What are some ways to build of a PC for cheap
Posted by Agitated-Egg-1397@reddit | buildapc | View on Reddit | 3 comments
I’ve been getting more into gaming lately and have been really enjoying it, but majority of games I want my laptop can’t run.
This is what my laptop specifications says
LAPTOP-NURBVCKG Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-N305 (1.80 GHz) Installed RAM 8.00 GB (7.68 GB usable) Device ID 190C9496-6856-4804-ABDD-390AA90ADC50 Product ID 00356-07430-18555-AAOEM System type 64-bit operating system, x64-based processor
Ive thought of just replacing some of the parts within the laptop such as the processor, but it’s attached to the motherboard. So as far as I know it’s not possible to upgrade it in any way.
I used to have a PC as a kid and still have the monitor and stuff like that. No actual PC though.
Luckily my uncle is a huge nerd so as far as putting it together I have help. Just can’t find the parts.
My uncle recommended just buying a cheap used one and making any adjustments I need but I’m iffy.
Any ideas?
(Games I want to run in case it helps)
Avatar: frontiers of pandora
Modded Subnautica
And…..yah thats about it
OkSystem455@reddit
Ok, if no anti-cheat, e-sport titles are in the mix, find a perfect functioning PC that was rendered "obsolete" by the recent Win10 EOL/Win11 non-compliance. A 7th Gen i7-7700* PC would be ideal; install a Linux gaming distro.
What region are you in?
Agitated-Egg-1397@reddit (OP)
I have no idea what any of that means but thank you. I’m in the USA
BaronB@reddit
Best ways to "build" a PC for cheap:
Find a prebuilt being sold at a big box store for the wrong price and buy it before they realize the price they slapped on it was less than half the worth of the components.
Find someone rage selling their SO's just bought expensive PC.
Build a time machine and go back in time about a year before PC component prices exploded.
Troll facebook marketplace, ebay, Jawa.gg, and pcpartpicker.com for good deals on used and new parts. Do a bunch of research on components to get a good sense of what the relative performance is, or find good sites that let you get reasonable comparisons. TechPowerUp, TomsHardware, and GamersNexus have charts with dozens of CPUs and GPUs on them that you can use to compare between them. Most aggregate sites like UserBenchmark, TechnicalCity, HowManyFPS, or Versus are not a good options and have highly questionable to outright fabricated data. PassMark is at least real data, though still not always great at predicting how well any CPU or GPU does in real games, mainly because real games are all very different from one another.
Lastly, there are a ton of YouTube videos on how to build inexpensive PCs from used parts. The main problem with these are that people follow them to the letter when they're often giving information that's only accurate for a very limited time window, or wrong by the time they even come out, because the used market is highly volatile and what was a good deal when they bought the components is no longer a good deal today. So don't treat any of them as component lists, but rather as what they (or at least most of them) are intended as, which is showing strategies for finding good components.
A number of years ago, buying old Dell Optiplex office PCs was a good deal, as the CPUs in them were often still more than fast enough to play games, and would usually come with good enough RAM and storage. In some cases you could even get a good GPU as the resellers weren't particularly careful with checking what was inside the cases. But that era is gone as these are all going to be completely stripped of RAM and SSDs as those have become so valuable today, and the CPU demands of many modern games have started to outpace the office PC CPU capabilities.