$400 Budget Gaming PC Build Guide 2024 | Step By Step

The Lenovo P520 is an AMAZING office workstation computer. What is even better about these Lenovos is how easily they take upgrades. Today we’re going to show you how to upgrade one of these workstations into a fairly high-end gaming rig without breaking the bank.

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RX 6600

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The Toastybros is comprised of Matt and Jackson, two tech heads with a passion for creating content. They have been creating content for years on YouTube and the Toastybros has become their most successful channel. Please consider subscribing to see more content like this! ✌👊

[wishbonet]

Thanks to Toasty Bros I just bult my own P520. I did the W-2135, 32 gb ram ($174 eBay), 1 tb Teamgroup M.2 ($41 Amazon) and a MSI RTX- 3060 12 gb ($289 Amazon) windows 11, $504 total. I went with Nvidia cause I hear it is better for Davinci Resolve, it dose seem to do great! Dose Halo Infinite 1440P medium settings right around 100fps . Love this machine, I couldn't be happier. Building one for my 11 year old son soon.

[jaredperkins]

I actually bought a p520 a few weeks ago after watching one of your other videos. I then put an rx 6600 in it a couple of days ago. I love my computer now. I love how well it was made.

[unstopology]

Got one from eBay with 2135, 32gb RAM and a RTX 2080 for $500. Works fantastic and is a steal! So happy, thanks for the video! 🥳

[theBoomerDoomer]

This is a really good build guide for one of these machines... between these refurb workstation builds and AliExpress Xeon kits, there are so many low cost of entry options with lots of computing power out there for the gamers that might be starting out. The refurb machines are a great choice for people that aren't comfortable with building their own machine, but might be okay with adding a couple extra pieces.

If the P520 isn't available, the HP Z workstations and Dell Precision workstations are out there in comparable configurations... just in case anyone watching this video is looking for something similar, but it sounds like PCSP might be the place to shop at the time of this video's release.

Really helpful video, guys!

[bne]

The Toasty Bros kind of missed this, but even if you are going for "only" 16GB of RAM (which is perfectly fine, btw), you should ABSOLUTELY go for 4x4 or 4x8 (for 32).
These systems have quad channel memory. The extra bandwidth you get from that is quite significant. Don't miss out on it. Especially more modern games scale well with bandwidth.

[bizbarley]

This actually turned out to be a pretty good idea. Several people told me they did well with this. I even spoke to a guy that installed a RTX 3090 in this, although he got the W-2145 8 core -16T CPU, which I picked up as well, and he told me there are some games that bottleneck (which would be the case, a 3090 is a total powerhouse next to this cpu) but in general he sees very good performance. He gave me some ideas for thermal solutions, which included removing the front fan brackets with pliers and installing 2 120mm RGB fans in place and 2 120mm fans at the bottom. He simply used well placed zip ties to hold the fans in place, and apparently the mobo has 4 extra fan headers, which makes it all work. Cheers.

[addamcockayne]

Hi to all at at Toasty Bros
I am a console gamer
Mostly down to the price and usability
But really considering building my own pc because of the awesome videos that you guys put out
Still a bit scary having never owned a gaming pc
But you make it look quite affordable and not too hard to build
Keep doing what you do guys
My eyes have been opened

[garyharper]

Have one myself. 128 gb ddr4 and it kicks ass. Came with a quadro p5000, has 2 M.2 slots. Plenty of room, highly upgradable

[justryanism]

I love how they raised the prices of every item you recommend...

[switchblade]

I love my p520 I paired it with a 5700xt for a year then built my own and now the p520 is my home server but still runs great and never have a problem with it

[LivingByFire]

I just bought the W-2133 P520 with 16gb Ram and a 512GB SSD. Combined with the RX6600 I bought a few weeks ago, this will become my main media server/video editing/light gaming machine. One machine to rule them all.

[vishwanathbondugula]

I just bought P520 last week and paired it with a 6700XT, it has been really great since then. No problems

[brandonmorris]

It has only been 11 hours since the upload, but for me the lowest GPU option for me is the Nvidia Quadro NVS 510 for $19.99 which makes it go to $209

[glitchy_fnf]

Thank you so much for this video Toasty Bros!!! I just ordered one of these myself from PCSP on Ebay, I went with the W-2145/no ram/hdd/os one since I had a higher budget and the clock speeds are the same as the 2135. I also got 16gb of 2666mhz ram, and a 1tb Crucial gen 3 nvme ssd. Total price was $369. I have a GTX 1080ti that I've been dying to put to work, so this was the video I needed. The cpu won't bottleneck too much at 1080p, but I'm planning on trying 1440p out since it diminishes all of the bottleneck for games. I'll update this comment when I get everything and try it out!! Edit: Just got my p520 and it works flawlessly!! Will definitely be my daily driver. And yes, I liked my own comment.

[yasu_red]

As someone else mentioned, these systems would benefit from getting at least 4 sticks of RAM since these old Xeons support 4 memory channels. They aren't capable of using fast modules so having more channels utilized more than makes up for that.

[Thatjguy]

15:01 first time ive seen him win a BR game omg! Congrats 👏🏾🎉

[Tywert]

I just bought a pc with a i7-10700k and a rtx 2060 for 400$ off of market place works perfect and in great condition I got a steal

[mikemartin]

I have this exact pc. I have an rx 580. I'm going to upgrade soon, but it works great as is.

[MrPiimpslap]

Thanks for the discount code, a P520 with a xeon 2135 without ram/hd was $137 shipped. Picking up memory, gpu and storage was cheaper from amazon than using their custom builder.

[frederikjensen]

My fiance loves that i bought her a Lenovo P520 to use. :) Such a great cheap build.