Arnan de Gans

The international goose

Building a Gaming PC on a budget

 |  6 min read

I used to game a lot. Back in the early 2010’s I spent almost 2000 Euros on a PC just so I could play Battlefield 3, GTA 4 and some other games that were popular at the time.

Some history

Before that, in the early 2000’s I would go nuts with my freshly earned salary and buy new and more PC crap every few months. So much so that I had 3 or 4 fully functional gaming capable PC’s at any given time. Mostly because I didn’t really sell the previous computers.

Coax IPX/SPX networking at 10mbit half-duplex? Sure. Fun! (Not!)
Buying the very very first version of a Wifi 11b Accesspoint? And spending hundreds on a PCMCIA Wifi expansion for my stupidly overpriced Acer Laptop? Hell yeah!
Building a File Server computer with Windows 3.11 and a custom TCP/IP driver? Sure why not!? Yes, it worked. And yes, having 250GB storage on a network was awesome!

Was there any benefit in it? Probably not. But I just liked tinkering with that kind of thing.
Actually most of that was pre Windows 2000, in the 90s. Oh well.

But then I decided I wanted to live in another country. And bringing PC’s to the other side of the world isn’t practical. So I bought the latest Macbook Pro. Sold my fancy gaming PC, all the other macs I had at the time and skipped town.

Now, 10+ years later. I own a house. So I did the smart thing and decided I wanted to play some games again. Not new games. Oh hell no! Well, maybe some games. But I very much like my games from back in the day. You know, Civilization 4 (maybe 5 too?), Total Annihilation, GTA5, Settlers 4, maybe some Anno 1404 or OpenTTD on the side. And of-course Minecraft too.

That kind of thing. You know, from when games were still good and had some thought and meaning behind it.

Going that way with my games, this also means I don’t need the latest and greatest hardware, and since I already have a Hewlett Packard EliteDesk G4 PC as a media server. I decided to get a similar computer like that. But the newer model for the base of my Gaming PC.

I’ve been out of the loop with building computers. I don’t know what’s good for m.2 nvme ssd whatevers, my last PC had a 7200RPM spinning disk. And I don’t know what has been good for Graphics cards. The latest I ever had in a self-build PC was a Geforce GTX 480. Back when 16GB and 4+ cores in a CPU was still a luxury.

Discovering about the modern idiocies of computer building has been a wild ride. I quickly decided that I don’t care enough to learn all the ins and outs, I read some reviews, compared benchmarks and choose based on that. I’ve used duck.ai for some ‘how to put it together’ ideas as well.

The Budget

For the budget I wanted to keep it modest, as far as that’s possible with computers these days, and decided that I wanted to spend around €500 Euros (About $550 USD).

I found a decent deal for a refurbished HP ProDesk G6 Tower PC on Amazon and bought that for just over €350 EUR.
It has decent specs, too. A 10th gen Intel CPU. 16GB Ram. New SSD. And, expansion options.

Obviously the onboard HD630 GPU won’t cut it. So I searched and found a renewed Asus Phoenix 1660 Super with 6GB ram. I think this card is nice. It fits the hardware generation of the G6 PC, too. And it’s compact enough so that it fits smaller PC’s. And I choose it, partly, because that’s just what was available for around €200.

I’m going over budget already…

To make the Graphics card work, I needed a bigger power supply. The dinky 180W ‘office’ PSU can’t power anything beyond the stock computer. For that I ordered a 550W upgrade for about €100. Also on Amazon.

I also needed a 180 degree angled adapter for the power plug for the Asus video card. Otherwise it wouldn’t fit in the case. So that’s another €20 EUR.
I’ve also bought a 500GB M.2 nvme SSD to hold the games. This was about €75 EUR.
And I spend another €75 on a Logitech K400 keyboard and a M510 mouse.

Summing it all up

All together that comes to:
€350 + €200 + €100 + €20 + €75 + €75 = €820 Euros. (Amounts rounded for simplicity)

I overspent. Whoops! If I cheat a little and don’t count the Keyboard and Mouse that’s a bit more bearable. Buuuut I feel that such peripherals are part of a computer.

Oh, I also got a new 43 inch TV from HiSense. Just about €260 EUR.
So really, €820 + €260 = €1080 EUR.

And isn’t spending 1080 on a gaming PC not just meant to be? Even though I’ll be gaming at 1440p or 4K resolution?

The set up

So all that put together, I have a PC capable of most games that I want to play on high or very high settings. That’s pretty good! The completed PC looks like this:

Pretty cool. I’ve been playing a game of Settlers 4 every day. I’ve tinkered with GTA 5 and Civilization 4 a bit. It seems to work pretty well. I’ve also managed to get Sin running, a shooter from the early 2000’s. Not as much fun as I remember it. But maybe I’ll finally make an effort and finish the story line. We’ll see.

Now if only the construction crew would finish my house renovations sooner so that I can set up my living room properly. Instead of sitting sideways on my couch with the TV balanced on 2 bar-stools and straining my wrist to move the mouse on a side table.

Diy, Pc, gaming, linux

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