Tuesday 8 November 2016

A Celeron N3050 and a GTX 1050 - A Budget Gaming Combo ??

This is to help with a little project i've made on a budget PC and adding a GTX1050 to it. Now before we start this, the GTX 1050 is actually for the Steambox. But since i saw a deal for this N3050m-D3P for £27.54 + Delivery, I ordered that along with a Case which was £55 in total from Aria.
The GPU was £134.99 from Scan Including delivery. The video with tests except a benchmark is below:




The Build. 


This was a nice project, with using spare parts along with the purchases, which means which ones were used, well it was: 

  • N3050M-D3P N3050 Micro-ATX Motherboard
  • CiT F3 Micro ATX Case
  • 500GB 2.5" HGST Drive 
  • 500W PSU Non 80 Plus 
  • 4GB Crucial Ballastix (borrowed from work) Normally its 2GB Kingston
It was not too bad but I didn't clean the build, but this is not a main pc do i'm not going to make the effort, But I did have a problem with the original 2 sticks of ram I had, one was dead so it was 2GB, but the Ballistix worked fine. It did take a while to boot up and install due to the hard drive, If i was going to have a use for this PC or sell someone a N3050 spec, it would have an SSD. End of.

Running this home with me

The case and motherboard

a look at the n3050m-d3p

A look inside the case

The build before the 1050


The 1050 Arrives. 


In all its glory it arrived. The Red eye with the OC and features shown and Nvidia's Mark all over. The design of the box is pretty aggressive as a GTX should feel. Features and details aplenty too. 

The Front

The bottom

The back

The card inside
The DVD which has XP drivers on it too


Then we look at the card, smaller than i was worried it was going to be, with beautiful blades, a nice grill and some nice designs to go with it, it deserved a photoshoot of its own.

Looking good

The connections

The back of the card

Looking at that typcial GPU view

The Fitting and setup in the build. 

Well this was a bit more complex but that was due to cables in the way, the PSU ones anyway, but it was the length of the mATX board and no PCI-E 6pin needed which is a nice touch. Then it was getting it to post, which it did first time, the fans weren't spinning on the GPU but that was a design of its own, not a fault. 

Inside the case

How the ports look

That fan though

The cables stretching over

Add caption


Then it was the Windows drivers to install, which took ages but worked fine. Also it was still using the iGPU which i had to turn off in the BIOS to get that GTX to fully be used. Then it was afterburner to setup. That CPU Usage was a heck of a lot too, same with the HDD. 

Installing afterburner to show the usage


The Testing:

(05/03/2017) For a Change, I decided to do a Benchmark of the PC with a Different HDD and this was the results.

PassMark Rating





Then, I tested 3 games in the video, since 2 were too awful to even bother with, but the list is: 
  • PAC-MAN Championship Edition 2 - Playable if scaled down
  • Rocket League - Playable
  • RollerCoaster Tycoon World - Laggy on high settings
  • Goat Simulator  - Didn't load
  • Ridge Racer Unbounded - a Disaster

Below is the settings and quality shown in each game. 

The menu has more FPS than the HD 530 can give out on its own in my steambox

You do see lag in tutorials

The settings for RCTW

It does look beautiful though 

A favourite lightweight game, Rocket League

It can do 60fps if tweaked properly



Conclusion


This combo is not an ideal one but if your on a really tight budget then it can work for £220 if you use decent RAM, PSU and a SSD. The CPU is a huge bottleneck so streaming or recording this is a no go, as the delay in audio and video showed. Also 4GB of DDR3 might not of been enough/ 
Also this can handle streaming if you have a 2mbps upload and use the x264 preset of ultrafast as with this PS4 capture test








Soon i'll have the 1050 really put to the test, inside that steambox.

omracer