I don’t tend to game a lot, however I do occasionally desire to play a few computer games, usually on the more casual end of the gaming spectrum.
My daughter has been playing through Hollow Knight and I was interested in giving that a go, but it won’t run on the simple 13 year old PC (with just the basic graphics support) that I had connected to the TV in the living room, and which provides no room for expansion.
I could go out and buy a new gaming PC, but that would be really expensive, especially for something that would only occasionally be used. So I’ve decided to build a cheap second hand system with a bit more punch and upgradeabilty than the one I currently have.
To be clear. I wasn’t aiming at something to play the latest AAA games at the highest visual settings and resolution, but more something relatively compact that could be hidden away in the living room and play the more modest titles like Hollow Knight.
After a few mistakes and a bit of trial and error, this is what I ended up with:
I didn’t take the cheapest route, trying to build the most compact system you can ends up costing a little more, and there was a few things that I wanted to try that I knew would cost me a bit more than strictly necessary.
What I’ve landed on for now is this, mainly bought from eBay:
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ASUS H81I-Plus motherboard
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Intel i7-4790T CPU (with stock small Intel heatsink that I already had - I might upgrade if this proves to be a problem)
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Sapphire RX 580 NITRO+ 8GB graphics card
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16GB DDR3 1600MHz
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120GB SSD (which I already had lying around, along with a SATA cable)
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650W gold modular ATX PSU (a bit of an extravagance as I wanted to try out a modular cable power supply)
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Silverstone SUGO 16 case
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Noctua 120mm fan (the one bit I decided to by new as I wanted to see how reliable/quiet they were)
This combination seems to be working reasonably well. The motherboard has a few issues around suspend and resume that I’ve needed to work around. I was hoping to use a spare 460W ATX PSU but it turns out the RX 580 graphics cards can have a very “spiky” power draw and the one I had wasn’t able to power it well enough, leading to random reboots.
This system cost me £265.
If I’d been a bit more conservative with the GPU and gone for something that was physically a little shorter, it could have built a system into a smaller case I found and it would have ended up being quite a bit cheaper at around £170.
If small and compact wasn’t a specific goal, I could have easily got this down to under £135, based on the items that I have seen sell on eBay whilst building this.
To put it in perspective, from a performance point of view, this system can probably play the kind of games that you’d be able to play on the Valve Steam Deck, and probably at a higher resolution. However it should be noted, unlike the Steam Deck, that this is not a modern highly efficient processor in a portable unit with it’s own screen and will need controllers etc bought to work with it. But, bear in mind the Steam Deck starts at £349.
Clearly I also have the advantage of being fairly confident with building computers (though not immune from making mistakes), am the kind of person who has old stuff lying around “in case it comes in useful” and that means I’ve managed to make this a bit cheaper than some others might manage (especially if they’re just looking to buy something that’s ready to use).
Here’s a few lessons I learnt during this:
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Graphics cards are stupidly large these days (even the relatively old ones). They also draw a lot of power.
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The 8 & 6 pin power plugs on PSUs are probably designed for connecting to the motherboard not a graphics card. This results in adapters being needed in a lot of cases.
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Modular PSUs (like the one I decided to try as I’d never had one) probably minimise the number of unused power cables and adaptors you need to manage, but the cables you do need seem to almost take up more room than the “fixed” cable power supplies and because they are connected all over 1 side of the PSU rather than all coming out in one relatively small clump, they’re way harder to cable manage.
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I probably need to sell of more of the bits I have lying around. I ended up using less than I’d hoped from my parts pile. It would be better to get those into someone else’s hands that’s going to get some use out of them, rather than hording them till they’re nothing but ewaste.