Building the All Brazil Gaming PC

In recent years, tariffs have become a key strategy for the United States by implementing a sales tax on nearly everything that Americans buy from out of country. But in Brazil, they've been kicking that rock for half a century. How's that going for them? To find out, I bought all of this tech from Brazil. Now, I've never lived in Brazil, but I have. This is Ricardo, who does some of our thumbnails, and he's going to be showing us how to survive when the government wants a 93% cut on all of your electronics. Do you shop AliExpress and just hope the seller lies on the customs forms? Do you buy lesser known or white label brands in order to get a better deal? Like, what is super frame memory? And why does it also have Kingston branding on it? We're just getting started. This is already so difficult. Like, how do you navigate this? Well, you do a little bit of this, a little bit of that. Brilliant, then that means we did the right thing. Our friends Davi and Roberto actually put together not one, but two Brazilian builds for us. On one side, we've got a pretty good gaming PC by Brazilian standards. And on the other side, we've got one of the cheapest builds that you could put together pretty much anywhere. And as you're about to see, both of these are a little different from what you'd find if you just fired up the new egg and shopped the most popular components. Now, let's shop the most popular Segway. Yeah, top sponsor. War Thunder. Take command of over 2,500 tanks, planes, helicopters, and ships of 10 major nations in one of the most comprehensive vehicle combat games ever made. Join over 95 million players on console, PC, or mobile using our links down below. You've never built a PC before. No. Would you describe that as sexier than this one? Well, this one has more like more swag or more mojo, as we say in Brazil, you know, means sauce. And the sauce starts with a SuperFrame, that brand again, B450M motherboard. Well, it turns out ASRock sells these boards in bulk to white label brands like SuperFrame who slap their label on them and then handle the logistical headaches of selling in Latin America. One of the headaches that SuperFrame handles is doing the final assembly of these things in the ZFM in order to get massive tax exemptions. This workaround allows some reasonably modern tech to be legally made in Brazil, resulting in pricing that is... Son of a boy! Resulting in pricing that's somewhat close to what you might pay elsewhere. But they're not typically going to stock higher end parts because even without tariffs, not many could afford it. Moving on to our CPU, we've got something that's familiar and yet unfamiliar. It's a Ryzen CPU with 3DV cache exclusive to Latin America. Why is that? Well, this allows them to have something that's affordable for that market, but that is not as easy to price compare in the other more affluent markets. Also, by having a discrete SKU, they make it a little bit more difficult for the gray marketers who would otherwise grab chips, just like game keys, for instance, from developing markets and then transfer them over to more affluent markets in order to make more margin on them. Of course, of course. Want to go ahead and install it? Okay, let's go. I have some experience building computers. The last time I did was just tearing down my iMac. Okay, just hold on. Oh, sorry. What did I miss? We don't want to touch the pins on the bottom. If these get bent, that's bad. You might have noticed, AM4 is still super popular in Latin America just because of the affordability, both of the chips, motherboards, and of course, the DDR4 memory. In fact, it's so popular that Asus has apparently been ramping up production of AM4 boards to serve the Latin American market. Oh, wow. I'll be right over here. Hopefully, you don't break anything. Brilliant. Now, let's talk about my system. As you might've noticed, Ricardo has already spent over 300 US dollars on his bougie Brazilian system. That's way out of reach for many families. That's where boards like this Zsus from AliExpress come in. Not to be confused with Asus or the Greek god. Step one, harvest the chipsets from retired server motherboards. Step two, do some BIOS black magic to enable modern features like M.2 SSDs. And step three, sell them for pennies on the dollar to developing markets. This motherboard plus the older generation 12 core Xeon that's installed, plus this 16 gig stick of ECC DDR4 memory, all came to just $56. It's not the most modern thing, but as you guys are gonna see later, many esports titles will run just fine on it. What a deal that was. And I say was because it was so good that Brazil went and slapped a 93% tax on anything off AliExpress more than 50 US dollars. Absolutely freaking brutal. So then like what? Would people just have to order the parts piecemeal and just pay shipping three times to get around it? Something like that. Or you have a friend that goes abroad and you ask, hey, can you bring something for me in your luggage? That's the way we do it. Or don't, not legal advice. As for Ricardo's RAM, he's gonna be using DDR4 just like me, but he's gonna be using much faster DDR4, unlike me. 3,200 megatransfers per second versus the 2133 of my generic server memory. Now, Davi and Roberto did suggest that faster RAM might actually be a worthwhile upgrade, even for my system, but a brand name like SuperFrame might be out of reach for this customer. So we also grabbed this Ninja Gaming DDR4 Hurricane for $11 less. Now, $11 difference might seem pretty small, but that's like 50 Brazilian dollars and could be the difference between buy now or realistically, buy now, pay later. You were saying BNPL is like super common. Yeah, I mean, since I grew up, this is just regular adulting, the way you buy stuff. In Brazil, that's like common. You can even like do it with your lunch. Are the interest rates lower maybe then? So that's a tricky thing. Usually they say you don't get any interest in those purchases. However, if you buy anything full price, you get 10% off. Oh, so it's like halal mortgages, where it's like, oh, you're not paying interest. You just pay a fee. Yeah, that's the only way you can buy a fridge or do anything, right? You need to buy installments. All right, now it's time for you to installment some RAM. No pressure, right? No pressure. No, no, you'll need some pressure. There we go. Nice. At my very limited budget, even though this would more than double my memory bandwidth, I'm still gonna see if I can get away without it. And let's move on to our storage. We're both using the Kingston NV2. We didn't order any storage from Brazil. But Kingston's a big brand there. Now it's time to talk case and cooling. And once again, you get way better stuff than me. Another super frame part. This time, it's actually a really compelling looking case for the equivalent of 85 US dollars. Not to mention glass. It's not even acrylic. Then you got this 360 millimeter, also RGB AIO cooler for just $55. I want it for me. Does it have enough sauce? Yeah, enough sauce. Enough sauce on this one. All right, you want to get started on that? While I show them what I ended up with? Meet the Gamer Ninja Eraser for $29.07. What makes this eraser? Well, let me tell you. First, it erased how much money I had to spend because this case, not to mention my Gamdias Boreas heatsink, cost less than just Ricardo's cooler. And I haven't even shown you guys the best part yet. It has an LED switch on the front that changes the color of the lighting behind this included doodle board. How long has this chalk marker been sitting? Oh, man. I'll keep you in here along with all my other PC building stuff. Brilliant. Oh, there they are. These are all my SSDs for the Linux challenge. I thought I lost them. Right, tech sack. So many pockets. Just don't lose things in it. How are you doing over here? Well, I'm going to need your help. Okay. I'm a Mac user. Here's what you're going to do. This right here, just like that. Boom. Meanwhile, in Linus land, I don't even know if these are... Oh, yeah. Okay. There we go. Okay. So you can do it just like that. Okay. You've got your own syringe though. You get a fancier one than me. Oh, that's lots. That's a lot? Oh, yeah. You're good. That's perfect. Okay. Yep. I've never done this before, man. You gotta tell me. Hey, so is that in? Did you do it? Yeah, I got it. But I don't know what are the next steps. I need to attach this guy, I assume. Yeah, let's do that. So I just need to glue this guy on top of the processor? Okay, sure. Yeah, the thermal paste. How would you say that? Contact those two? I don't know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You just put it on there. Okay. And then I put this guy right there. Yep. Trying to glue stuff over there. Okay. I'm going to put this in. It'll be exciting. Oh, let's talk about the power supply. Normally we kind of gloss over the power supply because for your popular North American brands, they're pretty much all going to be at least good enough. So your choice pretty much comes down to how much do you want to spend on extras like modular cables or super high efficiency ratings? This time, I actually don't recognize either my BRX 650 watt or Ricardo's Duex Pulse 800 watt. So I felt it would be a really good idea to get our labs team to take a closer look at these before we use them. Linus's unit is a pretty inexpensive option. And in our testing, it couldn't sustain anywhere near its rated 650 watt output, capping out around 400 watts instead. As for Ricardo's Duex Pulse, it's more than double the price. And while it isn't a top performer, it should comfortably do what it says on the box. In our brownout test, both of these power supplies turned out lower than the standard and recommended 12 to 16 milliseconds we typically see. We also looked at the voltage regulation and voltage ripple results. And you can find those in the LTT Labs companion article linked below. What do I do with a modular cable? What is it good for? One benefit is you only use the cables that you want. So you don't have to have any extras. So it can look a little bit tidier. But I can understand how for a lot of people that might not be that big of a deal. That's not bad at all. Some of the PSUs are short for labs. They have all the cables attached and it's so cumbersome to move around. And I can see the benefit for sure. Well, that's going to be me because I did not get a modular power supply. Sorry. I also paid less than half as much as you did though. So Cardo is doing pretty good over here though. Can I help you? Yeah, of course, please. There you go. This way. Okay, gotcha. Yeah. So we pull that fresh air in from the outside. And then how do you usually go? Do you go like underneath? You go however looks sauce to you. Oh, now look at that. So clean. So fresh, so clean. This is like a perfectly cromulent modern motherboard. But I guess the budget is just the problem. We have rich people in Brazil who would be able to afford these. Fair enough. Yeah, but like the regular Joe, you have trouble. It's nice to have cable management loops and even such a budget oriented case. But I got to say, did they have to put all of the loops right in front of the pass-through holes? So they're like right there. Also, this is a rookie power supply manufacturer mistake. Why is the sticker upside down? Super frame makes another triumphant appearance here. Epic graphics card, special edition. While we could spend another $100 on an RTX 5050 for a more up-to-date feature set, this is already a ton of money to spend. And that 5050 might not perform as much better compared to this as you might think. See, for starters, the raw performance uplift over the last couple of generations has not been as much as gamers were used to seeing in the past. And for another thing, the 5050 uses only eight PCIe lanes, half as many as the 3060. If we were putting it in a modern system, that doesn't really matter because those eight lanes on the 5050 are so much faster. But if you're using an older motherboard, your GPU is gonna fall back to the older speed for its lanes. So the fact that it only has eight of them and they're gonna be operating at a quarter of the speed that that GPU expects means that you can run into performance bottlenecks. Meanwhile, the 3060, it's Gen 4 and it's going in a Gen 3 board, but at least it has 16 Gen 4 lanes. So it's getting half the speed it expects as opposed to a quarter. Meanwhile, for my system, I get a Radeon RX 580 from 2017. This is the card that doesn't end. Yes, it goes on and on, my friends. While it's almost 10 years old, it can still play many of the titles that are popular in Brazil, like League of Legends and even Valorant with some asterisks. It is worth noting that we went with the eight gigs of VRAM version. Yes, I know. Thank you, tech media. Eight gigs is not enough for 2026. But listen, when the other option is four gigs, we take the eight gigs. Fun fact, one of the reasons that these are so commonly available is that these cards, especially the eight gig versions, were extremely popular with crypto miners. Those GPUs and that VRAM's been through some stuff. Can't speak to the reliability, but still a perfectly promulent gaming card. Hey, nice, not bad. Not bad? Once again, all this goes back there though. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So a little bit bad. No, no, no, no, no, no. It's good, it's good. You just built a computer. Oh, my first PC. It's the PC building world cup. Yeah. Brazil won. Well, that's the only thing that we're going to win because the, yeah, the soccer team. What are the odds this turns on the first time? Come on. One thing that Brazilians have is faith. So you gotta be a bit Brazilian here now. Okay. All right, I believe. Let's just face up. Oh, we have some more stuff though. We have monitors. I assume this one's yours. Nah, come on. Oh, yeah. He gets the super frame. He always gets the super frame. What's up with that? I'm the guest. 1440p, 180 Hertz, IPS panel for 130 bucks. Not bad. I mean, as long as you're making North American income, I guess that would be very expensive in Brazil, I assume. Wow, this has a lot of inputs for a budget monitor. Two HTMIs and two DPs. Don't break my monitor. Well, I'll leave you to do that and I'm going to assemble mine. Now that's glossy. That looks so sad next to yours. Yeah, maybe I guess size does matter, right? It even has a really small VESA pattern. It has no display port and no DVI. Only has VGA and HDMI. And it's especially funny because HDMI is the one that costs more to implement on your product. But if you're going to have just one. All right, 75 Hertz. That looks decent, right? Yeah, you've obviously got some upscaling on. And honestly, it looks like you might even have a little bit of frame gen on. In terms of the experience of gaming on that versus what I'm about to do here. This is decent for sure. Oh my... Oh geez, that looks bad. You barely have any shadows on that one. Listen, Mac guy, how many shadows does your Mac have? Fair enough. Oh wow, I am not getting that many fewer FPS compared to Ricardo. But my game is running at a lower resolution and much lower details. This looks like low everything. Low everything and image sharpening and FSR upscaling. There's not a lot of NPCs. Is that due to the power of the computer or no? No, you just are in the middle of nowhere. Super resolution, no frame gen. Wow, okay. You've got ray tracing on. That is pretty darn impressive. RTX 3060, still a DS card, hey? If we're being real though, my system was never designed to handle cyberpunk. Why don't we try something a little more esports-y? 12 cores, only at 2.2 gigahertz. But damn, 12 cores. Check out this keyboard. Man, I can barely tell the difference between T's and CT's with how bad the color is on this display. It's unbelievable. What the... Come on, man! Actually lag killed. That was not my fault. Oh my God, that was my fault. Oh, it's so, oh, it's so hitchy. Hitch, please. I'm only getting like 60 FPS. He's getting triple my average FPS and almost quadruple my 1% lows. That makes for a much better gaming experience. Oh no, do you see that? How it's not tracking what I'm doing at all? Yeah, fast movements, it's losing it. Mine, it doesn't even matter whether I'm moving fast. This is brutal. So what I thought was actually the system lagging sometimes is just the mouse losing tracking. So I don't turn. This is so frustrating trying to play with this. A better mouse would solve a lot of my issues right now though. Like 60 FPS, 75, 100 FPS, that's playable. Very playable. And I'm dead. Okay, exactly. Not great, but okay. And maybe that's okay. Sometimes you just gotta work with what the piggy bank allows and both of these PCs delivered a pretty playable experience considering the budget that we had to work with. Yes, Ricardo's performs anywhere from two to four times better but it also costs about three times as much. And considering the policies that Brazilians have to work around, you gotta admire the tenacity and the can-do spirit and the, what's the word that the visitor told me? Gambiaja. Yeah, yeah. So with all context of all of that, it makes sense why these parts were recommended. I can't say that I would necessarily recommend these parts if you're living in North America, at least not at the moment, but hey, who knows if US policies keep tracking the direction they're going, maybe we're gonna end up in a similar situation. Cool, and cool segue to our sponsor. War Thunder. It's the comprehensive vehicle combat game for PC, PlayStation, Xbox, and mobile. Take control of over 2,500 different planes, ships, helicopters, and tanks from 10 different nations all throughout history. That's anything from biplanes and the armored cars of the 1920s to the fighter jets and main battle tanks of today. When it comes to War Thunder, immersion is the name of the game. With authentic sound design and great graphics, you'll be placed right at the helm of your favorite war machines. They do this with their unique damage X-ray system, which shows precisely where the shell damages the vehicles, which components were affected, and what ultimately led to the destruction of the vehicle. Plus, there are tons of customization options from camouflages to the community-created decorations. Join over 95 million other players in one of the most comprehensive vehicle combat games ever made. Play War Thunder for free on PC, PlayStation, Xbox, and mobile using our links down below. Whether you're new to the game or returning after six months, you'll get a massive bonus pack on PC and consoles packed with vehicles, boosters, and more. Claim your bonus and start playing today. It's worth pointing out, budget PCs also exist in North America. And while some of them are similar, like these old Xeon combos, some of them look a fair bit different than what's being thrown together in Brazil. Don't believe me? Well, I challenged four tech YouTubers to build a PC for under $1,000, and you guys can check out what they ended up with. Where does the video go?