The PS5's Price went Up so I Built a PC that Beats it

In an unprecedented move from Sony, the PS5 family just got the biggest price increase that a console has ever seen. Yet another blow against affordable gaming. But I think we can help. First, by shining a spotlight on the healthy market for secondhand PS5s. There are tens of millions of these consoles out there now. And because of that, there are deals to be had. Also, I believe that despite Sony's move, that may remain true throughout the rest of this console generation. More on that later, though, because second, there are hundreds of millions of PCs out there. And with a little bit of scrapyard spirit, I think that even in the current climate, we can beat the performance of the PS5 at its new price. But there will be some obstacles. And the first is, of course, RAM. While I do believe that the worst may be behind us, memory pricing remains high. thanks to the insatiable needs of AI data centers. But what a lot of folks might not realize is that not all RAM has been affected equally. DDR4 is very much still in play, especially less desirable kits, and CPUs as recently as just one platform ago can still support it. Which is why we're starting our build with an Intel Core i5 12400F. Just $83 for this little fella. And like the rest of the deals that we're going to highlight, getting one for this price shouldn't be a major challenge anywhere with a healthy marketplace community. This seems to be mainly for two reasons. One is that Intel has lost a lot of their sex appeal for gamers over the last 5 years, which has lowered demand on the secondary market for their chips. And the second is that in spite of the lower sex appeal, Intel quietly still kind of dominates the CPU market by volume. So, there are a lot of these things out there with suppressed demand. Okay. Yeah, it has two fewer cores than an AMD price equivalent, or even the PS5 for that matter, but the 12400F's more modern architecture and maximum turbo speed of 4.4 GHz should more than even out the score. With that said, nothing in life is free and a little bit of that sweet sweet savings gets offset by the generally higher price for Intel motherboards is what I would say if we were buying a new motherboard. But we're not. And while we're at it, I got another tech tip for you. Over the last few generations, budget chipset motherboards have quietly GONE FROM NO GOD NO GOD NO ALL THE WAY to oh yeah, those are kind of okay compromises. Like on this ASUS Prime H610M MATX motherboard, it can be found for less than $50. And not only does it support our 12th gen CPU, it can even take a 14th gen upgrade down the line. Also, while it wasn't the case for a while, Intel's low-end chipsets even support XMPP now, so you can get the most out of nonJeck memory kits like this 3200 mega transfer per second 16 gig kit of Corsair Vengeance LPX that we got for about $60. Now, that speed not actually ideal for peak performance, but the huge jump in price for 3600 megat transfer per second made this decision a pretty easy one. Just like it was easy to finally tell you about our sponsor tonight. He says his only message is that ODU has every app you need to run your business. Critics say shut up and stop telling people that. Who's right? I will be when I interview him later in this video. Global shipping costs are out of control, but we've got a way to FIGHT BACK. THAT'S RIGHT, Shiptorm has returned. From April 24th to May 7th, you can get free shipping sitewide on ltdstore.com of orders over $150 in the US and Canada or $225 worldwide. No special code required. Just load up your cart and you're good to go. And if you want an even lower threshold for free shipping, you can sign up for our supporter plus tier at flowplane.com for an even better offer. We'll have that linked down below. Aside from RAM, the other tough one right now is SSD prices. And unfortunately, looking at kind of the timing of the RAM apocalypse and potential recovery, this one might take a bit longer to settle down. We had to pay about $100 for a one TBTE DRAM cashless model that in my opinion isn't worth more than about 50. Thankfully, we did find some outlier deals for quite a bit less than what we paid. So, if you're patient, there are still bargains to be had. And worst case scenario, guys, storage is one of the easiest things to upgrade or expand down the road thanks to, again, entry-level motherboards not being total dog anymore. Look at that, two M.2 slots. It is worth noting we could have saved a buck either by buying a SATA SSD or a smaller SSD along with a larger hard drive. And if I was configuring the system for a friend, I would actually strongly consider that route. But if we're comparing to the PlayStation 5, a shortcut like that feels kind of unfair. What does feel fair is paying less than $10 for a case. Okay, sure it's a little battle worn and sure it's a thermal take with a few missing parts, but when the comparison is the PS5, honestly, I think the Versus 17 comes out looking pretty good. Oh, sorry, Sony. And we pinched our pennies equally hard for our cooler, though, you might not have to. The 12400F does technically include one in the box. It's just that most of the ones that we saw secondhand didn't have the box anymore. The good news though is these can be had for around five bucks. And for not many more buckaroos, you can get a 500 W power supply like this Thermaltake Smart 500. It's not an amazing power supply, but it should get the job done. At least until it's time to build your PS6 killer for GTA 6. It's coming out this year. Yeah, sure. Let's get these installed. We interrupt this chill montage to bring you one of the potential pitfalls of buying secondhand hardware. It appears that the housing around the USB3 header on our motherboard is uh gone. The good news is the pins are all in there and they're all straight and we would be able to tell which way this goes on without the key because one of these holes is supposed to be blocked. Except whoever had this before must have plugged it in backwards and they pierced the one that's supposed to be empty. So, I'm actually not sure. Here's a tech tip. Don't do that. Thanks, David. That's helpful. With all that done, it's time for the cherry on top, the GPU. Now, this was a tough one to lock in because my initial thought was Intel B580 and we're done. But after crunching the numbers and looking at the very sparse availability of used Intel GPUs, I realized we could do better. We don't have to do better to match a PS5. All we need is something in the neighborhood of an AMD 6600 XT. But as it turns out, GPUs are one area where pricing has been on the mend for a little while now. And we can do better. Nvidia's 3000 series now sits in kind of a sweet spot. It's new enough to still support most of Team Green's most appealing features, but old enough that most AI bros just plain aren't that interested in them, which is good for us because the RTX 3070 is a whole lot of gaming goodness for just $215. With that in mind, then what is our total damage, David? $544, which actually leaves us enough budget that we could get a Gamester Cyclone 2 that's brand new, which is one of my favorite controllers, or a used Dual Sense, which feels a little more appropriate considering we're going against a PS5. Let's game. Let's do uh I'd never press the power button, but hey, uh that's what I love about sometimes budget power supplies and motherboards. They just kind of you provide power to them and they're like, I'm going, you know what? I'm going to go big picture, too, for the more consolelike experience. Okay, here we go. Dude, this looks freaking awesome. Yeah, I mean, both look really, really good. Go to where Ragnarok is a really nice looking game. Okay, I want to start kind of poking at fur. You know what? My fur is better. Yep. DLSS, baby. Ooh, this is some yucky flickering back here. Interesting. And that's probably one of the most distracting visual artifacts to me. Yep. don't know exactly what it is, but your HDR is a little more HDR. It's because I get to configure it every time I display I connect to a new display. It gives me a little wizard and then I configure it and then I get the most out of my display. Yeah. And to be clear, I can do that, but I was not at any stage prompted to do it. So, let's get out of this cut scene and then I'm going to configure it and see if I can close that gap a little bit. Just the way it's reflecting off of the metal on his shoulders. Yeah, that looks way more washed out than mine. Yeah, slightly. Oh, you're having some flickering in the background, too. Oh, it's gone now. I think that's the wind. No, there was like a light. Oh, I caught something there. Yeah, that. So, there's a weird I think LOD thing where we're pushing the VRAM so hard. We got 8 gigs of VRAM. We're at 7.49 that there's a certain distance that it has trouble with the textures. So, we could probably switch uh one of our settings. but that's PC gaming for you. You got to do a little bit of tweaking. get the most out of it. Ultra screen calibration. Let's go. Let's go. Enable HDR. Oh, I don't even have it on. Well, there's the problem. Now I've got HDR on. This should be better. That still looks way better. Yeah. Yeah. No question. Windows HDR. Man, I figure it out. HDR display calibration. Here we go. Get I have to download it. Ah, it's not as good still. It's quite a bit better. my performance is dropping a little bit more in these more complex environments. You're still pretty much above 60 other than a few drops. Yep. And with VRR, it's like this would be acceptable game performance for me. Absolutely. No question. Let's try another game. We'll do Returnal. Yeah, let's let's do Returnal. Does this game support HDR? On PC? Oh, I don't know. I think it does, but I'm We'll have to double check. That's something to watch out for is even if the HDR experience is perfect on PC, not all games that support HDR on a console necessarily support it on PC. Wow, yours looks so much better. Holy crap. Wa! Holy sniky. Yeah, this is not close, brother. Not close. Smackdown. Holy crap. Are you running at a 60 or a 30 fps? This is a 60. At 60. At 60. Cuz I'm definitely falling well below 60. Uh graphics. Okay. So, oh man, I'm I'm still at quality assess too. Yes, I bet you'll still be sharper than this. I'm getting really big FPS dips, though. Look at that stutter. Huh. Hold on a second here. Hold on. So, I'm down to medium now. And I definitely am still sharper. but it doesn't look like super betterer anymore in my opinion. But now I'm actually in more complex environments and still maintaining like a solid very playable FPS. Even then it isn't 60 though. No, you're dropping down to around 40. Yeah, my HDR looks really good. Yeah, that I I think your HDR actually looks better than mine right now. With that said, you wouldn't normally be sitting this close. No, if I was all the way back there, I think this would none of this would be an issue. But that's the point of pixel peeping is to get in here and really judge it. Okay, let's do our next one. Let's do it. Let's start the game at the same time. Yeah. Uh, Death Stranding. Death. 3 2 1. Oh crap. That's okay. I'm like a fraction of a second behind. You're going to end up probably 30 seconds behind me. Oh, don't continue. I mean, it wasn't that way. That was really close. My performance is not Let's uh dial you in a little bit. Can you uh pan a bit? I mean, that's not 60 fps either. I'm going to go medium. I'm going to turn off motion blur. I cannot turn off motion blur because this is a console game and that's just not a thing. Are we going full speed pan? I think I'm above you now. Yeah. You've got motion blur to kind of mask it, but I at medium am now above 60 fps even in my image. Once again, noticeably sharper on the PS5. You know what though? Hold on a second. I think I like the way the PS5 is handling level of detail better. Oh, look at this. Oh, yeah. Huh. So, very near. I think I'm on par. In the distance. I think I've had to I think I've had to cut too much. Let me have a look. Maybe that's something I can tune though. Okay, here. Can we just go to the top of here? Right where you are. I want to see the terrain quality again. Can you turn back this way? Yeah. Okay, we're close now. We're close. I think I'm basically on par now. Okay. What about our main character? Oh, mine's better. Oh, substantially. Look at that hair. Okay. Would you say that we've killed the PS5? At the new price, I think there's an argument to be made that we did. We got equal or in some cases even more performance for less. But Mark Cerny would surely point out again that secondhand hardware is a pretty big advantage. And as we pointed out earlier, secondhand PS5s and even brand new PS5s are not selling at that new retail price, which kind of raises an interesting question. Is this a real price increase? I think it's hard to know until we've done a full year cycle, but I could imagine that they're raising the price so that they can do big discounts and get people to rush out and buy PS5s for games when they want them to. But it might also be something else. My theory too is that they could be testing the market, doing what you're talking about, going, "Okay, here's our MSRP, but here's our discount for the holiday," and then using that to take the temperature of the market to maybe establish what will be the non-disounted new MSRP of the PS6. That way, no one will be talking about it during the launch that the price went up, and then they can continue to sell PS5s at a normal price. Are they playing 4D chess? Uh, it's hard to know. I think part of the challenge is they don't really know either because they've probably booked the fab time for the PS5 or PS6's SoC. So, they need to get it out at a certain time, but they don't want to get it out at that time anymore because the RAM is so expensive. The SSDs are so expensive. So, I don't think they are sure what they're going to do. All right, changing gears. Do you think we could have gone DDR5? If we kept mostly the same system, but just changed the motherboard to one that does DDR5 and the RAM to DDR5, it adds about 150 bucks. That's too much. It breaks the budget. You could downgrade your CPU, but then it's just a different system. It's not as good. I think this is the better option right now. At least DDR5 has maybe started to start to come down. So maybe in another 6 months, 12 months, we'll be having a totally different conversation, but for now, this is pretty good. What about some of the other aspects of PC versus PlayStation 5? I know that this is sort of a passionate conversation topic for you, but people often talk about how game pricing is so much better on PC thanks to Steam summer sales, but you often bring up, okay, well, when was the last time that you paid full MSRP for a game on the PlayStation store? Yeah, there's pretty similar sales for pretty similar games on PlayStation. I think there's kind of a threshold that we've kind of figured out to go for the sales to get those games that are 3 to four years old sold. I do worry right now about the Sony ecosystem because they had on their investor call. They know that they're going to have trouble getting more audience. So, they're going to try and extract more out of their current audience. So, what does that mean? Higher game prices, new hardware. I don't know. But I don't like that. Locking exclusives back down again. That's a big thing, too, is it was a really nice couple of years that it was almost a sure bet that Sony games were going to come on PC, but they've said that they don't want to do that because they know that that's how they sell more PS5 hardware is they make exclusives or they make great value hardware even at the new price. I hate to say this, it's still really competitive. And if you're willing to buy used or open box, you can get really good deals. I literally bought a PS5, the 30th anniversary one for uh $380 US. So, it's a special edition, open box, and it's still out there. You just got to look. Or not. I mean, there's a lot of good news here today. And I'm glad to report that building a sweet budget PC rig is still possible if you channel a little bit of your inner scrapyard warrior. Even if that means you won't have the latest and greatest and flashiest features, this system is a great reminder that there are tens of thousands of games out there that we can enjoy without buying into the latest hype and a good reminder that games were good before generationally locked optimization and they will be after as well. Personally, I'm really looking forward to Alabaster John from Radical Fish and I'm really excited about the new Castlevania game. Yeah, I don't think we're going to need anything more than this PC or a secondhand PlayStation 5 in order to enjoy those. Exactly. Right. You know what else I'm looking forward to? Telling these fine folks about our Yeah. So, that's my guy. He starts every one of my videos with a tech tip. Fascinating. Just a little tip. Just a little tip. It warms people up for my message. Right. Which is that ODO's got every app you need to run your business in one userfriendly and customizable platform. And that's good news for everyone. Mhm. Mhm. But not everyone. Mhm. Mhm. Well, the uh business app council would disagree. No. Who? The group that wants you to pay for a bunch of different app subscriptions instead. They often chase after and try to stop you. I believe they did actually catch you at one point. Oh, those guys. Oh, yeah. No, that's just like a fun game we play. I think they are trying to hurt you. Nah, we're buddies. There he is. I think they want to play right now. do is the allin-one solution for your business issues cuz it's got all the apps you'll need. Now we're talking invoicing, inventory, CRM, and every other thing. And this link is for free 15 trial. It's so much fun playing with my friends. If you guys enjoyed this video, you might like other videos where we build PCs for a fixed budget. Why not check out our recent $1,000 build? Sadly, it's not as much performance as we should be getting. Thank you, Sam Alman. But it's still not a bad little rig.