this $200 build is easily one of the best looking budget gaming PCs that we've ever done on this channel but it was also one of the worst performing builds until we made an adjustment today I'm going to walk you through how to find build and customize an ultra budget gaming PC like this which honestly I think is the future of my budget build guide videos we're also going to talk about how I completely overestimated the performance that we were going to get from this again until after we made that adjustment and we're going to talk about all of that after a quick word from today's sponsor today's video is sponsored by gvg Maul and you probably already know that I've been using them for so long to activate Windows on a ton of my own builds they're actually running a huge sale right now which boost my normal 18% discount up to 25% off if you use code zt18 and I'll have that linked at the top of the description they not only have Windows keys but also a ton of other stuff such as office and even game keys for platforms like steam origin and up playay and they even have console stuff too like PSN prepay cards as well activating Windows is super simple it only takes like 3 minutes total so activate Windows today and remove that nasty Watermark and don't forget to use zt18 for 25% off all right so let's talk about these Aesthetics first because honestly I've been wanting to show you all this for days now and I can't wait any longer the purpose of this video was actually my wife's idea to combine her custom Cricket vinyl cutting skills with my budget PC transformation skills and I think it turned out perfect it was her that suggested we try the wood vinyl front because these seem to be getting more and more popular lately ever since the launch of the fractal design northc case she's been using this Cricut Machine to do a lot of the custom ztt work for the freebies that we give out with every PC on ztt bus.com and she also just did a custom keyboard project where we made a YouTube short and Tik Tok about a few days ago I'm not going to give you all of the details about how she did this because quite frankly I have no idea and I definitely do not have the patience for it but here's the quick rundown basically she had to measure out all the dimensions on the panel the ports and the distances between everything and then she modeled that out in the software until it came out perfect I know it's easy to say this in hindsight but we definitely should have used a micrometer to get all these measurements she did all of this with a tape measure either way I think this turned out absolutely perfect and when you combine this with the quick white spray painting job I did on the side panel and the edges around the front panel I am in love with this design for the front panel I originally just wanted to paint the entire thing white because that would have been easier but she informed me that when installing the vinyl it takes a lot of trial and error getting the positioning correct so she would have to constantly remove it to readjust it until it was just right and it would have been very difficult to do that on top of the paint so I ended up just taping off most of the center of the panel so I didn't paint it and then the only thing that actually needed the paint were the outer edges this didn't require an accurate paint job as you can see here but after that I just took it outside did about seven total coats with 10 minutes in between on a hot sunny day and it was good to go this is probably my absolute favorite design that I've ever done for one of these OEM transformation videos I already bought a different OEM PC so we could do this again but now let's talk about the performance because the starting point of this build is pretty wild both good and bad I guess I picked up this HP Pavilion off eBay for $220 which is pretty steep for an oem starting point but the specs are kind of actually worth it the CPU is an Intel i5 10400f and that's still a very viable budget to mid-range option right now and that's about $100 on its own it also came with 12 GB of ddr4 which isn't ideal but still much better than 8 GB of course also a 250 56 GB mvme and even a dedicated graphics card here's where I screwed up though because the card in here is an RX 550 and I thought that it would at least give us a solid super budget 1080p gaming experience but I was wrong like really wrong I'll save the benchmarks for later on in the video but yeah you can tell here that I wouldn't exactly call this a playable gameplay experience hell no now I wasn't planning on just keeping the 550 in there and being with it I was going to upgrade to something like an RTX 2060 no matter what that's exactly what we did and here's an MSI Mech RTX 2060 and you can find these readily available on places like eBay and Java for just a bit over $100 the Intel i5 10400f combined with the RTX 206d is definitely already a proven combination which we'll confirm in the benchmarking section before that though we also needed some more storage because the included 256 GB mvme Drive is appreciated since it's mvme but we do need a little bit more he so little helpless I added in this 500 GB SK HX 2.5 in SATA drive and that's just because I already had it collecting dust on the inventory shelf if you're trying to follow this along at home I would indeed try to find an oem with these specs but definitely try to keep it under $200 you'll definitely want to get an Intel i5 or i7 model and I personally wouldn't go any older than an Intel 8 gen at this point sure those Skylake builds will still run but because the eighth 9th and 10th gen Intel builds are becoming more and more available I would just stick to those for Ram you definitely need 12 GB at an absolute minimum but ideally I try to find one at 16 GB whenever I'm searching for an oem starting point like this I usually just type in eBay something like Intel i58400 plus 16 GB desktop and that will usually give me a ton of options from there you can select which specific model of desktops have those specs and then you can start narrowing down your search from there now usually they will almost always never come with a dedicated GPU and this rx550 was literally the reason why I paid a little EXT EXT ra for this one I saw models with these exact same specs without the card for under $200 very easily but because I wanted to test out that card in a YouTube video I decide to pick it up boy was that a mistake though because these benchmarks are absolutely atrocious here's what Starfield looks like before we swap the 550 to the RTX 2060 we had to run the game at 1080p with a 50% resolution scale and it was looking like a PowerPoint presentation completely unplayable here's cyberpunk 2077 and we could drop the resolution down to 720p which should have helped us out of a bit but it was honestly no use 23 FPS on that one and for hell divers 2 we tried to take it all the way down to 480p which I think my analog watch has more pixels than this and here we got a slightly decent 46 average FPS I mean I literally can't tell how many syringes I have in here the text is completely unreadable here's a screenshot of all the other games we tested with the rx550 just in case you're interested but yeah most of these just aren't great shout out to fortnite though in 1080P performance mode that 126 FPS isn't too shabby before we started this video I was also thinking that we should just sell this PC as one of our monthly drop Builds on ztt bus.com drops with the 550 but after seeing these results I just can't do that to you guys we'll be selling this build for like $150 with the RTX 2060 so let's see how the performance on that did right off the bat here's Starfield and make no mistake this one's still tough to run on older Hardware but we're pretty close to that 60fps Mark now with 1080p low and a full 100% resolution scale for cyberpunk it's looking even better because we could crank up the settings too high and we still got a very solid 65 average FPS and just to compare to the abysmal 480p hell divers 2 Benchmark here it is again but this time also in 1080P high and we got 59 FPS here's the rest of the games we tested along with the comparisons against the rx550 and clearly it's just a night and day difference according to 3D Mark's time spy with the RTX 2060 we've increased performance by 648 all for just a bit over $100 whenever you can add that much performance for that little of extra money you got to take that all day every day but now I know some of you are still going to want this 550 and we definitely don't have any use for it here so I'm going to give it away to one of you guys I'm trying to grow my ex profile finally and I've been using it just a little bit more than usual lately so head on over there at Zack TEF and retweet my pin tweet about the rx550 giveaway I'll randomly give it out to one of you retweeters but you got to be in the United States don't be mad at me I'm definitely just not going to pay to ship a card like this overseas but yeah hopefully you enjoyed this video if you want to see a different way of how to build an ultra budget gaming PC like then feel free to click the video that's on the screen now