Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/08/05/how-to-build-a-240-gaming-pc.html
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In this vein; you can also get a lot of mileage out of boring off-lease corpo boxes.
Not quite as easy as it used to be; since more of them are laptops or various USFF desktops that are not meaningfully expandable; but if you can get something in mini-tower(or, if you don’t mind the somewhat higher power draw, something that was originally sold as ‘workstation’, that will also be much more likely to have a PSU that can just take having a proper GPU slapped in).
Most, though not all, games are more GPU than CPU bound when it comes to getting good-enough performance out of them; and the OEMs that do corporate box pushing tend to try to sell you on a little more CPU than your case probably actually needs; and their customers often don’t have too much incentive to push back because buying 1000 of the same thing and being able to deploy it to anyone is significantly less admin overhead than slicing and dicing and being stuck having to ensure that the i3s only get assigned to light duty systems, i5s for middleweight standard use, and i7 for those business analysts who hit the Excel real hard.
Such systems will probably have some proprietary bullshit(whether it be relatively minor like the front-panel header; or a potential dealbreaker like a completely nonstandard motherboard PSU connector); but they are available for a pittance, mostly low on nasty quirks, aside from specific proprietary parts that are identifiable up-front, and tend to be lacking purely in the GPU department.
One thing to watch out for, though, is vendors trying to take advantage of the relatively long period of Intel not reshuffling their high-level marketing terms. “Core i3/i5/i7” has been used for 14 generations of parts, starting with Nehalem in late 2008 and running to the present(the new thing is "Core 3/5/7 or Core Ultra; but so far that’s only mobile; not sure when the desktop parts using it will show up); so if someone just says Core i7!!! they could be talking about a decade-old Broadwell part and not technically be lying. Anyone worth thinking about giving money to will, of course, supply an actual model number; but you do have to check.
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I’ve been gaming on the Linux workstation I set up for doing work-for-home stuff, and it’s fine. There’s a fair number of native games, and the Proton compatibility layer works pretty well. I’m not, I admit, a really hardcore gamer, I just like shooting some super mutants when I get home from work.
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Did this with a Lenovo ThinkStation. Power for days (maybe to a fault) with dual Xeons and a pile of ECC RAM, and I can’t wedge a very large graphics card in there, but absolutely smashing machine in daily use and perfectly capable of gaming. But yeah, that PSU is proprietary and I might want to buy another one while they’re cheap to replace…
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Before you go to all this effort, you may want to check if the game you want to play is on GeForce Now, or something similar. My main gaming rig is an iMac a family member rescued from recycling because it had terrible image retention at the edges of the screen, and stopped getting OS updates years ago. Eventually what I pay monthly will catch up to the cost of one of those PCs, but not for years, and things are going to look different again then.
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Can confirm, that is the cheapest way to play. modern single player games with good graphics. Here‘s a curated list of games on Steam:
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"Sorry, this device or web browser is not currently supported by GeForce NOW. "
I take it you‘re not using the native client on Windows or MacOs, or Chrome, or Edge, or ChromeOS, or Safari on iOS.
In that case it probably won‘t work. 
Wait, here‘s an article about how to run it on Linux:
https://linuxconfig.org/cloud-gaming-with-geforce-now-on-ubuntu-debian
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Don’t get me wrong, I dig the videos from ETA Prime (he does a LOT of videos on SFF/ITX builds) but I’m slightly irked by the concept that seems to be prevalent lately regarding “builds.” Pardon my soapbox, but for me, a build involves buying a case, power supply, mainboard, CPU, cooler, RAM and a graphics card. This is basically taking a preexisting computer, blowing out the dust bunnies and slapping a dedicated (gaming) graphics adapter inside it. Possibly upgrading the power supply and (in this case) installing a different OS. This, to me, is “upgrading” and not building. The PC is already built. For videos of this type I prefer Toasty Bros, since they do a wider variety of these types of videos where they actually build (and upgrade/refurbish) a wide variety of systems (stepping down from soapbox).
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The setup I have now is working for me, so why bother?
I was really looking forward to a moment when all those old Bitcoin mining rigs were going to suddenly go on sale and yield enormous discounts on decent 3D hardware. Sure, a fresh unit might be preferable, but surely they wouldn’t have degraded to the point of uselessness?
In the meantime the GTX 680 I picked up for free will probably suffice.
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Oh, I thought you went to their site for a reason. Why else would you copy the error message?
I did go for a reason. I had never heard of it, so I looked at what it was. Clearly, it’s not for everybody.
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