Gaming PC on a budget

[bdbdbd]

Bofferbrauer2 said:

bdbdbd said:

So, basically I'm trying to a build a gaming PC with as small budget as possible. I don''t usually do this kind of stuff and the reason why I'm building it, is to be able to play Cottage Simulator and My Summer Car. I'm not playing them myself, but it's for the teens to play with.

It seems that used PC's with recommended performance are around here 550€ and up, but I'm targeting to spend more like 150€ max., though it's not set in stone.

Technically you can find used PCs with first and second gen Intel i7 and GeForce 1070/1070TI/1660TI/3060 for pocket change if you're fast. Also I5 Skylake/Kaby Lakes with 800/900 series GeForce PC are somewhat easy to find and there seems to be a number of I7 6700K and 7700K processors sold separately. This would be 150-200€ the cheapest, with one PC worth of electronic trash (or to browse the internet).

Well, this was the best I could come up with. What would people recommend with similar performance with the performance above? Or something I should take into account? I'm also interested in memory speeds and such, as I would prefer the better option - for example the difference in performance between 6700K and 7700K is small, but what makes 7700K actually a more interesting option is that 7700K supports faster RAM speeds.

I've been focusing more on Intel/NVIDIA, because AMD is much more rare to find. AM4 socket would be interesting because of how many generations it was used, but most older systems with AMD CPU are AM3 or older socket. 

I'm a bit surprised you can't find any AM4 CPUs, considering how many upgraded to Zen 3 over the years. I was expecting the CPUs to be plenty by now, just the boards being rare since you don't need a new one to upgrade your CPU.

Have you thought about refurbished MiniPCs? While the GPU won't be able to keep up with an used 1070 or 3060 (surprised you can find the latter so easily tbh), you can get one with a Ryzen 5 2500U (8 Vega CU GPU), 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD for less than 200€. And if a Celeron would suffice, you can easily go below 150€, though the GPU will be much weaker in those cases.

I checked out the mini PCs, it seems that required specs with the budget isn't available. The minimum requirement for GPU is GeForce 1060 6GB and If I understood correctly, the Vega is integrated GPU that doesn't come even close. 

RTX 3060 seems to pop out every now and then with old systems, but cheap ones are sold quickly. It was the budget option 4 years ago, so it's possible they've been used in Bitcoin mining.

AM4 processors are available, but the motherboards are not. It looks like that at my budget range, it's maybe 1 or 2 AM4 motherboards and 10 Intel equalents. Buying a semi-obsolete gaming PC with usable motherboard or graphics card hives you a decent case and a power supply. And if I decide to upgrade the system, there's something I still can use.

I bought a gaming PC for my second kid over 1,5 years ago. It has I5 11400 processor and 3060ti GPU, sonit's possible that someday either the motherboard or graphics card ends up to the PC I'm currently planning on building.