Vlog: Getting kids into PC gaming with cheap ex-office PCs!
7If you've ever thought about building a PC for your kids, you can do a lot worse than looking for ex-office PCs. You can often get a 5 year old machine with 16GB ram for next to nothing.
In this video I'll go over buying a PC, using the new Steam Family settings to share games and some game comparisons when adding a GPU.
This ended up being a kinda weird vlog thing after shooting about 6 hours of footage that I didn't use (a lot of installing windows / messing with bios as I was trying to work out exactly what I could do with the machine).
The original incarnation had wattage values for each game with and without GPU but that data was quite sterile. The TL;DR is that the unit idles at under 10W, and with the GPU isn't much more.
Under load, the highest it went was about 100 during stress testing. WIth a GPU the highest value I saw was Elden Ring at ~130W. Interesting to me but the video was even drier than what I ended up with :D Nobody needs to see footage of Windows installing.
I seem to say 'So' a lot, too, in this edit.
Final machine spec:
HP 290 G1 Small Form Factor PC
i5 8500 (6 core)
16GB DDR4
AMD RX6400 LP
256GB NVME
1TB SATA SSD
If I had to do it again, I'd not go small form factor; with a full size unit the power supply would have more headroom, it'd be easily upgradeable *and* decent GPUs like a 1070 can be had for a lot less than a current low profile, low power GPU. For 150-200 you can have yourself a decent 1080p gaming machine. (Plus monitor, though they're pretty cheap these days too)
0:00 Intro
1:18 Let's Blow The Budget
2:23 Steam Family Settings
4:04 Non-GPU vs GPU comparison
8:04 GPU summary
8:57 Final Thoughts