I'm Finally Going To Be Upgrading My $200 Budget Gaming PC This Coming Week!
Five months ago, I showed you this $200 budget gaming PC that I had built using an older Dell Optiplex. Since December, this has been the little budget gaming PC that could. As far as modern titles go, it's been able to handle pretty much any game that I've thrown at it. I was even able to completely play and beat Final Fantasy 15 which is a pretty intensive game hardware wise. It struggled at some parts especially on higher settings, but when I changed the settings to average (which still looked incredible by the way) I was able to play it with very few issues.
Here's a breakdown of my current specs:
Dell Optiplex 7010 MT
3.4 Ghz i5-3570
Gigabyte RX 480 4GB G1 Gaming
8GB DDR3-1600Mhz RAM
Corsair CS550M Semi-modular PSU
500GB 7200 RPM HDD
5Ghz PCIe WiFi Card
Not bad for around $200 huh?
I was only able to get it for so cheap because I shopped around for the best prices for over a month (and did a ton of research) on everything before I finally pulled the trigger and got everything that you see here.
I spent right at $185 for everything since luckily I already had a good older PSU laying around. I say it's a $200 budget gaming PC because you could get a used PSU for around $15-$20 that would be good enough for what you'd need. The last upgrade that I did on this was getting a PCIe wifi card because the cheapo one that I had before absolutely sucked. The current PCIe wifi card that I have has continued to give me some issues, but I was able to get a partial refund on it at least.
Let's finally talk about my upcoming upgrade for this thing!
Just this morning I purchased an additional 8GB of DDR3 1600MHz RAM for it which will then put my total system RAM up to 16GB. While 8GB is enough for most budget gaming rigs, some newer games are recommending 16GB so it's a sensible upgrade. After this upgrade, all four of my RAM slots will be taken up, but luckily I just don't see myself needing anymore than 16GB of RAM for quite some time.
I knew this was an upgrade that I'd get eventually, but I knew that I only wanted to get it if I could get it for a good price. After trying (and failing) to haggle on some RAM yesterday, I seen this listing this morning which was the price that I was wanting to get it at. As far as I know, right now $20 is the cheapest that you can find two sticks of 4GB DDR3 1600MHz RAM at on eBay. Most other sellers were asking anywhere between $25 to $40 on eBay so I feel like I was able to get this at a steal. Furthermore, from the research that I've been able to do, this RAM is rated at CL11 which is also the same latency as the current RAM that I have in my system already. While you don't NEED to have the EXACT same RAM across all your modules, it's important to get as close as you can because if you have two different speeds/latencies of RAM then your system will only run at the slowest rated speed of them. Besides being a different brand of RAM, this is pretty much the exact same thing that I have in my current system. Research man, research.
Adding additional RAM is also an easy upgrade that should take no more than a couple minutes. I'll simply have power off my system, remove my graphics card, open the latches on the two open RAM slots, insert them, and reinstall my graphics card. Normally on a PC you wouldn't need to remove the graphics card to just install more RAM, but in my particular case, my graphics card pushes right up against those latches so I'm actually not able to open them without first removing my graphics card.
After this upgrade, these will be my new system specs:
Dell Optiplex 7010 MT
3.4 Ghz i5-3570
Gigabyte RX 480 4GB G1 Gaming
16GB DDR3-1600Mhz RAM
Corsair CS550M Semi-modular PSU
500GB 7200 RPM HDD
5Ghz PCIe WiFi Card
Later on today, I'll probably write an article talking about what'll be coming next as far as future upgrades to my budget gaming PC. This article went on a bit longer than I intended it to lol.
With that said though, thank you for reading! I hope you have an awesome rest of your day! :)