How Far Can I Upgrade This $1 Office PC?!

Added: 2026-05-06

[00:00:00]This PC was completely free off Facebook Marketplace, barely being able to even run games at only 10 FPS, but I'm going to be turning it into a crazy gaming PC that can run a ton of FPS. Okay, so this right here is the free PC, and I actually did some digging online, actually try to find out basically like the exact model and the name of this PC.

[00:00:22]I even resorted to like Chat GBT cuz this thing was literally almost non-existent on the internet. I went from like eBay, YouTube, almost everything to try to get at least a name for this PC so that I can go ahead and see how I can fully upgrade this thing to make it a gaming machine. And literally the only clue I had was it being a Lenovo PC. So after some digging, I did find out that this is the Lenovo Idea Center K4110 PC, which is a super old Lenovo PC from like 2010. And the inside of this PC is definitely very very dirty with literally the entire PC being covered in like dust and stuff. Like we have the CPU fan being completely covered in dust. It's not even keeping the PC cool anymore. You're just blowing around dust all around the system. And then also this PC doesn't even have a graphics card inside of here. But I do know that the CPU is an Intel Core i5 3450. And we also do have 4 gigs of DDR3 RAM, which is just crazy. Now, upgrading this PC shouldn't be too hard. The only thing that's really going to be stopping us is the power supply since the wattage in here is only 250 W. If I wanted to go ahead and actually place like a dedicated graphics card inside of here, I definitely do need a power supply with much higher power. And also, I completely reset this PC when I actually got it cuz when I first actually played on this PC and downloaded Fortnite, it only ran about like 15 FPS. And since the guy gave it to me for free, he'd even reset the PC. So, it still had like a bunch of stuff inside. So, I went ahead and reset that. Okay. Now, quickly just taking a look at the FPS we're getting on this free PC before upgrading this thing at all. I mean, you guys can already tell right off the bat with the free PC, the performance on this thing is definitely not great at all since it only has an Intel Core i5. And originally, it only ran Windows 7, but I did manage to download Windows 11 onto here. But with the super cheap PC, we're running about 45 sometimes 50 FPS.

[00:02:13]Definitely not great at all. I did also have to set the resolution to 720p just for this game to run above like 15 fps.

[00:02:20]And if we can only run about 3540 fps in creative at 720p, I don't even want to know how much we would run in an actual game. But you guys can definitely tell Fortnite is super unplayable on this PC.

[00:02:31]I did expect a lot worse though, I'm not going to lie. But this is 720p.

[00:02:35]Literally like the lowest resolution you guys can play Fortnite with. And the game can barely even run like a consistent 30 fps. So the PC definitely needs a ton of upgrade to do onto here.

[00:02:44]But I think the first thing I really want to do with this PC is honestly just clean this thing first. Like you guys can see we have dust all around this PC with the fans having dust, the RAM having dust, the power supply cables. I think that's definitely a very good first step in fully upgrading this thing. Okay, so you guys can see I have the PC outside now. This thing has a ton of dust all around the PC and there's literally a ton of dust inside. So I have nothing else to use to blow all the dust out. So, I'm going to go ahead and just use a blow dryer and really try to get all this dust out so I can go ahead and clean up this PC. Definitely don't do what I'm doing right now with this blow dryer to get all the dust out of this PC. It's definitely not good for your PC at all. Let's go ahead and see how much dust I can get out of here. OH MY GOD. OH my no. Holy crap. I got swarmed by like all the dust and everything. Oh my god, yo. There's so much dust. Holy crap. It's literally flying everywhere. I try to get every spot on the PC, especially the CPU fan, which has a ton of dust. So, I really need to get all of that out. Okay, definitely some progress on the cleaning of this PC. Definitely had most of its dust came out, but the blow dryer wouldn't get all of it out, as you guys can see. But for the most part, I've never seen this PC look this clean. I'm going to try to get other spots on this PC fully cleaned out a bit. Also, it's blowing cool air instead of hot air for anyone who's like worried. I don't think it's entirely damaging the PC.

[00:04:10]Okay, so now that I have this PC all cleaned out now, the condition is just so much better than before. Like everything is just so much more clean, but condition-wise of this PC is looking so much better. I did clean it up a bit as well. Moving on to the next upgrade I want to do onto this PC. It's definitely going to be an upgrade that's going to give us a lot of FPS or definitely gives us much more consistent FPS. What I basically have is a dedicated graphics card I'm going to go ahead and place onto this PC. If you guys take a look, we don't actually have a dedicated GPU inside of here. This thing just runs entirely through integrated graphic. And the graphics card I have is the GT710, which honestly isn't the best GPU, but the PC definitely doesn't have too much space. As you guys can see, we can't really fit a full-size graphics card inside of here, or we're going to have to go ahead and entirely change out the PC case. But honestly, this GPU definitely is still going to help us out, giving us a pretty decent FPS boost while having this graphics card also fitting inside of the PC since originally I actually bought a much more powerful GPU to place inside of here, which is the GTX 1050Ti. But even though this graphics card would have gave us a much more higher FPS boost, definitely would not fit because of its size. You guys can see this thing is definitely much more larger compared to this much more smaller GT710. But still, having a dedicated graphics card is better than not having any at all. So, yeah, taking a look at this thing, this is definitely not the best GPU at all with only two gigs of VRAM. But still, what's great about this GPU is that it doesn't need to take any power from like the power supply. So, we don't need to actually plug in any PCIe cables, anything like that. All of its power comes directly from the motherboard. But regardless, this GPU would even draw that much power from the power supply. So, let's go ahead and place this graphics card inside. And this should definitely fit a lot better compared to the GTX 1050Ti I tried, which didn't even fit at all, even though that would have been the perfect graphics card for the CPU inside of this PC. But boom, there we go. We have this graphics card installed now.

[00:06:07]Super easy. Just like that. And this is going to be the number one reason we're going to get a much more higher FPS increase since we don't need to run through integrated graphics anymore.

[00:06:15]Okay, so now that I have the GT710 graphics card inside of this free PC, like I said, just placing a graphics card is going to give us a pretty decent FPS boost, which you guys can actually see now we're reaching close to 100 FPS and it's pretty consistently above like 95 90ish FPS now compared to before when we were only running about like 35 to 40 FPS on 720p, but now I'm actually running on 1080p and you guys can see we're reaching close to the triple digit FPS. So definitely just placing a graphics card inside this PC helped. But I want to go ahead and also optimize this PC since it does have a dedicated graphics card inside of here. Now go ahead and use Nvidia optimization to even get more FPS onto the PC. Now the first thing I do with any PC when I optimize it, especially when it's like completely fresh and has nothing, is actually use this ultimate Windows utility. Super easy to use, runs directly through the PowerShell.

[00:07:07]Basically, you guys don't need to download anything at all. All you do is just paste in that command on PowerShell and it basically just runs it. And we're going to go ahead and just go into the tweak section. We're going to go ahead and just click on standard for the recommended selections. You guys can see it just selects all these essential tweaks they want you to use. And yeah, I've shown you guys Chris Titus tool many times before. Basically a perfect all-in-one tweaker. You guys can see it just creates a restore point and also runs the script in the background. And the first time I ever used this, it actually helped a lot with my FPS. So, I have really high hopes for this tool.

[00:07:35]And obviously, since we do have an Nvidia GPU inside of here now, I'm going to go ahead and download all the drivers I need for the graphics card. And I'm going to go ahead and quickly run through all the Windows tweaks as well.

[00:07:44]Like even though this PC really doesn't have much, I want to make sure it's fully optimized and hopefully we can reach close to like 200 FPS. So, let me go ahead and just quickly go through all the Windows settings. I'm not going to show everything I'm going to be doing onto this PC since I'm sure you guys seen it like 100 times by now. But it's definitely for a good reason since all these tweaks are really helpful for a PC that's never been optimized before. Like even when I first did all these tweaks on my main PC or even my super old laptop, it definitely helped a lot. So, I'm sure it will at least help a little bit with this super old free PC I have.

[00:08:14]We're going to go ahead and disable high resolution textures. Wait, they removed like the pre-downloaded stream assets. I just realized that. And then lastly, I want to go ahead and use hone, which is basically another optimizer. Gives you 10 free optimizations to use. And I basically just select the 10 recommended ones. So, let me quickly go ahead and do that. And I'm going to go ahead and restart this PC and see how much FPS boost we can get just from optimizing the PC. But we definitely got a pretty decent FPS boost literally just by placing the GT710 inside of here. Okay, now let's take a look at the FPS we can get now after optimizing this PC. Now, I didn't fully optimize this PC. I really just went through all the basics and everything, but I honestly think I still did pretty great. Now, we're actually running about 165 to 170 FPS. So, we did get about like a 60 FPS increase just from running these very basic tweaks.

[00:08:58]And I'm not going to lie, most of it probably came from the Chris Titus utility tool or the hone optimization app. But regardless, this is still a huge jump from the 45 FPS we were getting earlier without a graphics card inside this PC and also without optimizing it. But I do got to say once I'm actually building, the FPS does drop significantly. Only running about 135 to 150 FPS now. But the game is definitely so much more playable compared to what we had before. And also before there was like a ton of input delay and everything. And I think I somewhat fixed it. It's still not super easy to play since there are frame drops. I mean the CPU inside this PC is definitely not the best. The lowest it just goes down to in creative is about 135 FPS. Taking a look at the FPS in an actual game, feel pretty decent. We're actually running about 15 to 125 FPS. Without having a graphics card and without optimizing it, I'm pretty sure in an actual game we wouldn't even be running like 10 FPS.

[00:09:49]I'm actually really glad that we're running about like 90 FPS still, even though it's not as much as in creative.

[00:09:54]This PC shouldn't even be able to run in an actual game before if we could barely even run in creative. Like that's actually crazy. All right, we're going to get down here.

[00:10:04]Okay. Oh my god, here's our guy. Are they below?

[00:10:10]26. What the 200?

[00:10:16]Oh my Oh my gosh. Okay. Okay, bro. Like, we do still get a little bit of frame drops. It only goes down to like what, 95, 90 fps or so. It's definitely nothing crazy, that's for sure. While the max FPS does go up to about like what, 130 FPS. Oh, definitely still very good. Oh my Oh my gosh.

[00:10:36]I can't build crack. Oh, what the heck? What the heck?

[00:10:43]That guy actually just teleported to me.

[00:10:44]I don't know what just happened. I need this kill. I need this kill. Where's another guy?

[00:10:51]I need that. I need that. There we go.

[00:10:53]There's a guy flying in.

[00:10:56]30 little 30 damage.

[00:11:00]Okay. Yeah, I'm not hitting that, bro.

[00:11:02]I'm not I'm not hitting that. There's someone up here. Right over here.

[00:11:07]Okay, free kill. Still no crazy frame drops. There's someone right here.

[00:11:16]Oh my god.

[00:11:20]Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. How am I lost?

[00:11:23]Yeah. Even when I get into a fight, there's not like huge frame drops, which is definitely very good. For the most part, it runs consistently like 120 130 FPS. Oh, there's someone right here. I knew it.

[00:11:34]30 200. There we go. There's someone. Oh my gosh. 30.

[00:11:44]I missed.

[00:11:46]Oh my gosh. They're all one.

[00:11:49]45.

[00:11:52]Oh my. Yo, how did I miss? How did I miss? How did I miss? I don't even know if it's the frame drops or whatever, but I'm an actual bot right now. I'm an actual bot. Hold on. Let's get this. Oh my god, there's another guy. Oh my gosh.

[00:12:05]How many people do I need to fight, bro?

[00:12:07]I need a shotgun. Oh my gosh. Chill out.

[00:12:11]Chill, chill, chill, chill, chill.

[00:12:14]Running for my life. I'm just running for my life. Oh my gosh. I'm an actual bot. Let's go, bro. GG's.