CPU/2060 laptops out there that you can do an external monitor to for $500~, and people on FB marketplace are /always/ negotiable.

[Shadowless]

...esports games are usually not too demanding though.

*Halo and Call of Duty have entered the chat*

Honestly, I'd look for used XPS towers, used MSI towers, or used ASUS towers and go from there. $500 doesn't get you too far on the new market.

[SubCog]

As a test, I've ordered an Optiplex for $93.

• Core i5-4570 3.2ghz
• 8gb ram
• 500gb hdd
• Windows 10

I'm going to pair it with a 2gb Radeon RX 550 that I found for $50 on ebay. It's slim enough to fit in the case, and doesn't appear to require any additional power adapter.


I expect this to breeze through classic fps games (UT2004 for example), and should also handle modern esports titles fine... plus the stuff my kids play (mincraft, roblox & fornite). If my testing is positive, I plan to build ~7 more of these, and put together a ready-to-go lan party that I can run out of my garage.

We're in the middle of a move now, and won't get the key to the new house until the end of the month... it'll take me several months to get things set up at the new house, before I get back to this project. But I figure I can start with 1 for now, as I have a few weeks to kill before the move.

[KAC]

You can probably buy a 10th gen Intel and a 3060 for a 500-600 used these days. Maybe even less.

[SubCog]

You can probably buy a 10th gen Intel and a 3060 for a 500-600 used these days. Maybe even less.

Sure, I can get something better by spending 4x more. That shouldn't be surprising.

[KAC]

You wrote 500 each. I just told you the spec that you should be able to grab at that price. Whatever man…

[Trunks0]

As a test, I've ordered an Optiplex for $93.

• Core i5-4570 3.2ghz
• 8gb ram
• 500gb hdd
• Windows 10

I'm going to pair it with a 2gb Radeon RX 550 that I found for $50 on ebay. It's slim enough to fit in the case, and doesn't appear to require any additional power adapter.


I expect this to breeze through classic fps games (UT2004 for example), and should also handle modern esports titles fine... plus the stuff my kids play (mincraft, roblox & fornite). If my testing is positive, I plan to build ~7 more of these, and put together a ready-to-go lan party that I can run out of my garage.

We're in the middle of a move now, and won't get the key to the new house until the end of the month... it'll take me several months to get things set up at the new house, before I get back to this project. But I figure I can start with 1 for now, as I have a few weeks to kill before the move.

Noice! Can't wait to see the progress

[acroig]

Noice! Can't wait to see the progress

Seconded.

[SubCog]

You wrote 500 each. I just told you the spec that you should be able to grab at that price. Whatever man…

This particular build is $140. I intend to put together a lan setup that has 8-10 of these.

[SubCog]

Got the $93 optiplex in today. First test is successful. Running UT2004 at 100+ fps. As expected, this machine breezes through classic games. Next up I think I'll try CS Go or Valorant. Also need to try minecraft & roblox.

My $50 gpu is still in transit. Once I get that in, I should be able to run much newer stuff.

One thing I was pleasantly surprised about, is that the computer came with a mouse & keyboard. I expected to have to acquire those separately. This will make a big difference when I buy the next 7 machines.

[acroig]

Nice!

[Sasquach]

You can probably buy a 10th gen Intel and a 3060 for a 500-600 used these days. Maybe even less.

But then you gotta get the rest of the components.......like MB, RAM, HD, etc.

[Trunks0]

And these Dell's are everywhere. If you where closer, I could literally give them to you for free (minus a HDD/SSD).

[SubCog]

1. I got my Radeon RX 550 and installed it. It's a slim unit, but I had to remove the metal bracket to get it to fit (maybe I can order a slim one?). Plus the Dell case has this weird fold-over clamp, and I had to bend one of the pins back. Also I can't get it to fit completely tight into the PCIe slot... but all of the contacts are making contact and it's working properly.
   
   
2. So far I've tried UT2004, Quake Live, CS Go, and Valorant. All of them run much higher than 60fps, although not necessarily at the highest graphics settings (which is fine). So there's plenty of compute power in this inexpensive rig, for the kinds of lan-party games I intend to run. I'm currently installing Doom Eternal, and will report back when I get a chance to evaluate it.
   
   
3. I'm really struggling getting things to run smoothly though. Despite having high framerates, there's still a significant amount of stutter and microstutters, seems like quite a bit of frame-pacing issues. Makes me wonder whether my power supply is putting out enough juice? But PC gaming has been pretty confusing the last several years...
   
   I'm finding that the smoothness of the games also depends heavily on which mouse I'm using. The cheap Dell mouse that the system came with is pretty terrible, and it helps alot to plug in one of my gaming mice. All games are effected, but UT2004 is particularly sensitive to the mouse stuffs. Actually I'm finding that the mouse-smoothing & reduce-mouse-lag settings make a big difference in UT2004... toggling off the reduce-mouse-lag setting actually wreaks havok with the displayed framerate, making it rapidly spike between 50-130fps. I don't recall framerate being tied to mouse settings in the past.
   
   I used to just plug into a monitor and things would be smooth as long as the computer was pushing out enough frames... but nowadays I have to use a frame-limiter to make sure I'm locking the framerate to the refresh rate of the monitor. I overcome this on my larger gaming rig with a 144hz freesync monitor, but I'm really struggling getting things smooth on a basic 60hz screen.
   
   
4. Also, everything takes FOREVER to load. I checked the harddrive health with crystaldiskinfo, and it seems to be fine. But windows takes like 10 minutes to boot up, and then all the startup apps take several minutes more to settle. Then the game takes a long time to boot (although UT2004 is reasonably fast). Have we just been spoiled by SSDs, or is there something wrong?

[Nunz]

Lack of RAM and CPU power.. and you got used to high refresh rate. 60Hz always felt terrible, you just didn't know better

I wonder if you dropped down to Win7. I'd also try and de-bloat the OS as much as possible.

[acroig]

I wonder if you dropped down to Win7. I'd also try and de-bloat the OS as much as possible.

I was about to suggest same thing.

[SubCog]

I wonder if there's a portable version of windows 7 that I can boot on a USB drive, to see if that works?

[SubCog]

So I used Windows10Debloater and turned off cortana and a bunch of other stuff, and that made quite a large difference. Most of the stuttering is gone now, and the games I've tried are feeling pretty smooth! Of course everything still needs a frame limiter to lock it to 60fps, but actually I'm pretty impressed now.

Also, things seem to be loading MUCH faster!

Next I'm going to try minecraft and fortnite.

[Nunz]

I'd say it's likely the 8GB of RAM. Win10 and above really start to lean on system RAM, and 16GB becomes minimum. For your purpose though, a de-bloater app should be fine. Just make sure it's not a sketchy app that's going to put some keylogger on your rigs!

[Trunks0]

It's Win10 being a bit of performance goblin with more recent versions. An SSD's really smooths these rigs out. I've done that upgrade tons of times to get more life out of them.

Basically it comes down to Win10 performing terribly on a HDD by default. It tries to do to many things at once and just runs outta bandwidth. Slimming down Win10 was a good idea.

[SubCog]

I'd say it's likely the 8GB of RAM. Win10 and above really start to lean on system RAM, and 16GB becomes minimum. For your purpose though, a de-bloater app should be fine. Just make sure it's not a sketchy app that's going to put some keylogger on your rigs!

It's Win10 being a bit of performance goblin with more recent versions. An SSD's really smooths these rigs out. I've done that upgrade tons of times to get more life out of them.

Basically it comes down to Win10 performing terribly on a HDD by default. It tries to do to many things at once and just runs outta bandwidth. Slimming down Win10 was a good idea.

I am considering spending the extra $30 to get systems with 16gb of ram. I think I can get things to work with 8gb, but I think it might just save me a ton of headaches if I splurge on the extra memory.

I could also look for systems that run Windows 7, that might make a difference.

As for hard drive performance, it seems fine as long as I'm only doing 1 thing at a time (installing 1 game, for example)... but as soon as I try to do 2 things at once, it grinds to a halt.

-----------

I've now got Minecraft, Fortnite, and Battlefield 2 running smoothly, so I'm super pumped about that. This project is going to be AWESOME.

Also, I tested Doom Eternal, which can run mostly smoothly, if I turn down the graphics settings WAAAAAY down. It's not really a target for this project, as I'm only focused on lan-oriented games.

[Trunks0]

SSD will go further than the ram. So I would do that upgrade first and see if you want to try and snag more ram. Upside is DDR3 is super cheap and easy to find used right now. So upgrading further should at least be cost effective

Also don't forget that you can use various types of cloud gaming services. Including the ability to do local streaming via AMD Link.

p.s. They also run Win7 fine. My work environment had them on 7 till the bitter end of the support window for Windows 7 . But then you have to isolate them off from the regular net, as Win7 machines are easy targets now that they are outside of getting regular updates & support.

[SubCog]

SSD will go further than the ram. So I would do that upgrade first and see if you want to try and snag more ram. Upside is DDR3 is super cheap and easy to find used right now. So upgrading further should at least be cost effective

Also don't forget that you can use various types of cloud gaming services. Including the ability to do local streaming via AMD Link.

p.s. They also run Win7 fine. My work environment had them on 7 till the bitter end of the support window for Windows 7 . But then you have to isolate them off from the regular net, as Win7 machines are easy targets now that they are outside of getting regular updates & support.

I'm seeing ridiculously cheap NAND drives on newegg. I could get this 128gb for $13, and put the operating system on it. Or scale up to larger drives for not much more. Is there anything wrong with going with a NAND drive?

Also, I'm not seeing a slot on the mobo for this... maybe there's an adapter that I could get? I could use the SATA from the DVD drive (which I doubt I'd ever need), or else I have one of these slots open:



--------


Nevermind, I answered my own question. I ordered one of these for $8, along with the 128gb NAND drive. Will see how hard it is to transfer windows across.

[SubCog]

I'm also reading about a windows feature called "Readyboost", where you can use a fast usb flash drive as additional cache to supplement a low-memory system. It's supposed to help alot for slow HDD i/o. Actually a system like mine, with 8gb ram and a slower HDD, sounds like a perfect candidate for Readyboost.

I don't have any suitable usb thumbdrives laying around, so I ordered a 5 pack of low-profile drives for $23. They should arrive before my SSD, so it'll be a good chance to test it out.

[SubCog]

Got my usb drives in, popped one into a USB 3.0 port, and turned on ReadyBoost. It's a night-and-day difference.

So the computer still takes a long time to boot up, and programs can still take some time to start, at least the first time. But once the computer has been on for a few minutes, everything is pretty snappy, especially while multi-tasking. I don't get that problem I had before, where every tiny thing I load makes the computer feel like it's totally frozen up for several minutes.

I'm still waiting for my SSD to arrive. I've read that ReadyBoost doesn't help much (or at all) when using an SSD. But it's still worth a try, since I'm planning to just run the OS from the SSD... maybe the additional cache will still be helpful for non-OS stuff? I suppose it's probably better to just make sure my pagefile is on my ssd though, but it's worth trying out.


------------

edit: Actually it looks like ReadyBoost may be negatively impacting performance while gaming. Need to do some more testing, but ReadyBoost may not be a good solution for gaming.

[SubCog]

Finally got my $13 SSD, and yeah it's not working.

The optiplex motherboard doesn't have an m.2 slot on it, so I'm using a pcie x1 adapter. But, it turns out that my SSD can't run over that, 'cause this motherboard doesn't support SATA3 over pcie. So maybe there's another adapter I could use, where I could cannibalize the SATA from the DVD drive? Otherwise this system may just not support any low-priced SSD. I'm still exploring my options.

[Trunks0]

Some of the later generation versions of these towers came with MSATA to 2.5" SATA adapters. Which I always thought was a funny thing to do instead of just going with regular 2.5" SATA SSD drives. I guess for Dell it made sense as they could just use the same MSATA drives all over the place (desktop & laptop, older and newer)

Not sure that would work with a PCI-E M.2 SSD drive though.

[SubCog]

Some of the later generation versions of these towers came with MSATA to 2.5" SATA adapters. Which I always thought was a funny thing to do instead of just going with regular 2.5" SATA SSD drives. I guess for Dell it made sense as they could just use the same MSATA drives all over the place (desktop & laptop, older and newer)

Not sure that would work with a PCI-E M.2 SSD drive though.

It's worth a shot. I ordered this one for $8.

It means I'll have to disconnect my dvd drive, but I doubt I'd use that anyway.

[Trunks0]

You will have to find a place to mount that. But nothing a little bit of double sided tape can't solve