I bought an Intel Core i3 for $0.01...

Hello everyone and welcome to a bit of an Unexpected Budget Builds Episode, I thought we'd be giving it a miss this week while I wait on some interesting bits to come through in the post. But a local ebay auction popped up which I just couldn't pass up. This time being an Intel Core i3 which cost me next to nothing. Namely a whole 1p. It was listed as being for parts with no description, and I had to drive down and collect it myself. But to save this thing from the bin we might as well have some fun and see just how far we can push it.

What did I buy? - 0:00
Intel Core CPUs are worthless - 0:41
So yea its faulty (Troubleshooting time) - 1:14
It's working...but at what cost? - 2:52
The Specs - 3:42
It's Struggling but we're giving it everything to help - 4:24
The Benchmarks! - 5:09
Oh the load times - 12:03
Real World Usage, Dorris Doesnt want Gentoo, and x264 Test - 13:32
Conclusion - 14:56

Music
SC OST

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Specs:
CPU: Broken Intel Core i3 540
GPU: AMD Radeon R9 285
RAM: 4GB (WOW) DDR3 1066Mhz Single Rank RAM
OS: Windows 10 (Stripped down)

[BudgetBuildsOfficial]

Let me know if you enjoy it when i bid on worthless computer parts that are often faulty and collection only. Maybe one day we'll actually get a bargain 😎

[cyphaborg]

1P ends up accepting only 1GB, this chip is self aware.

[NexusFantismo]

Brother, I cannot tell you how much I appreciate you uploading at a high volume at this time. I'm going through a difficult phase of my life and your videos help me, as odd as that may come across to some.

[kennethmadsen]

I was sure it was going to be the Sempron

[DanielCardei]

It definitely had some noticeable performance hiccups. The important point is that it managed to find a new home and was saved from the recycling center. It was the true official budget builds CPU review today. As usual, great work and keep them coming.

[ToniaGlitched]

I did not expect a first gen i3 to work this well at Mount&Blade Bannerlord, I was already impressed by being able to run it on an i7 4510U, I feel like M&B 2 is gonna be the most optimized AAA title for quite a while, considering how poorly most of them come out now, and how many potatoes it runs well at...

[KRNBRN]

Amazing find haha. I snatched a 3tb drive for £1.05

[sirtanon]

I snatched up an i3-2120 about a year ago for $0.01 and free shipping.. and I still see them on Ebay for similar pricing even today. I absolutely love this kind of deal, and I find myself snatching up these super cheap CPUs a few times a year to do an ultra-cheap build-and-flip. My favorite one of these was a Xeon E3-1220v5 CPU I picked up (virtually the same as an i5-7400) for $0.99 and free shipping. One quick thought on the odd behavior - while it may be due to an internal issue, one thing I try when I get any used CPU is to take a soft clean cloth with some isopropyl alcohol and clean the pads on the bottom of the CPU. I've had a few quirky CPUs that I did that with that worked find afterwards.

[napowolf]

If the BIOS splash screen comes up, it means the machine posts. I didn't even know a memory issue can cause a PC to post but crash in BIOS before Windows loads. Usually if there's any sort of issue with RAM, the machine simply won't post and should give out error codes.

I know dropping capacity and speed of DRAM worked, but could it be the iGPU that was actually the issue? These Asus oem boards have some weird BIOS sometimes. Maybe disable iGPU if there's an option in the BIOS, then try different capacity. The slow down could be the result of cripplingly low amount of RAM instead of the CPU.

Although with everything said, first gen i3 likely doesn't have much to give these days anyway. It would probably run most tasks fine but any simple single task could easily max out the CPU.

[flarg]

your voice is peculiarly comforting, thank you for the high quality content

[hananas]

Your conclusion at the end really says a lot about how wild the second hand CPU market is, being able to buy a totally good CPU for under 1 pound...
It's never been so cheap to get a perfectly good computer! I just saw a complete PC for 30 euros with an i3 6100, 8gb of ram and a 240gb SSD. Totally insane.

[lockout]

i3 running stalker on ultra = blowing up since its so powerful running fable its pure insane loving the content

[OmegaWolf]

Who knew the penny in a parking lot could be the cpu to your gaming pc

[lancecarson]

Caught a video early man, keep up the great work I genuinely love your videos!

[watercannonscollaboration]

15:56 well, you could also say “my PC has a 1p CPU”, which depending on your situation, is more impressive than saying “my cpu was free”

[chhandobhihbhushan]

I wish ebay was in my country, the way you just snatch away those dirt cheap parts makes me envious of you. Great video though.

[StaelTek]

I had one of these. Delidded and managed to overclock it to 4.6 GHz on aircooling. It was fun to benchmark can also benefitted from faster uncore speeds

[narobii]

I kinda want to see a 1p processor war, of what is the best of the cheapest processors. not like a serious thing just some fun

[Revan-HK-]

I love these videos you're making about old pc parts it's giving me ideas about making my own pc using second hand / used pc parts instead of using brand new computer components thanks again much love from Ireland 🇮🇪 ❤❤❤

[amentiamurna]

6:36 that out of memory error is caused by the msi afterburner overlay, for some reason if it is turned on as the game is loading in it will always display an out of memory error. 🤷 dunno why but it does this specifically on red dead