 This is the ultimate guide on how to build cheap gaming PCs. If you're the type of person that likes saving money and are willing to take it one step further, this video can save you an extreme amount of money. I've built maybe 300 computers in my life and these methods have saved me roughly $75,000. Most YouTube videos that showcase this skill only show one facet of what it takes to do this. And the reason I'm showing you everything today is because I don't really upload anymore. So rather than sitting on this information, I'm gonna make this something that you all can access whenever you want to. So let's get started. Buying good prices on parts requires a few things. Looking in the right places, knowledge on part value, and a little bit of luck. Before I show you how to do it, you need to understand the first two things. As far as looking in the right places goes, the place that I look for parts are Facebook Marketplace, OfferUp, Craigslist, Facebook Groups, eBay, Mercari, r slash hardware swap and r slash build a PC sales, Surplus stores, Micro Center, and lastly, B-Stock sales from known retailers. I know I just threw a lot at you, it's okay. These resources will be explained later in the video. As far as how I determine a value of parts, I use a comparison method. For example, let's say I wanted to compare an RTX 3080 to an RTX 3060. Assuming they're both used parts, I would first look up the retail value of an RTX 3080. It looks like it goes for $500 new, so now I know that anything that I have to consider a deal needs to be under $500 for it to be worth it. So let's say someone is selling a use 3080 for $420, and I also happen to find a use 3060 for $250. Which one is the better deal? The first thing you need to do is compare the specifications of each card to see how much performance you can expect out of each of them. If you don't understand these metrics, a simpler way of doing this is going on YouTube and finding a benchmark test with the parts you were looking at to review the FPS. Let's say you wanna play Fortnite, and the 3080 gives you 200 frames per second, while the 3060 gives you 120 frames per second. Now you just need to do some simple math. At $420 and 200 FPS, the 3080 gives you about one frame per $2.10. At $250 and 120 FPS, the 3060 gives you about one frame per second for $2.08. In this specific example, the 3060 is technically better value for your dollar, but now you need to ask yourself a few questions. Is spending the extra $170 on the 3080 worth it for me? Can I save that $170 and put it towards other parts in the PC? Is spending the extra $170 better for me because I plan on playing more demanding games in the future? Maybe you plan on getting in content creation in the future, and the extra CUDA cores of a 3080 would be helpful for you when you edit in Premiere Pro. Once you answer these questions, it becomes a lot easier to understand what is the better choice for yourself and what is the better value for your dollar. Because ultimately, while building something for as cheap as possible is fun, it doesn't make sense to do that if it won't work for what you intend on using it for. Now I'm gonna show you how to do it. There were two ways I would try to tackle this, and I'm gonna show you both. The first step would be to find something bare bones. This means something that's almost already built or can be upgraded. This saves you the effort of having to do multiple purchases, and in some case is the better option for you financially. I'm gonna show you the method of finding an old Dell OptiPlex or other prebuilt system and throwing a graphics card inside just so it's good enough to be considered a gaming PC. There's a lot of videos that already showcase this on YouTube, but I'm gonna show you how to do it here anyways. To start this, I would suggest by going on eBay. Go ahead and search Dell OptiPlex and start reading through the description of the listings. If you don't understand what any of the specifications and the description means, this is a great time to teach you what to do. Figure out what games you wanna play. Now go Google the minimum specifications in order to play that game. Once you see what parts you need to have in order to play, you can use a website like user benchmark to compare what you're looking at buying versus what you need in order to play. This is a good enough way of figuring out if what you are looking at is good enough for what you need it for. But you do need to be careful of comparing parts that were made many years apart. For example, if you were to compare an AMD FX8350 to an i5-8600K, there would be some issues. On paper, the AMD option might seem like the better choice because it has two more physical cores. However, the FX8350 was also made in 2012 and has far inferior architecture compared to an 8600K. And then you could also look at the single core performance and understand that it's not really a comparison. Now, let's say you don't want to use eBay or you just wanna save even more money. Here's another option I've become aware of through the years of being a Jeepskay. If you live in a town with a college or high school, these institutes oftentimes have something called a surplus store. Most schools have a mandate that requires them to update their computers and other hardware every certain amount of years. For me in Las Vegas, there is the University of Las Vegas, Nevada. And if we take a look at these prices, they're even lower than what's offered on eBay. And so for the sake of this video, you should already know what that means we're gonna go do. We are here. Let's go find out. See if they have anything good. All right, so let's see. Devil's Stroze, Optiplexes. We gotta find which one has the right specs. 555.90s. 47, wait, I7? 4790? 100 bucks? For an I7 4790? Wait, that's actually really good. Holy shit. Wait, that's insane actually. For me, right now it is between, and I can't really see that, but an I5 4590 with eight gigabytes of RAM for 60 bucks or an I7 4790 with eight gigabytes of RAM for, where is that, $93. Both of them could play the games that we want, but a four core eight thread processor allows us to do so much more in the future if we ever choose to do something with it. So even though it's $33 extra, I just can't refute the value of this processor even though it's a tough choice we're gonna go with this one. I hope you test it if you want to. Yeah, that would be great if you could. Thank you so much. We also just give you the cables too. Oh nice. Yeah, cause we have stuff made up. Do you want to look for a monitor? Just the computer? No, just this is fine. Oh, okay. And would you want to purchase it? Sure. Yeah, that works. Okay. Thank you so much. Oh God, no, oh God. I ended up spending more money than I was expecting to, but in exchange, I got a substantially better processor than I was anticipating on getting. Not only that, the guy knocked down the $93 price tag to only $80 flat because there was no DVI port on the back. I'm not sure why they would warrant a discount but I'm never gonna say no to saving more money. So now for the system, we have everything we need except for a graphics card and the only thing we have to do now is go and find one. Unfortunately for a system like this, we are actually limited in our options. Most of the time, you can put whatever graphics card you want in a system so long as you have the power to support it. But for this, and like most Dell pre-built systems, the power supply doesn't have an extra cable to support a graphics card. So we need to find a graphics card that will run off of the power that it receives only from the motherboard. If you're not sure what the best options are, this is the best time to practice what we talked about before. Check the minimum specifications for what you are trying to play and then try to find parts that fit that. In this situation, since it's a more specific search, what graphics cards work without external power will help you find what you are looking for. Find what fits your budget and then you need to make a choice. Is the security of a warranty worth paying full price of a retailer for you or do you want to save money and risk buying it from somebody else? If you wanna buy it from Amazon or some other store, go for it. What I would do in this situation is identify the model that you are looking for and then start looking for it in other places. Now, I'm not gonna lie to you. I started looking already through Facebook Marketplace and OfferUp and I assumed that I would be able to find this relatively quickly. After about three hours of searching, my local market is actually pretty dry right now. Wait! No water for him. I went through OfferUp extensively until I got to the point where I was actually looking outside of Las Vegas unintentionally because I had scrolled that far down the page. Eventually, there was an absolute hero who finally responded to me on OfferUp. My boy, Ernan, was holding on to a Zotac 1650 which doesn't require an external power source and he is willing to meet up and sell it for only $100. So it is 1030 and the guy just reconfirmed that he's still down to meet us at 11 for the graphics card. That's good. And while we're on our way to do that, let's talk about negotiating. For example, in this video, I was willing to take the price of what was originally $120 listed and then offer $100 plus pickup. That is not a bad deal. However, I believe that if I wasn't in a little bit of a rush to get this video done, I could have got it for substantially cheaper. When it comes to negotiating, you always want to be willing to walk away from the deal. If you are not willing to walk away from something that you want or something that you need in order to finish your PC build, you are never going to get an amazing price. What I mean by that is there are people who have had listings up in my area for let's say a few months. If I send out an offer and they say, no, that's too low and I don't respond and I just let it sit. A lot of the times those end up being some of the best prices that I end up getting on parts because things that are lying around like a graphics card, collecting dust, people realize that there is a market for it, but it's not something that people are just like exploding out with responses trying to get it every single day. The reality is when it comes to older hardware, there is a demand for it, but it isn't great. So you shouldn't be willing to just pay whatever is listed as the seller's price or even what's even a little bit lower than that because a counter offer doesn't necessarily mean that that's the lowest price that that person is willing to sell it for. So long story short, don't get too attached to something that you think you need even if it fits your build perfectly. Be willing to walk away or you will pay more than you want to. Do you mind if I take a look at it real quick? What? Do you mind if I take a look at it? So what did you use the card for? I used it for two or three months then I saved it in the cafe by the new one. Okay, nice. So it takes 1650. Cool. How long did you use it for? My what? How long did you use it for? Two, three months then I bought the new card. Do you want to hold this for me? All right, there you go. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Appreciate it. Yeah, have a good day. All right, so all we gotta do is pop this in there and we should be good to go. Build so simple you could do it with one arm and in 45 seconds. Okay, so Windows is finally done installing as well as some games and we are about to test it. Don't ask me why I'm using a 55 inch curved monitor. It's what we have lying around in this house. Why the fuck you lying? Why you always lying? We're just gonna play a few games. Valorant, Pow World, Hell Divers. All right, so I'm dead, but with some pretty active gameplay for Valorant at high settings, 1080p, get 120 frames. I mean, that's definitely playable for an Esport. I mean, look, 180 bucks. You're not happy with this. Should have spent more money. Okay, so loaded up Hell Divers. It's on the lowest settings at 1080p and for some reason Fraps and Steam doesn't want to show me the exact frames per second right now. But if I had to guess, I mean, this is without even actually having any gameplay, maybe 30 FPS, it's bad. If you were desperate to play this game, you could do it, right? Like it's doable if you were really, really desperate, but maybe at a lower resolution than 1080p. Which honestly, actually, hold on. I mean, it's a $180 budget, right? Like, wait, this is kind of play, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, hold up. But this is kind of playable. Okay. Maybe I spoke too soon. You know, at $180, maybe my expectations were higher than they were supposed to be. At 720p on the lowest settings, this is actually playable. So we're probably getting, my best guess, 50 frames. I could do this on a $180 budget. 720p 50 frames. For a game like Pow World, I mean, this is fine. Like, you really don't need anything higher than this to be able to play a game like this. I think it's, oh, maybe this is like a Valorant League Overwatch type PC. Okay, so today we are gonna be building a computer again by seeking out deals, except this time, we're not gonna be looking for a specific pre-built bare bones model. Before we do that though, I'm gonna go into the resources I mentioned earlier in the video of what I try to use in order to build something for myself secondhand. I'm gonna explain the use cases of each different resources and which ones I personally prefer the most. So this is probably the best information out of the whole video. Number one for the resources I like to use are local deals. Facebook Marketplace, OfferUp, Craigslist, all of these are amazing tools. Facebook Marketplace is one of my favorite tools because it's real people using real names. I know a lot of times the fear with local deals is that you're gonna get scammed and when you have your face and your name out there, it is less likely that someone is going to slay you in that way. OfferUp is a great tool in the same way. You can hide your identity on there if you choose to, but from my experience, a lot of people on there have been good since there is the review system where if you do scam somebody, you're probably not gonna have your account for very long. Craigslist is still a tool I use from time to time, but it definitely has been phased out over the course of the last five years in my experience. Anytime I'm using it to meet up with people for parts deals, not trying to be rude, but if I'm being honest, I'm normally meeting up with people 40, 45 years old or older. That's not to say it's something that you should avoid because every once in a while I do find a gem on Craigslist. This next resource, it's kind of in a group of its own, but it's definitely not something you should sleep on and that is Facebook groups. This is gonna vary on the strength of a community within your hometown, but a Facebook group in my area called 702 Gaming has gotten me some of the best deals I have ever gotten on computer parts. I know for some of you, it may sound a little bit lame to be actively looking for a community with shared interests, but I am not joking when I'm telling you that if you can find something in your hometown, maybe even start it, of a collective of people who enjoy computer parts. Part of that interest is buying and selling. You will get a group of like-minded individuals who wanna do the same thing that you do and then if you can get those individuals to buy and sell, you might build rapport and you might end up getting something down the line that helps you out in a great way and you might be able to provide that same service to somebody else. The next group of resources is online secondhand deals. So websites like Mercari and eBay. I won't lie, I have bought some things off of Mercari but I am very turned off from using the platform because after all the fees and the shipping, the secondhand deal becomes a lot less of a deal. That's not to say I haven't bought in some things off the platform. My personal opinion of it though, Mercari is a little bit dog shit. Now as far as eBay goes, it's not bad. I'm not gonna say it's good and the preferred method but depending on what you were looking for and the time that you're looking for it, eBay can be a very valuable resource to buying something used so long as you already know what you're looking for. The beauty of the other online marketplaces that are more catered towards local deals is if you know what you're doing, you can look for things that are actually not necessarily what you had in mind but still fit the use case for what you're going for. eBay is very much a resource you use when you already know exactly what you were looking for and then trying to get that for a good deal. In my personal opinion, it's just less fun. It's still a good thing to use. This next resource requires a little bit more knowledge to understand how to use it and that is Reddit. Two subreddits I use in order to get deals are called r slash hardware swap and r slash build a PC sales. r slash hardware swap is exactly what it sounds like. It's people who are posting on their hardware, whatever it may be, and are looking to either trade it for something or exchange it for cash. I've had about 10 total transactions through that subreddit and in my personal opinion, it is helpful. If you follow all the rules and guidelines, it is an amazing resource and you can get things that you, A, wanted to get anyways or B, like I said before, didn't know you wanted but ended up getting anyways. However, I've kind of already alluded to this. I do know some people that have used that subreddit and end up being scammed. However, from my understanding from the people that I know that did use that service and get scammed, they were rushing through and didn't necessarily follow the rules. The best case scenario I could see for you to use r slash hardware swap is let's say you don't live in a big town. I live in Las Vegas, it's two to three million people. That's enough of a backyard to have local deals. If the population of where you live isn't that dense, well then going online through hardware swap and then being able to see all over the country, that would be a better scenario. As for the other subreddit r slash build a PC sales, I like this one a lot. Back during the first Bitcoin mining boom, it was one of the best resources that I could have ever asked for when it came to trying to get a 1070 or 1080 card when there were people who were buying them immediately and then flipping them and scalping them for more. Basically what the subreddit does is there are collective users who post deals that they think are good value that other people might be interested in for PC parts. The downside to this resource is that the really good deals that get upvoted to the top of the subreddit normally get bought out immediately. And so if you're not on that subreddit, refreshing it fairly regularly, you might miss something insane. What a lot of people don't actually know though is that this subreddit also has a bot that puts the deals that get pushed through and approved onto a Twitter account which you can set up notifications for on your phone. This is something that I have set up for me and if a good deal pops up, I'm immediately alerted to it on my phone. This is the type of resource that I would say is best used for the person who knows exactly what they want. They're just waiting for a better deal to show up. The next resource to talk about we kind of already showcased, but that is surplus stores or thrift stores. Figure out what in your area sells secondhand used PC parts. I'll give you an example. Something I learned that exists here in Las Vegas, Nevada is called the Blind Center. In order for the Blind Center to conduct their business and raise funds, something I found out that they do is accept secondhand electronic donations, PC parts, laptops, whatever you name it. They then take those things and sell them through eBay. I found them one day while I was searching through something specific on eBay and when the seller said in Las Vegas, Nevada, I asked if it was something that I could come check out in person. Every once in a while, that is a resource that I use whenever I try to find something locally in town and want to avoid a shipping fee. The next resource is probably something you've already heard of before, but that is Micro Center. This video is not sponsored by them, but I cannot help but state that every once in a while, when I do need something from a physical location, Micro Center prices do occasionally surprise me. One of my favorite deals that they have had for the longest time is a CPU and motherboard bundle. It is not uncommon for them to knock off 20, 30, even $40 off the price of whatever it is you're buying if you get a CPU and motherboard together. Check to see if you have one in your city because if you do get their newsletters when they come out, there is always some type of deal in there. The last resource is one of my absolute favorites, but it is incredibly difficult to utilize and that is B-Stock sales. In case you don't know, there are retailers online that do accept returns from products from their customers in case of any damage or just a general return where the customer decided, I can't afford this. Those returns a lot of times get held onto in a warehouse and then sometimes they get resold on the same website except in a category called B-Stock. Back in the day when EVGA was still making graphics cards, they had an amazing sale every Wednesday called Midweek Madness. I check this every Wednesday because every once in a while, you could find a power supply for $20, a graphics card for 60. Midweek Madness isn't really a thing anymore these days, sadly, but I will say this, check any of the online retailers that produce PC parts like Zotac, Gigabyte, whatever around the time new products get released and see if their stores will let go of some other old product for a substantially lower price than what they used to sell at. Now that you understand how all the resources work, I have just combed through OfferUp, Craigslist, and Facebook Marketplace to see what is available in my area. And this is what we are looking at for the two options right now. This $250 bare-bone system, which if you read it has a CPU, motherboard, and RAM with a cooler already attached. So that's four of eight pieces that we need. This setup is pretty decent and 8700K is a six-core, 12-third processor. It can be overclocked. The motherboard does allow for that. And so we could get some pretty decent performance out of this. He wants it for $250. I offered him $200 and he's willing to accept. For the second one, we have another bare-bone setup for $300. Included in this, we have a CPU cooler, motherboard, RAM, and a case, which means the only things that we would need are a graphics card, power supply, and storage device. This one is also an overclockable six-core processor, but it does not have the 12 threads that the 8700K does. I will say what excites me about this listing is that this comes with an H500P case, which is one of my favorite cooler master cases. They're absolutely beautiful. A slight detail that I'm picking up on right now is that even though normally money-wise, I would usually go for something like this if it was for personal use. This guy seems to take better care of what he builds. You can tell from the photos, whereas this one was kind of thrown on the ground and looks a little bit dusty. I did offer this guy $250 and he did accept it, and five out of eight pieces for $250 seems like a pretty good deal. I think we're gonna go with this. I think $250 for this is pretty solid. It is a nice-looking system, and performance-wise, 16 gigabytes of RAM is enough. Overclocking is definitely something that we can do if we don't feel like we're getting enough juice out of it, so yeah, we're gonna do this. Okay, I'm gonna get the money and we are gonna head out and we're gonna go meet up with this guy. Hello, how's it going? Chris, hey. Hey, I appreciate you taking the time. Oh, yeah, there she is. Oh, God, this is so big. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All righty. Have a good one. Stay safe, have a good night. Back home safe and sound. The only thing that we need to worry about now is the graphics card, SSD, and power supply, which we're actually gonna take care of easily here from the comfort of my desk. I almost never get power supply secondhand, and the reason for that is because if you put a bad power supply in a system, you risk damaging all of the other parts. Since we got a pretty good deal on those parts, I do not think it is a bad idea at all to spend a little extra money on a power supply brand new and ensure the safety of our parts. One of my favorite options for mid-level PCs when it comes to power is actually this thermal take smart. It's a 500 watt, 80 plus white certified power supply. It's only $40, so it's definitely a budget option, but it is also a smart option because again, I do not want to risk a bad power supply in this setup. The next thing that we can get is actually a little bit of a cheap option, which is this Patriot memory, 240 gigabyte SSD. Now look, I know if you are using this tutorial for yourself, you're gonna end up wanting to get something a little bit bigger. This is barely gonna have enough space for Windows and a few games. That being said, it is only $23 if you have an Amazon Prime account. If you don't have one, I'm sure you can find one of your friends that'd be willing to buy it for you. It's good enough for what we're gonna do, so we're gonna use it right now. And now with those two things purchased, we have one final thing that we need to get this computer running, and that is a graphics card. And to show a little bit of variety, but also to practice what I preach, let me show you where we're getting it from. This is a receipt that I have from a Zotac B-Stock sale. I have my Gmail account subscribed to notifications from the Zotac store. They actually have a little bit of a reputation for selling their aftermarket GPUs for a little bit lower than the competitors. A few months back, they were getting rid of some B-Stock graphics cards, so I took a look at what they had in stock and they had some really good prices. And what we are gonna be using for this setup is actually an RTX 2060 that I was able to get for $120. It's not the most insane deal I've ever gotten on an RTX 2060, but I think that this kind of performance that we're gonna get out of this for only $120 is not a bad deal in the slightest. So now if we wanna add up the total of everything that went into this computer, we have $250 for the bare bones, $63 for the SSD and power supply after tax, and then $130 for the graphics card after tax, $443 for the entire setup. All right, so as you can see, the computer's been assembled. We reapplied some thermal paste on the CPU. The 2060 is installed and everything is working as intended. Okay, so I kinda have to die to show the frames, but I mean, it is infinitely better than what it was with the last computer. 350 frames, 1080p high settings. I mean, this is pretty solid. Now we have Power World running at 1080p on low settings and I'm an idiot because I didn't realize that this game automatically hardcaps it at 60 frames, but the performance is pretty smooth. I've done a little bit of running around, a little bit of action in the game and it stays pretty solidly at 60. It maybe dips to like 52, 53 at times, but the performance is really good. So last but not least, we're ending it with Helldivers and this is the menu, right? But we're at 1080p mixture of high to medium settings. It's incredibly tough to play and try to shoot this with one hand, but I mean, we're pretty solidly at 60 frames. I mean, even with there's a ton of action on screen, we dip sometimes to like 55. It is definitely playable. And yeah, that's pretty much it. That's my last five years on YouTube right there. That is an example on how you can build yourself a very cheap computer for better than anything else you're gonna get online from a real teller. I mean, I think I've always thought this, but the risk of buying secondhand not only makes it more fun because it's like treasure hunting for me, but it also just saves you a ton of money. I hope that you guys got all the information needed from this video. I hope that if you watch it, it ends up being helpful to you and that it's something that you guys will be able to use if you ever need it in the future. I don't ever see computers being something that we don't need. So have fun, go crazy. And if you end up learning how to sell them too, I hope you make some money and hope you have a good day. And it's gonna sound a little sad, but you never hear from me as far as the YouTube stuff goes going forward in the future. Just know I really enjoyed my time and I had fun and I learned a lot. So hopefully you guys learned something too. And if I do, I'll see you later.