What the workshop had to give, or an older Ultra Budget. Our third PC built from leftover stock, and this time the best-equipped one in the series: 32 GB of memory instead of eight or sixteen, a graphics card with 8 GB instead of cards from a decade ago, and a case with seven ARGB fans that looks like more than the whole computer costs.

Let's be upfront: this PC is also built from parts left over from other builds and trade-ins. The Intel Core i5-4590 dates from 2014, four cores without hyperthreading, 3.3 to 3.7 GHz. The GIGABYTE Z97X-Gaming 3 board is from the same era, an upper-range gaming board back then with a Realtek ALC1150 audio codec and a Killer network card, today simply a good old DDR3 board. The Crucial Ballistix 4× 8 GB memory is the most the board and CPU can take. The CPU is cooled by a Cooler Master tower cooler, not a stock one. The only genuinely modern part is the SAPPHIRE PULSE Radeon RX 6500 XT OC with 8 GB GDDR6, a 2022 chip with the 8 GB version even younger. None of the parts are new, but we tested all of them and matched them so they work as a whole.

What it handles: web, office work, school, movies and gaming at 1080p. Counter-Strike 2, Valorant, League of Legends, Rocket League, Fortnite, GTA V, Minecraft or Dota 2 without trouble, expect 80 to 110 FPS in CS2 depending on settings. Demanding games like Cyberpunk 2077, Hogwarts Legacy or Kingdom Come 2 only on low to medium settings at around 40 FPS, a bit more with FSR. Let's be precise about performance too: in raw speed the RX 6500 XT sits roughly at GTX 1650 Super level, about a fifth below the GTX 1660 Super in our PC No. 2. What it adds is 8 GB of memory for higher textures, lower power draw and a chip several years younger. The four-core CPU without hyperthreading is the weakest link in new games: where a game wants six cores, the CPU holds things back, not the GPU. New releases like Battlefield 6 already list a six-core CPU as the minimum, so this PC is not for those. Thanks to 32 GB of memory you can keep Discord, a browser with twenty tabs and Spotify open while gaming without anything swapping to disk. The FPS calculator on this page tells you what to expect in each game.

What you need to know first: the graphics card is built for PCIe 4.0 with four lanes, the board only does PCIe 3.0, so the card runs at half the bus bandwidth. On the 4 GB version that cost around 10 % of performance; on the 8 GB version it shows less because the card rarely has to reach into system memory, but it is not zero. The card has only two outputs (HDMI and DisplayPort), has no hardware video encoder, so forget GPU streaming, and cannot decode AV1. Upgrades: there is nowhere left to go with the CPU or memory, LGA 1150 with DDR3 is a dead end and 32 GB is the maximum. The graphics card can be swapped, and the branded Seasonic 500 W power supply has headroom for a somewhat stronger card. Windows 11 is officially unsupported on this CPU due to Microsoft's requirements, which is why Windows 10 Pro is included. In fairness: Microsoft ended Windows 10 support in October 2025, the system keeps running normally, it just no longer receives new updates. The 128 GB SSD holds the system, the 1 TB HDD your data; the board has an M.2 slot for a larger SSD later.

What makes it a fair deal: add up the parts yourself. The graphics card alone sold new for around 4,400 CZK, the darkFlash C280 case with glass front and side and seven ARGB fans costs 1,500 to 1,900 CZK new, 32 GB of DDR3 plus a Z97 board go for over two thousand second-hand. The rest of the price is the CPU, cooler, power supply, drives, Windows licence, clean assembly, a stress test of the CPU, GPU, memory and drives, Windows 10 Pro installed with drivers and, above all, a 24-month warranty included, which you will not get on parts this old anywhere else. Sold under the special VAT scheme for used goods (no VAT itemised).