In the timeline where mining and AI have long overtaken the gaming hardware market and us, humble gamers are left with crumbs and misstreated by our tech overlors; we at A64 are putting together absolute stinker builds with 10 year old components for your devious gaming and viewing pleasure.
Hello world, Kala with A64 today we are building and assessing an itx pc made from a plethora of second hand finds and we'll be doind some overclocking, synthetics and also gaming in order to determine the real world performance that you can expect from these components and their worth in relation to similarly priced items. So, lets check the cast...
Initially this build was more of a migration of components from an atx case to an itx one obviously with a different motherboard to fit and a GPU upgrade but as we started searching for itx cases we found almost none that would fit the old PSU, a Corsair VS650 that is 16cm long so in the end we decided on a used InWin A1-plus that came with a proprietary PSU and a missing front panel clip.
As for the motherboard seeing that AM4 itx models are as rare as hens teeth on the second hand market in our region and brand new ones start from 130 euro we chose a more sensible option and turned to Aliexpress in the hopes that the chinees would offer a more competitive price point and boy was that right... I introduce you the Jginyue B550i, you know its good when you cant pronounce the name of the thing but basically it's a chinese made motherboard that was 72 euro including shipping so quite the bargain I might say but we'll end up having to change 2 more components from the system due to this choice because this motherbord doesn't support Zen or Zen+ microcode so there goes the old cpu and also the ram slots are so close to the socket that the old radiator block was brushing against the A2 stick so that also had to go and in the end the only components that survived the migration were the M.2 storage the ram and 4 fans. Coming back the motherboard; it's actually pretty well equipped for the price... it has 5 3.2 USBs and 3 2.0; two M.2 slots but only the one on the back is 4.0, 3 chasis fan headers and it comes with a reinforced PCIe slot for the GPU and a 1x one for your network adaptor as well as a beefy radiator for the vrms so overall, a pretty good package... we'll end up talking about the bios later on because they made some say questionable choices for it...
Moving on, as I said we're bringing the old ram kit and M.2 to this build so a pair of G.SKILL Aegis for a total of 16 gigs running 3200 CL 16 and a western digital SN something that we'll pop in the front M.2 header because it's only 3.0.
Next, the original idea was to also bring the old CPU along for the ride that being an R5 1600 but as I said, we ran into some issues regarding compatibility on this front so we ended up buying an R3 4100 because these are dirt cheap nowadays... a brand new one will set you back aroudn 40 euro and we found this one second hand with a row of bent pins for 30 euro... as for the CPU itself it's basically a 4300G APU with Vega disabled so 4 Zen2 cores and 8 threads accompanied by a laughably small amount of L cache and it tops out at 4GHz although we'll be seeing later on that that is false even without any oc.. otherwise it states 65watts TDP and again that is very much a lie and it compares nicely to the R3 3100 which is basically identical in configuration apart from larger L cache and power consumption and of course PCIe 4 support because the 4000 series only supports PCIe 3.
In the original configuration with the 1600 we wanted to cool that with a Thermalright King V2 Mini but after the CPU turned out to be a bust on the new platform we ended up making different plans for that CPU and cooler combination so then we thought okay, we'll just use the old CoolerMaster Hyper 212 Evo block that we yanked out of the old build for the 4100 but turns out mountign an horizontal radiator block on a 17 by 17 ITX platform makes your A2 dram slot unusable so we had to reconsider the cooling solution for the CPU. Luckly we had an ID Cooling SE 214 XT lying around gathering dust so we used the radiator block from that and kept the old fan from the Coolermaster because the IT-Cooling one was just overkill for a Ryzen 3 and we also had other plans for it; so to summarize we are cooling a 4100 with an ID Cooling block that has an old CoolerMaster 120 fan from 2017 strapped to it.
Now, for the GPU we have the legendary RX 480 also known as the original RX 590 because that card is a re-released RX 580 that in turn is a re-released RX 480 with a faster core; it just makes me wonder why AMD bothered to change the architecture name from GCN to Polaris; since the GCN series was so successfull and made it not at all confusing to figure out what card used what architecture they might aswell have went for 5; hell throw in the two Vegas and VII in there and get it to a nice round 10 *wait, they actually did that?*. But i digress and as of late AMD has cut funding to the Radeon re-release GPU cloning department and have managed to stay desaster free for a few generations of cards.. God damn it AMD. Right, back to the RX480; I don't know what to say about this one since it's already been beaten to death. It's like a cockroach among GPUs short term it just stayed alive because AMD kept shoving it down gamer's throats and by the time they released convincebly better cards it became a solid second hand pick that would run the latest games. Afterwards crypto miners started picking them up for their efficiency and you still find people selling these second hand in bulk from minig rigs and now in our Lord's year 2025 they are truly in the bargain bin with prices ranging from 30 to 40 euro for the 8 gig variants so this card kept hanging in there no matter the times. Now for the people unfamiliar with the 480 or the broader 400 range or arctic islands or whatever else AMD calls them these were basically released just before Pascal from nVidia and despite using a newer node the best from the range that being the 480 only matched nVidia's 1060 so if you think that the gap is big nowadays you should look back at 2016 but I think this just goes to highlight the goated status of Pascal as one of the best architectures for it's time. Right... back to the specs of the 480 that are now en screen we have a 14nm process running with 8 gigs of GDDR5 vram trough a 256 bit memory bus, 2304 shading unit, 144 tmus, 32 rops and 36 compute units at a clock reaching up to 1266 MHz and the memory running at 2GHz. Our particular variant is the XFX RX Triple X that comes with a plus 22MHz to the core boost, an 8 pin connector instead of the 6pin and an overkill cooling solution which we love to see, otherwise it's just like any other 480.
To cool the system we'll be mounting an additional 3 120 fans, one in front and one just under the GPU for intake and one for exhaust at the back.
With the components listed, actually building in this case felt like trying to turn a chicken coop into a 5 star hotel although in the end it turned out okay and the temperatures were impressive for the size but it's deffenetly not for beginers.
Okay so that does it for the components and building side of the affair so let's move on to the overclocking chapter. Quick disclaimer the TIM we used for both the cpu and gpu is the chinesium GD900 4.5W/mK.
For the GPU we got stable 3DMark performance with the configuration you see on screen right now so unlocked power limit, 1360 peak core with a considerable undervolt and 2150 for the vram with a bit of an undervolt. This got us 4436 point in time spy with a maximum of 60 degrees celcius and 131W power draw. And if your wondering why 3DMark thinks this is a 580X that's just because we are using radeon id modded drivers.
The first thing we did for the CPU was to unlock PBO and after a cinebench run we saw 377 multi with 77 single core scores whilst the cpu was boosting by iselft up to 4.25GHz without any overclockingin despite it being rated just for a 4GHz boost clock. With everithing else left on auto we saw an average temperature of 67 with peaks to 68 degrees celcius and a peak power draw of 40W. Afterwards we moved on to 4.3GHz, PBO unlocked and a set voltage of 1.4 volts and that got us 389 with 77 in cinebench and we saw a 1 degree drop in temperatures and 37.5 W peak draw. Next was the same configuration but with 4.4GHz that netted us 400 with 79 cinebench results, worst thermals and a slight power draw gain. The final frequency we reached was 4.45GHz at 1.4 volts although we saw the same cinebench results and the same thermals with a slightly higher power draw of 40.2 W. At this point it just seemed like the CPU was drawing more power and doing jack with it. Voltage lower than 1.4 crashed the system and going to 4.5 GHz was impossible due to the CPU requiring more voltage and that in turn generating more heat than out cooling solution was able to disperse. And that brings me on to the TDP of this chip an mainly why it's listed at 65W when we can clearly see that it has no right being above 40W. Moving on.. this overclock also scored pretty well in 3DMark with 5336 points in time spy and at that time this was number six 4100 in timespy.
Alright, now the ram is where it gets miserable because we have to get back to this motherboards bios in order to explain why I ended up not bothering with ram OC and just left them on XMP unfortunatelly. So i'll spell out the list of issues encountered: 1. You have no voltage controll over dram only 1.25, 1.35 and auto; 2. You have no option to save your bios configuration on external or internal media so if you fail to boot and have to reset cmos you'll also have to rewrite your bios; 3. You have no safe mode, making point 2 even more of a sore; 4. I don't know what agesa this is runnign since the bios says it's running some 2025 version but on their site they have listed something like 4 bios distributions all from 2023 and 2024 with no notes/changelog so I guess it's running a bios that doesn't exist; 5. The dram settings are scowered and split into 4 separate submenues, some of them having duplicate settings with just one or two specific settings exclusiv to the submenu so when you'll eventually fail to boot bios the rewriting process will consist of a few solid minutes of you just shifting trough all the garbage Jginue? left in their bios. And that is all; I don't wish an encounter with the bios of this motherboard upon my worst enemies.
Now, let's see how this system fares in the games we tried on it.
Starting off with Cyberpunk we saw 50 fps average with 1% lows down to 36 fps during the built-in benchmark with everithing set on medium. During normal play the average would drop down to 47 fps but our 1% lows remained the same across the board. Here we saw both the CPU and GPU struggling and okay frametimes meant that Cyberpunk was very much playable on hardware outside it's minimum requirements.
Moving on to Mount and Blade 2 bannerlord we scored 70 average fps with 34 fps 1% lows and just okay frametimes. This was with everithing set to the max during the game's built-in benchmark. Here we saw that the GPU was able to keep up with all the eye candy and it was the CPU that was struggling during the large battle but overall a great showing.
Unfortunatelly you'll not be getting a competitive framerete in CS2 out of these components as we marked only 113 fps on average with 54 fps 1% lows in the dust2 benchmark using my competitive preset. I'd recommend a system like this only for casual play and seeing that our frametimes were rather good this would be an enoyable title to play.
Where this system excells is GTA5 Enchanced. We managed a solid 60 fps average with 52 1% lows on maximum obviously without ray tracing. Honestly not much to add to this one; we again saw the GPU being a slight bottleneck but overall stelar performance; frametimes could have been lower.
In Baldur's Gate 3 we whitnessed a miracle; that being this game running on a Radeon card in Vulkan mode on Windows. I don't know what the radeon id team did to the drivers for this to work but we should be gratefull. With maximum settings on average we got 48 fps with 1%lows down to 32 fps and manageable frametimes for this kind of title. This just highlight's this game's optimizations and that the old 480 still got it in somewhat recent titles. One other thing to add is that this game would just crash with any GPU core OC so the performance you're seeing is with the memory OC alone and this will also be the case for the next title.
Before we move on to the heavier 2025 titles let's do a sanity check with the original Crysis and as expected we are met with excellent results 74 average fps, 46 1%lows and amazing frametimes on maximum settings, DirectX10.
Now onto the heavy hitters starting with Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 which uses just like the previous game the cryengine albeit a newer version of it. During play we saw 43 average fps and 1% lows down to 37 fps with all medium settings and maximum anti alising. This would have been an impressive showing were it not for borderline crippling frametimes for this kind of game. Interestingly the CPU was just chilling while the hevy lifting was done by the GPU. Overall I'd call this playable performance considering we are outside the game's minimum required specs and the graphics were amazing with the settings tested.
Next, we have Assetto Corsa Evo running with nothing tuned off but everything on low we scored 56 fps on average and 49 1% lows and considering that this game looks quite good on low and the frametimes we were getting were passable I recon this is a valid budget configuration to play this title even though, again we are below minimum requirements.
Finally to top it all of we tried running Unreal Engine 5 with Oblivion Remaster and this was by far the worst performance from the benchmarks. We chose medium settings for it because the 1993 Doom looks better than this game on low and after the game trew an error that I first thought was to do with the GPU but actually said that it doesn't support our quad core and then launched anyways to a solid 15 minute shader preloading loading screen. After all of that we got into the game to appraise 35 fps on average with 1% lows down to 26 and less than ideal frametimes. Now, this was to be expected as we are well underneath the minimum required specs but I'll go out on a limb and say that I rate this as playable if you don't mind the input latency during combat. Also we found the CPU error on launch to be unfounded because during gameplay you'd be hard pressed to find CPU utilisation ever go above 60% so it truly seems that the bottleneck all along apart from Bannerlord is the GPU.
Now, to round it all up lets go 1 by 1:
The case: looks good and offers great thermals for how crammed it is but building inside it is a nightmare;
The motherboard: very affordable for what is offers and has great build quality but god forbid you have to do more than changethe boot order in the bios;
The CPU: Stellar gaming performance for a 30 euro quadcoare; What's left to be said about it is that for casual gaming it seems that you don't need more than 4 good cores and AMD should reconsider the removal of the quadcore from below the 6-core as a budget offering seeing that both Zen4 and 5 range are void of this options as of right now.
The GPU: One of the best bang for the buck graphics cards around;
Overall: Overall I say this build offers as I have proven respectable performance for what it is and it also looks great courtesy of the a1 plus. If you want even better performance on a looser budget you could go for a six core Zen2 CPU as the single core performance of Zen2 is already plenty enough and as for graphics cards I guess try finding either one of the Vegas even though they usually go for around double the price of GCN or Polaris but they are still cheaper than the 1070.
And that would be all that I wanted to talk about regarding this build. I'm sure you've noticed that we switched to the lingua franca for this video and it will probably remain like this for the up and coming future of this channel. Also stay tuned for our next video which will be about the CPU and cooler that we failed to incorporate into this itx build and speaking of, if you enjoyed it make sure to like and subscribe and if you have any questions leave them in the comments. Thank you for watching.