Cheap PC for TR, Zwift, and streaming. Prebuilt or custom?

Equipment
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There’s also options like this, which seem surprisingly great value.

Just looked up 1050Ti on eBay, and they show up for under $80, and then some auctions that might close lower. So I guess then it could be as cheap as $75 for the first Dell I linked + $80 for the 1050ti. I have everything else.

I did think that I heard that Microsoft somehow locked windows to the first pc you install on, so I don’t know if I can uninstall it from the Alienware and move across, or if I need to buy a new Win10 license.

It just seems unbelievable that for $200, I could build a used pc that can run Zwift 4k. When I got into Zwift, the gaming PC’s people were talking about seemed to be more like $1000 or more.

Thanks.

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Unactivated Windows 10 is free (or at least used to be). Unactivated just means that you can’t customize the desktop and do a couple of other minor things.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10ISO

Couldn’t you just put a better video card into your Alienware R1?

110

Thanks, I didn’t know about the Win10, that’s great, saves $50.

The Alienware R1 is a small form factor machine, so no option to upgrade the graphics card. There is a work around with a second power supply and this adapter to install a graphics card via the wifi card slot, but feedback is that it’s a lot of hassle for little improvement. The adapter looks to run $50, and then it’s same cost for the graphics card, maybe a little cheaper for the power supply as it’s just running the graphics card, but it’d be a real hodge podge setup.

Now the Alienware runs 1440 ultra and shows 4k as an option in Zwift, but it’s definitely not changing what I see on screen to look like the 4k sample images I’m finding online. If someone came across and R1 for the right price and prioritized a pre-built pc which takes up minimal space, and is content with 1440 ultra, then it’s pretty great.

After doing more reading yesterday, I can see options to either:

  1. get a $50-100 used office PC, probably spend $50 on a used power supply that’s more like 700W, probably spend around $100 on a 1060/1070 level graphics card used off eBay, and have a decent setup.
  2. get a $200 used workstation computer that already has a greater than 700W power supply, and some have 16 or 32gb of ram, and some even come with SSD (which admiditly is really only worth $15 for a used Samsung 256gb SSD) the ones I’m seeing have USB-C ports too, and space for multiple drives etc, but they’re big bulky computers. Then do the same graphics card as option 1).
  3. Buy a refurbished gaming PC like the new egg one, and spend around $350.
  4. just run the Alienware at 1440 ultra and be happy.
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Option 1, join ZPCMR group on Facebook and read the files, that will get you 99% of the way there knowledge wise.

Option 2, buy a premade PC. This will likely cost more but will certainly be easier!

The above PC seems way overpriced to me, by the way, although I’m not up to date on US prices.

1 Like
112

i recently got a small form factor optiplex i5-6500 for $50 and added an rx6400 card, I’ve got it hooked to a 32" 720p tv, so resolution isn’t super important but on 1080p it runs at over 70fps avg, def does the job

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Out of your options above I’d chose this! The first 2 won’t run 4k smoothly, and the bottleneck will likely be CPU not GPU anyway, so none of the above will fix that. You’ll need 12th gen CPU, at which point you’re getting close to the price of the NewEgg one (at least in UK money) - so buying and building that makes more sense at that point.