Sometimes we get accused of being out of touch, so we're putting that to the test today. Our Tech tipsters will go head-to-head in an epic showdown. That's right, using only their knowledge, they will build a $1,000 PC. That doesn't seem that hard. Well, there's a catch. We need the highest possible performance, but we can't go over budget, and we're not allowed to check the internet for pricing. Oh well, that is a lot harder then. I guess the pressure's on to tell you about our sponsor, ug green. Check out their cute and compact Uno magnetic power bank. It features status emojis and up to 15 watts of wireless charging with a 36w hour capacity. Check it out at the link in the video description. All right, Lads, the rules are simple. One, build the best $1,000 PC from anything on these shelves. Two, no help from the internet. And three, a few other restrictions that I sent out yesterday. Any questions? Don't care. Go! I think we go big GPU. Yeah, 100%. AM4. AM4.

for sure. I don't care about case, just something cheap and decent, probably like a Chinese brand. Big risk, but I want to go 7900X. We going to way overshoot this budget. Some of them are really cheap. How cheap? Like 500 bucks. Do we want to waste money on CPU or just stock it? 3 okay and fractal mesh. Each team has their plan, and now it's time to select all of our parts. We're going to do a snake draft order, starting with Team Literal Arson. We have 45 seconds per part. Let's go. Okay, go, go, let's go, go. 7800 XT, not the XTX. Well, we could go for a fancy with 7800. No, we need to go the cheapest, shiest-looking one. The gigabyte looks expensive. I was hoping for something that seems cheaper-looking. We got to pick, we got to pick 79 gr. Where next? We next, I don't know, try it, two do this. We got, we have our part. Okay, do we want 12 or 13? 12 might

be cheaper. Like, we could do 12400. Do we have a 12400? Oh [ __ ] a lot of 13 6ks. Oh my God, we don't have any of the ones that I'd want. Where are all the CPUs? G G is not as good, not as good. Holy sh 13400, 13100. They're going 79. Does that make? They're going way over budget. 77 uh 7900, 7800 XT. That's a maybe. 77. That's 7700 XT. XT XT. Okay, yeah, we're good on that. We're good on that. CPU CPU CPU. I really would rather go with this unless we want to go Intel 3 4. Okay, okay. B 660. B 660. 650 650. Oh Jes. Oh Jesus Christ. Oh, and this said A1. Oh no, no. This is ITX. Oh God. Uh here. This is reasonable. Asus. No, no. This one. This one. All right, it's our turn. Go. All right, way. All right, yelling. All right, I'm looking for motherboards. AM4. Where the

freak is it right here. Do you think B450 Pro four good? I think that's fine. All right, that's probably 100 bucks. Okay, okay, but we get to go again, right? Yeah, okay. Basically, all they have AMD wise that's like reasonable, right? I really don't know. I think it'd be safer just to go with like this. Yeah, that is this one. That's probably the best choice. Yeah, we're going to go with the 5600 G, 6900 XT, or 7900 XT, or 78, or 78. I think 78. 78 is the one. This looks like some pretty awful stuff. Should we just go for it, or theam what? Let's do [Music] it. I can't. I have what I want. I just can't get it out. What did you just do? What does this require? It's pretty chunk, dude. It's pretty chunk. It is pretty chunk. Oh my [__]. We're screwed. We're so screwed. Now that the major components have been selected, we're going to round

out our systems with RAM case, power supply, etc., until we get to the most important category, Flex item. I need to find out if there's fans that are included with this or not so that we want to use our FX pick for fans real quick. Oh God, it's back. No, no fans, so get fans. Okay, this looks good. This all work. Let's cheap RGB would be really good. It's going to be so expensive though. It's going to be really expensive. I want something silly alija. We can have this for $10. Done. The parts have been selected. Our fates have been sealed. Now it's time to build, starting with Team Arson. For our CPU, we ended up going with the 5600G, and I think we ran into the same issue a lot of the other teams did, which is when they looked in the pile of AMD CPUs, all of them were already checked out, either to another project or labs testing. I don't know how much these are worth now. I have literally no clue. I want to say 15 bucks. I put down 125 as my guess. I'm

feeling a little bit sick to my stomach. The fact that the first component is different than I thought it was. I thought we just got a regular 13100, but this is a 13100 F. F is just no Graphics, no Graphics. That's fine, so it's actually better, so it should be cheaper. Yeah, you'll save 10 bucks probably. I think we went a little overboard on the CPU. We went with a 13600 K, 'cause there was like no, we wanted a 5600 X. Yeah, we panicked. Yeah, we panicked. There's none. And then for motherboard, we went with an Asus Prime B660 Plus, which is one of the cheapest LGA 1700 boards that we have in stock. We wanted to make sure that our CPU runs at Boost clocks, so maybe we can win big in the CPU competition. That might push us over the edge. Yeah, man, this motherboard looks very cheap, Alex. Exactly, and that was one of the original things with going with AM4 plat. Oh my gosh, these. Yeah, that's fine. Very

w we went with the ASRock b450 Pro 4. How much do you think these are? Like, I was going to say like 70, maybe 90. That might be pushing like a 100. 13100 F. And then we got our z690 plus Wi-Fi D4 motherboard. It is a much more expensive board than I would have picked, but we didn't see any 660 ones left. In terms of our estimates, we were thinking 13100, 130 bucks. z690, we said 170. It's probably more. I think I'm going to adjust the estimate to 200. You think so? Yeah, which is a huge bummer for the RAM. Chose the one that was used in the Shen build. I don't actually know how to pronounce it, but it was blurred the last time I pronounced it like this. So, G DDR4 3200 MHz. That's style points right there. St, that's class if you ask me. I think the anime adds five bucks, so we're going to go 40. I think that's our estimate all.

right cross our fingers with that one y this whole build please please please please the only thing we know for sure is that we are over budget all right so we're just going stock cooler here yeah which is nice 0 I actually haven't installed these stock coolers before boy over here okay don't do that this young does not know the ways of the when you boot up a game oh I do my computer still screams what kind of case do we get we got a fantex eclipse G 360a great case this is probably going to come in around $100 yeah maybe one 10 tops we got the fantex eclipse p300 this right here uh it that's quality it feels kind of like junk but not in a way that's like concerning it's not going to hurt me which is like a plus I guess and we have what seems like too nice of a fan in the back I'm a bit concerned about that next is our Flex item oh yeah and Jordan I want you to take a closer

Look at the box that you chose. Uh-oh, did I do a bad? Oh sh, light strips. What? Hey, I know I 100% would have made the same mistake. I was fully reading that as LS 120, assuming 12 mil fans. This box looks like a pack of three fans. This is not looking good for Jordan. While he's handling all the stuff on the motherboard, I'm going to be getting the case prepped. Uh, we got this Thermal Take Smart BM3 650 watt 80 plus bronze. I think we all had the same strategy. We went for Thermal Take bronze. Is it just we all consider them cheap? I think so. I think we were all expecting them to be cheaper than a CIC or Corsair. One thing that I did not realize when I picked that GPU was that it requires an 800 W power supply. So we went with what seemed like the worst 800 watt power supply but not so bad that it would actually just not work. What do you think though? 65 to 100? It's only 650.

watt. I think it's 100 tops. Uh, $85. Sure, it's 650 watt. It's bronze. Yeah, thermal take. Uh, they make some great products, but they're not necessarily the power supply. Like, well, that's not ther take, that's thermal right. Oh [ __ ] you're right. We love them. Yeah, we do love thermal right. The Phantom Spirit 120 SE argb. $40. I'm going to say 50. You say 50 'cause yeah, it is the Phantom Spirit. Spirit's newer. Just going to tighten my cooler down with our LTT Screwdriver from LTT store.com. Oh yeah, yeah. Don't get screwed. Be the one who does the screwing. One thing that I was thinking. Mhm. Uh, as far as I can tell, there are no bonus points for noise. We should go full fan speed on everything. I mean, we can, but like, what's the so just so it stays super cool. Oh yeah, it just like might net us a couple FPS. I man, I'm getting kind of worried that like we're going to be so far off.

on budget, and we're going to like really. I got less nervous when I saw Alex grab the 7900 XT. I was really hoping that we would have like an XFX or a slightly crappier 7900 XT, 'cause this right here might be 900 bucks. You told me 600. It might be so. We're banking on 600 bucks. That's how much we think it's worth. I'm saying 650. Okay, 650 for our GPU. We picked a good old 7700 XT. We think it's going to do just fine. We didn't want to go overboard on price. What's 7700 XT? 400? 500 bucks? 500 bucks? Gotta be 500. Probably 550. Maybe so long. Yeah, like the board is done here. The cooler is just massive. Oh yeah, no problem. Okay, that's good. Alex, Alex. Oh God. I was like, Hey, let's go plug it in. Like, it's like, It's like right. No, I think you can get it. I think you can get it. Oh, I okay. We're going to need some

finagling here. We're going to need some finagling. We almost had a budget time for a saw. Wait, that means we probably have time to go and Laser. We're not laser etching the glass panel, Alex. Yes, we are. That's we have millimet of clearance. I did not think about that at all. That GPU is massive. So not only did you potentially screw us on price, you almost screwed us on actual space. Okay, do you want to plug it in? Plug it in, get it posting. Yeah, how much time do we have? 15. 15, okay. Dude, we're not going to have time. No, we're going to have time. We haven't even post-tested. We can post-test over there. You can do that and worry about the cable management. I will make this art, literal art. All right, we're going to the freaking 105. This a stupid idea. Look, I've had only bad ideas today. Let's not stop. Okay, nothing yet. Hold on. Are the board diagnostics saying anything? Do we have can't read it.

there's a it's one of those lights that has like four options d so it might be Memory training we'll give it yeah give it a minute all right we're coming over here really really fast we have about 15 minutes I'm going to try in that time to create us a custom side pan. Now we don't have enough time to do it as like a I don't even remember what it's that called. I just need to get going uhoh good we're good light turned off good hey thatb is Alex as pretty as your glass is. It'd be really cool if the computer turned on it really would be wouldn't it yeah we still have our dam light d light. Are these dead David our ddr4 might be bad uh I'm just going to hit start and hope for the best yeah this might guarantee that we totally do not win the style points if it's only half done which is really looking quite likely at the moment. Alex I need help getting the computer booted though oh you do I I

literally cannot get it to boot. Uh, what? Yeah, so I had it plugged in. I know this cable works 'cause it was powering the monitor, but I tried unplugging even the front I/O to see if it was the button, but I touch the pins and it does not, doesn't go. The lights are moving, something's happening. You stop the at time. Yeah, trouble shooting. Yeah, yeah, 'cause this I don't think is our fault. It seems like it might just actually be a dead power supply. What the just happened? Oh, we're [ __ ] we're [ __ ]. It got most of the way through too. I have no clue why it did that. Oh, you know what happened? Tinan changed the focal distance of this laser I have. I had the laser about as low of a power and as fast as it could get, but this is the first time that we have ever etched with this laser. This is what I wanted to be on the side panel, just the sad Linus.

on fire team literal Iris. I cannot believe that that side panel exploded. Oh, I can. I totally can. It's almost like we said, Hey, Alex, we only have 10 minutes left. Maybe we shouldn't go for this. I'm just going to send it and see what happens. I still don't see any LEDs. Yeah, there still is nothing. Do we have a dead board? Kind of really looking like it. Alex, what do you think is more dead, the motherboard or the side panel? The motherboard. We can still put the shards of the side panel in there. We could save this, but yeah, our motherboard's dead. So, I guess we'll have to figure out what happens next. This is really unfortunate. Yeah, okay, right, okay, uh, power button, 15 seconds, Moment of Truth. Yeah, okay, we got the RGB. That's good. That's good on. We got lights, yellow light, DRAM. Oh, it's not going away. What do you mean it's sticking around? We might have a RAM issue. No, as per the rules, which you can see here, we are going to replace these.

broken components with working ones and get these computers all tuned up. Computers are built. Windows is installed. Everything's ready to go. It's time for the teams to show off what they have done. There's our computer. Everyone, do you like our decoration? We got some for free, and we did pay $10 for this hypn frog. So, tell us what happened to your side panel. Alex decided to try to laser etch the glass. Oh my God. And he, we didn't have the laser dialed in, and all of a sudden, we heard a shatter. So, while you were building a PC, he just went to the shop to... No, no. We built the PC, and we were so confident it was working. We were like, Let's go laser ET. It then didn't boot 'cause the motherboard was dead, and then the glass panel shattered all in 5 minutes. Actually, the motherboard wasn't dead. We had the Ryzen 5600G from that random Lenovo desktop that has a fuse in it that locks it from going in.

another totally forgot about that. We have a whole video on that, and you can plug in another Ryzen chip into that Lenovo board, and it will lock that as well. I'm pretty sure that's wild. It's crazy. We have another 5600G, but because we couldn't figure it out, we have a different motherboard that David selected for us. Got it. It's equivalent value. You'll still be scored at the original price. Got it. And motherboards aren't super important for performance, so we've kind of gone a little bit looser on that. And now that he's laid that out, this helped us a lot. It turns out that we screwed up and accidentally got a PCI Gen 3 board. This one is Gen. Let's go. He got it. So we have resizable bar enabled. We have the GPU running at full thing. This is really good. That would have been a huge St. And I see you went with the 7900 XT, which is not a mid-range card. What was the impetus for that card? This was an

executive decision by Alex. There somebody's m is uny in a $1,000 build. I would not recommend this GPU normally, but you can get them on sale. We're hoping one's on sale right now. We estimated this computer costing $1,115. What that's again hoping the GPU is on sale. The actual price not bad, not bad. Okay, it's not bad. $1,249.27. The GPU was $700, and your original motherboard trait really saved you was 100 bucks. We're going to have a 24.9% penalty. Team B me had trouble from the beginning. Uh, we ended up making a rush decision in getting a 13100 F. I was looking for like a 12400 or a 13400, something a lot more balanced but still really low price. Tough gaming motherboard, eh? Okay, yeah, yeah. So the next problem we were, you know, locked into our ecosystem based on our CPU choice, and I was looking for a b660 board, and I couldn't find them in 45 seconds. We took one, so we ended up with

a Z690 board. Our total system guess is 1205. Okay, what's the price? What's the price? So, we were pretty spot-on on our guess. Our big factor was a $270 f***ing motherboard. Oh my goodness. W 27. So, that gen last-gen motherb. That's basically our entire overage compared to that one $170 difference on a GD mother. You got a nice case though. How much was the case? It was $70. What godamn. It's a pretty computer though. I like it. Tell them what we picked, Adam. Oh, team DDR 420. We picked a 13600 K, which was um, a panic decision. We had 5 seconds and we grabbed a 13600 K, which is probably going to be the thing that hurts us the most in terms of budget. Absolutely. It's a great CPU, except for maybe the um, uh, voltage issues. This only has to run for 2 hours, so who cares. Um, which also explains our power supply selection. We chose a thermal, literally the exact same

thermal take smart line as everyone else who cares. It only needs to be on for 2 hours. Another downside to our CPU pick was that we had to get a cooler. Unlike the other two teams who had included coolers with their CPUs. I will say as a note to that the cooler that they used is not the included one for the 5600 G. We're not going to dock points because it's RGB and it's way cooler. But it would come with just the stealth with this which is a black one. But will it cool down our price? Let's see. You had the highest yes. We were very cynical even with the lowest GPU. We guessed at least $350 for our CPU and we came in wow wow nice $1,092 wow. Turns out we have no idea how much stuff costs but um we always air on the side of of expensive so that's good. We kind of know what it costs. We were trying to build $1,000 PC. We came out around $1,100. I think that's pretty they

got a little bit lucky. The 13600K just happens to be on sale. Good job, you guys. So, that's good. You guys are the closest to the Thousand for sure. That's going to be a big help. Ooh, okay. There's no way that plof would not use an aftermarket cooler. That's ploofs. Oh, he's right. He knows his stuff. I'm a little bit scared at how well L knows us. We were so spot on. We took a break for the weekend and I've run some of the benchmarks beforehand, but we're going to run our last one on camera. So, get to your freaking stations. 3, 2, 1, go. I started first. I win. The best part about not having a side panel, I can add extra cooling. It only helps if it's over. Why showing them as winning? 'Cause we have a better system, duh. They're not. They drop like crazy. Yeah, we're good. Oh yeah, okay. GG easy. Wow, killed them. Yeah, I'm so surprised that 77 to 79 is way bigger of

a difference in this game than I expected. Yeah, they're looking like 40%. How do they have the fastest CPU score? That's a very good question. There's like wonkiness with some of the results, like they have this massive drop in fps in the middle of the Benchmark. This is why, like when Labs is doing testing, we run things multiple times to make sure that any weird outliers are dealt with. Whereas this is just have fun with friends, run some benchmarks, see who does better. But oh well, we've run the benchmarks, and I am shocked at the results. In third place is team three with 535 out of 700. In second place is team two with 582 out of 700. And in first place is team one with 639 out of 700. That's a really high catch. We'll get they only have 60 points on the table. However, with a penalty that cost them 24.9% of their performance, their final score puts them in second place. And the winner is no way. Let's go.

wow, we haven't talked about the pineapple for good taste. What? Oh, you obviously not that it's you guys four out of the six votes. Yeah, that means that they took a very clean victory. Not only did they win after price performance adjustment, but they got the best-looking system. Hang on, hang on, hang on. We got to deduct a point there, a scratch in the glass. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. They also were the closest to an actual $1,000 mark. True, which was really awesome. Tell me how it feels to win. Well, David, it feels great. You know, we played a good game. We played a hard game. The other guys are out there, you know, they're giving their all every single night. And like we're out there, you know, and sometimes you take, got to take the win, do the good with the bad, got to just, you know, give it 110%. Yeah, just like I'm going to give you 110% for the segue to our sponsor, UGG Green. Their Uno magnetic power bank has

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Are We Out of Touch? - $1000 Gaming PC Challenge

Linus Tech Tips is a passionate team of "professionally curious" experts in consumer technology and video production who aim to educate and entertain.


Are We Out of Touch? - $1000 Gaming PC Challenge

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