THE SCRAPYARD GAMING PC CHALLENGE

4 weeks ago, I challenged my friend Dave to build the fastest gaming PC possible, for £450. A decent gaming rig usually costs over £1000, so this would be a good test of our hardware and overclocking knowledge. Unable to turn down a challenge, I accepted, and we agreed a prize of £50 Steam credit – and the kudos of building the fastest PC.

THE RULES

• £450 only applies to the PC case and contents (peripherals are excluded).
• Hardware must be purchased. Use of existing spare hardware is prohibited.
• Postage is not included. (I don’t remember agreeing to this, but Nick insists I did)
• Benchmarking will occur on May 4th 2016, and will consist –
  • Userbenchmark
  • Cinebench
  • 3DMark (firestrike)
  • Unigine Valley
• Each benchmarking tool will be run 3 times, and the best score used.
• Failure to achieve a score, due to crashing, will result in disqualification.

GETTING STARTED

For the first week or so, every conversation I had with Dave was about hardware. We spent all of our free time researching CPUs, RAM, motherboards, cases, PSUs, trying to determine the cheapest combination to deliver the biggest bang for buck. I can remember one evening Dave was bidding wildly on an eBay auction, thinking, “I was probably the other guy bidding against him!”. In the following days, I read numerous articles about overclocking, and how to squeeze the most performance out of the new Skylake I5 6500 processors as I had heard that you could overclock the none K version to astonishing results and I went for the new motherboards that supported this new chip set and DDR4. Dave went for slightly older hardware. Eventually he settled on an i7 4th gen, socket 1150 motherboard, and DDR3 RAM.

First to arrive was the ex-display Gigabyte Z170 Gaming K3, My new Intel i5 6500 came from Japan via playasia and Amazon messed up and sent me 16GB of Ram by mistake I had only ordered 8 🙂

During build

FINAL BUILD SPECIFICATIONS

BENCHMARK RESULTS

WHO WON? Read Part 2