How effective is a low budget gaming rig?

We had two previous posts about making a low budget gaming solution out of a refurbished office machine paired with entry level gaming card. How good is such a combination in current games? Up until some time ago, I wouldn’t even have considered such a solution. Then I literally stumbled upon Tech Deals, a great YouTube channel that had this very combo tested and benchmarked. Have a look at the videos below and be amazed. I know I have been.

$250 i5-2400 + Radeon RX 460

$250 i5-2400 + Radeon RX 460/GeForce GTX 1050

$150 i5-3450

Are you convinced yet? Then you might want to start hunting for your own bargain deal. Of course, prices and availability here in Europe are not at the level you can find in the USA. That doesn’t mean though there are no bargains to find.

Here is a list for an eBay search, with the following criteria:

– CPU: i5-2400, i5-2500, i5-3450 or i5-3470
– Buy Now format
– located in the European Union
– maximum price of 300 euro (above that it’s not worth it anymore as a bargain).
– in ascending order of price + shipping to your location

eBay search for i5-2400, i5-2500, i5-3450 or i5-3470

Happy hunting!

Deal Alert – nVidia GTX 750 ti from Amazon UK Warehouse Deals

nVidia GTX 750 ti is still a good video card to transform an older corporate machine into a budget gaming computer, capable of more than decent framerates at 1080p. That is, if you manage to find it on a bargain. Most Amazon UK offers hover around the 100 pounds price, which is too close to the GTX 1050 (around 120 pounds) that is at least around 30% faster, if we compare their PassMark scores.

However Amazon UK has a bunch of Gigabyte NVIDIA Gtx 750Ti 1 GB as a warehouse deal for only £66.07 (around 77 euro). If you have a machine like the one in yesterday’s deal alert, add one of these cards and you got yourself a nice budget gaming rig. You don’t need anything else – just plug it in and boot the computer. It has no need for external power connector so it will work right out of the box with these refurbished PCs.

Here is the link where you can find them:

GIGABYTE NVIDIA GTX 750Ti TOC 1GB Amazon Warehouse Deal

This is an affiliate link – it won’t cost you anything extra, but if you purchase one of the cards, using this link, I will get a small commission that will be used to generate content for this website.

Deal Alert – i5 desktops for a bargain

There is a hot deal going on on eBay right now, with a number of HP Pro 3400 and 3500 desktops. What’s so hot about them? These machines still have a lot of computing power inside their cases. Pair them with a video card that doesn’t need external power, like GTX 1050 or 1050 ti and you get a beast of a machine, capable of running almost everythign, over 60fps at 1080p.

Even more so, these machines are in mini tower format. This means that you can fit any video card inside

Here are the deals:


HP PRO 3500 – Core i5-3470 @ 3.20GHz – 4GB RAM – 320GB HDD – Windows 8.1 PRO | eBay

Current price: £129.99 / Approximately EUR 150.09


HP Pro 3400 – Core i5-2400 @ 3.10GHz – 4GB RAM – 320GB HDD – Windows 7 PRO | eBay

Current price: £119.99 / Approximately EUR 138.55