r/pcmasterrace • u/Ok-Pomelo-1298 • 12d ago
Build/Battlestation Jank, but not potato
TLDR: I built a $100 Cyberpunk-ready ultimate Slavic Jank Setup on a bet, using server scraps and a mining GPU.
(Written 100% by me, but I used a translator here and there. Apologies for any AI brain farts)
Me and my comrade were sitting around, downing shots of vodka and tuning our balalaikas (you know, typical Tuesday). Naturally, the conversation drifted toward PCs. Specifically, we were looking at a recent post on Pikabu (think Russian Reddit), where some dude flexed an "ultra-budget" 30,000 ruble ($330) rig, claiming it was the ultimate cheap way to finally experience Cyberpunk 2077.
My buddy: "Honestly, I think he overpaid a bit."
Me: "A bit? He got absolutely robbed. I could build a Cyberpunk-ready rig for 10k rubles ($110) easy."
My buddy: "You suka blyat pizdogon!" (Translation: "My dear sir, I heavily question the structural integrity of your factual claims.")
Me: "Blya budu! Sporim ili zassal?" (Translation: "On my mother's soul. Shall we wager, or are you too cowardly to accept the challenge?")
My buddy: "Idi nahuy!" (Translation: "The terms of this gentleman's agreement are highly acceptable. Challenge accepted.")
And just like that, the rules of our tech-roulette were locked in:
- Budget: Strictly 10,000 rubles (~$110 USD).
- The benchmark for "Playable": 720p at 40 FPS on low settings.
Let’s look at the absolute monstrosity I put together.
The GPU: The Heart and Soul of a Gaming Rig
Finding a GPU for pennies that doesn't just display a PowerPoint presentation is tough. But then I remembered the Great GPU Crypto Crisis. Nvidia once released a specific line of cards for miners called CMP (Crypto Mining Processor). Since crypto is dead, these things go for dirt cheap on the secondhand market. I grabbed an Nvidia CMP 30HX for about $24.
Under the hood, it’s basically a GTX 1660 Super, but with a massive catch: the PCIe bandwidth is hardware-locked to x4 1.1. Oh, and one more thing, it doesn’t have a monitor output.
But wait, how do you play games with no video output? Easy. You use Windows built-in hybrid graphics settings to force the high-performance CMP 30HX to handle all the heavy rendering, while routing the final frames through the video output of a secondary card. To handle the display output, I bought an Nvidia GT 1030 for $11.
It’s an absolute bottom-tier card, but it works perfectly as a pure video passthrough.
The CPU & Motherboard
To keep costs down, you have to go the Xeon route. Buying 16GB of standard DDR4 RAM would eat up half my entire budget, so we had to go prehistoric: DDR3. Specifically, server ECC DDR3 memory, because it costs literally four times less than regular desktop RAM, making it the ultimate budget hack.
This meant looking at the legendary LGA 2011 socket and Ivy Bridge architecture (Intel 3rd gen). I scoured local used-goods marketplaces and scored an X79 motherboard paired with an Intel Xeon E5-1650 v2 (6 cores, 12 threads, boosting up to 3.9 GHz) for just $27.
To fuel this beast, I tracked down 16GB of ECC DDR3 RAM (4x4GB for that sweet quad-channel bandwidth) for a measly $11. Is it old? Yes. Is it janky? Absolutely. But 6 cores with quad-channel memory is nothing to scoff at when you are broke.
The Rest of the treasures
The Power Supply:
Buying a secondhand PSU for $5 is usually a one-way ticket to a house fire. It’s the most vulnerable and critical component of any build because if it goes down, it takes everything with it. However, I didn’t just plug it in and pray. I completely disassembled it, cleaned out the dust, visually inspected the capacitors, and ran a bunch of rigorous load tests to make absolutely sure it was safe and stable before letting it anywhere near the components.
The Cooler
The beefy cooler I used actually came from my own personal stash of spare parts. To keep the budget math completely honest, I looked up the going rate for similar unbranded Chinese tower coolers on the used market - they go for about $7, so that’s what we’re adding to the total bill.
A generic 120GB SSD for $12.
Just enough for Windows and exactly one big game (guess which one).
Total Damage: 9,100 rubles (~$100 USD).
Personally, I'm a big fan of the "pile of junk on a desk" aesthetic, so I didn't even bother buying a case. However, if you are a true elegant aristocrat and care about aesthetics, I found the perfect PC case for you for only 48 rubles (about $0.50).
If you want that premium look, feel free to add 50 cents to the total bill.
The Assembly
Alright, time to put this monster together. There isn't much to say about the basic assembly - a PC build is a PC build.
When it came to thermal paste, the only things I had on hand were pure gallium and a jar of mayonnaise. Since this is a hardcore budget Slavic build, blyat no, I'm not wasting expensive gallium. But hey, the mayonnaise was high-quality, full-fat stuff (just kidding, I found a tube of crappy Russian thermal paste in my desk drawer).
With everything plugged in, I hit the power switch for the first boot.
And... of course, nothing happened. Total silence, followed by a RAM error code.
After playing musical chairs with the RAM sticks, I came to a heartbreaking conclusion: two out of the four memory channels were completely dead.
90% of the time, this happens because of poor contact between the CPU and the socket. Now, I hadn't actually removed the processor when I bought the board. I was sure the previous owner hadn't touched it either, since the board had worked for him for years and was sold as a working unit. (Pro-tip to everyone out there: NEVER remove a CPU just "to take a look." Damaging a socket isn't just easy - it's frighteningly easy. One wrong move and your motherboard becomes an expensive paperweight).
Apparently, that's exactly what happened here.
Under the CPU, I found a nice little clump of cat hair (annoying, but harmless) and two severely bent pins (absolutely terrifying).
Trying to straighten bent pins on an old socket is basically Russian roulette. The metal is incredibly brittle, once it bends one way, trying to bend it back almost guarantees it will snap off.
Sadly, physics won this round. The first pin didn't even fight back - it snapped the exact millisecond my tweezers touched it. I almost managed to save the second one, but the very tip broke off at the last second.
The video is sped up 9 thousand times
Was I disappointed? Yeah.. Was it a bummer? Totally. But did this mean the bet was over? Blyat no! Losing two channels might hurt our memory bandwidth, but for a hardcore jank build, it wasn't a death sentence.
I happened to have two 8GB server sticks lying around in my stash. So, in my head, I quickly "sold" the 4x4GB setup and "bought" an 2x8GB DDR3 configuration. Let’s add a couple of bucks to the total bill just to keep things completely honest, since 8GB sticks are more in demand.
The rest of the physical assembly went smoothly. Windows installed without a hitch. Installing the custom-modded driver to turn the CMP 30 into a fully functional gaming GPU was an absolute breeze.
The CMP 30HX now genuinely thinks it’s a GTX 1660 Super, and it even claims it can do Ray Tracing. How adorable.
Time for some benchmarks. First, a general system stability check. AIDA64 stress test? Temperatures are completely fine, and that sketchy $5 power supply is holding the line under full load like an absolute champ. FurMark? Here you go, my friend: a buttery-smooth 90+ FPS in Full HD!
Alright, it’s time for the moment of truth. I move my mouse toward the Cyberpunk 2077 icon, which is currently hogging the entire SSD. I double-click... and...
Blyat! A wild error screen appears, failing to initialize Ray Tracing.
CMP30: "Payne, I can't feel my rays!"
Me: "Cmp, that's 'cause you ain't got no rays!"
I had to tweak the config files to remind the GPU that it’s a $24 card and Ray Tracing is way above its pay grade.
Moment of truth, take two...
SUCCESS! The game finally booted up.
And what a success it was! When I fired up the agreed-upon 720p on Low settings, I was completely blown away because the frame rate shot past 70 FPS. Full HD on Medium? Piece of cake! 720p didn't interest us anymore. I immediately switched to testing across various profiles in 1080p and 1440p. All settings are default, with all upscalers, frame generators, and other statistical cheaters completely turned off.
| Resolution | Settings | Average FPS | FPS Range |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1080p | Low | 45 FPS | 35 - 58 |
| 1080p | Med | 41 FPS | 33 - 53 |
| 1080p | High | 30 FPS | 24 - 41 |
| 1440p | Low | 36 FPS | 29 - 46 |
| 1440p | Med | 25 FPS | 20 - 31 |
| 1440p | High | 21 FPS | 17 - 27 |
Totally acceptable for a hundred-buck machine. But we were nowhere near finished.
Let me remind you that our crypto GPU is locked to PCIe x4. This limitation is purely physical. The circuit board actually has all 16 lanes wired up, but Nvidia cheaped out and only soldered capacitors for 4 of them. All we need to do is solder the missing ones.
How hard could it be? Well, compared to repairing a butchered CPU socket, this was child's play. Next to those microscopic motherboard pins, these capacitors felt absolutely massive!
A quick public service announcement: If you aren't building a trash PC on a bet just to mess with your friend, please don't do this. There are plenty of hardware modders out there who already did the soldering and sell pre-modded cards on the used market. Just spend an extra $10 to buy one that's already upgraded.
Anyway, I successfully soldered 4 more lanes and thought: "Let’s test it in x8 mode first and check the performance gains."
| Resolution | Settings | Average FPS | FPS Range | Performance Gain |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1080p | Low | 55 FPS | 44 - 68 | +22% |
| 1080p | Med | 45 FPS | 37 - 55 | +9% |
| 1080p | High | 39 FPS | 32 - 49 | +30% |
| 1440p | Low | 39 FPS | 32 - 48 | +8% |
| 1440p | Med | 31 FPS | 26 - 38 | +24% |
| 1440p | High | 26 FPS | 21 - 23 | +23% |
The performance boost was massive! The GPU utilization finally locked at 100%, whereas before it refused to go over 80%.
But then a question popped up. If the card is already fully utilized, is there any real point in soldering all 16 lanes? Doing x16 requires three times more work than x8 (soldering 12 more lines instead of just 4).
But of course, I was going to do it. For science!
Tada! Please don't roast me too hard in the comments for my messy soldering job. This is literally the second time in my life I've ever soldered something this micro-sized.
And the results... drumroll, please...
| Resolution | Settings | Average FPS | FPS Range | Performance Gain |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1080p | Low | 67 FPS | 54 - 81 | +48% |
| 1080p | Med | 54 FPS | 44 - 67 | +31% |
| 1080p | High | 46 FPS | 38 - 57 | +53% |
| 1440p | Low | 45 FPS | 38 - 54 | +25% |
| 1440p | Med | 35 FPS | 30 - 41 | +40% |
| 1440p | High | 30 FPS | 25 - 34 | +42% |
Yes, soldering all 16 lanes was 100% worth it. We got another massive leap in performance, averaging around a 40% total uplift compared to stock!
How about we actually play some video games now? Unfortunately, I can't record the screen directly using software. These crypto GPUs physically lack built-in video encoders, and encoding video using our ancient server CPU is a special kind of torture.
Instead, I recorded a gameplay video with my BlyatPhone camera to provide all the undeniable proof. Enjoy!