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.

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

omracer's Steambox: an i3 upgrade

Now, with the new month shortly in, it was time to really focus on this PC, which has been stable but for gaming and streaming, its been almost impossible to get smooth framerates, so it had to be an upgrade. Now I could of gone with a GTX but since the HD72A is useful for console streaming, the CPU upgrade was the best choice. So, I manged to get the i3 for £106.79 including DPD delivery from Scan. Amazon have it cheaper to be fair. The Video is below

The Performance of the Celeron

Now this one is actually quite ok, well for the average person or really for someone that just wants internet use. Since the Graphics are perfect for video watching, casual video conversion and entry way graphics powered.  There were moments when some games are just not worth running but this celeron was never meant to be intel's suggestion of a gaming iGPU.

The video conversion in handbrake

The settings for rocket league

the low framerate for HM 2 when in game

Similar framerate for RR unbounded

Rollercoaster Tycoon World is weak but looks nice

Beautiful but very slow on the celeron for sonic lost world

The i3.

The design of the i3 is more like the core design of the skylake series with the speed blur and the colour was the same as the Celeron compared to the i5 which is teal and i7 which is red/pink. But the features are different, like hyperthreading and also speed step technology, also with the Intel HD 530, it was a new feature.

The i3's box

The features

The barcodes and details

The chip itself

The back with warranty mini info

Comparing the boxes for the i3 and celeron

Inside the box is exactly the same as the celeron which is with the same fan and same packet. Which was ideal to help me list the G3900 on eBay to sell, well someone hasn't sold it secondhand on there in the UK. But the it was fitting.

The Fitting

Now this was nerve-racking sue to the possible problem of the CPU pins being bent on the board. But that was OK. I managed to safely get the heatsink off and swapped the CPU.

Getting the CPU in with cables around it

Then it was a case of getting the heatsink back on, which seemed easy but it was a nightmare to get back on and the push clip system is never 100% after fitting and refitting. But then it was the posting after getting it done.

The Setting up and off things

This is the moment, to make sure it actually does work straight away or is it a RMA. But I turned it on and with luck, omracer came up and it booted to windows,  with the graphics drivers off since I removed them and big picture mode being laggy. But that was sorted out with a graphics driver, but one thing I noticed, the max frequency was 1.99ghz. This was odd .

Then I panicked since this could f been a due to CPU pin issue but after a call to scan who slightly sassily gave me the advice of bios settings, which were already setup and a load optimised defaults and SORTED. it was at 3.7Ghz. But nowhere on the internet had this problem, which 2 GHz is less than the celeron and also 100% CPU usage in rocket league.

I say this now. Load optimised defaults after you upgrade a CPU or this happens. 

The Testing

Now this was working, it was time to test things. So I tested with the help of MSI afterburner and the Xbox game bar

• Rocket league
• Ridge racer unbounded
• Goat Simulator*
• Sonic lost world
• Hotline Miami 2
• Handbrake
• Arkham origins*
• Rollercoaster tycoon world

Which the games were surprised in the fps boost. Like I could play Hotline Miami 2 in 1080p at 60Fps. Steam big picture mode could render at 1080p where as before it struggled to render 720p.

Rocket league has a small boost, but I could play 60fps with the right tweaks.

The settings on quality

The settings for performance

it looks nice 

Ridge racer unbounded was still 22ish FPS but more smoother that the ps3 version, since the Ps3 version had some lag on certain parts. But then it was Goat Simulator and the main menu was smoother but still not 60fps, this was actually on par with my laptop with the GT650m.

The settings for Goat Simulator

Then it comes to Sonic Lost World, that doubled in Framerate, really, it did. from 20 to 40fps and that was when recording.

The framerate in this is pretty good, nearly playable. 

Then it was time to see a light boost in Rollercoaster Tycoon world, which was hitting over 15 and nearly getting to 20 fps in game. 

The settings used

The nice colour in the park

Then it was Batman: Arkham Origins, now this game is apparently poorly optimised but there was about 20 fps hanging in there, this isn't ideal for iGPUs whatsoever.

The settings used for Origins

Finally, we have handbrake, from video conversion. Which was double the framerate when converting a MPEG2 VOB to Mp4 with intel Quicksync. This might be ideal for people with media streaming or Kodi using (like me). Settings are. Intel quicksync h.264, 1000kbps, 640x360, best speed. 

the higher FPS rate when converting

Conclusion

So then, it means that pretty much this i3 has got alot going for it, its not the perfect in the world but it can pack a punch with some graphics in games. This is ideal for a budget in steamboxes that want a bit more power, but not ideal for the PCMR race that wants to do it on a budget. 

This means more gaming videos can be done soon, like Rocket League, pacman championship edition 2 and Sonic Lost World and more. Enjoy Soon

omracer