The start of something special

We’ll be honest, this isn’t a machine that is going to set the world alight in terms of raw performance. When you’re piecing together a system using older parts, though, it’s never really going to be anything else. You could argue, quite fairly, that a system built with development in mind should use the latest, greatest hardware. After all, when time is precious, scrimping on parts at the build stage will ultimately cost you in the long run. That would be true in a professional capacity, but this was actually built with an intern in mind, and because it uses a lot of older, unused parts, it’s essentially free.

The build itself was fairly straightforward, with only the SSD mounting causing any serious headscratching. The fact that those holes don’t line up at all had us wondering whether we were doing something seriously wrong, but we simply couldn’t resolve what was happening here. It could be that we were missing some holding brackets, which is a risk you take when you’re using older hardware that may not be complete.

When it comes to performance, the machine may struggle to impress when compared to our default zero-point, but it’s really not that bad a machine in normal day-to-day use. Those gaming frame rates are generally smooth, and with a few judicious tweaks here and there, you should be able to enjoy games for a few years yet. The Deus Ex: Mankind Divided score is low, but that game does appear to thrash even top-end hardware as well — we would have hoped that some optimisations would have materialised by now, but nothing yet.

By the time you read this, AMD Ryzen may be out in the wild, and a quick look at the Cinebench score here shows that it couldn’t have come soon enough. To be brutally honest, AMD’s Piledriver is miserable when compared to Intel’s offerings — even a Core i3 will give this chip a run for its money. At the lower end of the pricing spectrum, this can be forgiven, but at this price, we expect much more. It does have the raw core count when it comes to compiling and handling multiple threads, though, so isn’t quite as bad as this benchmark would suggest.

We would recommend upgrading the graphics card, depending on what sort of game development the user intends doing with it, but this is a reasonable enough starting point. Apart from that, the core specification should last a couple of years, and with that large meaty data SSD, there should be plenty of space for textures, videos, models, and anything else needed. A bit more memory wouldn’t go amiss, but again, as a starting point, this isn’t too bad. The PSU should last a few upgrades as well.

These toolless drive bays are fine for traditional spinning and optical drives, but the mounting pins don’t line up with SSDs. There’s plenty of space if you do want to add more drives, though, and the fans behind the front door will help to keep them cool if you do. The BitFenix Shadow case we’ve used doesn’t have a side window panel, so while this isn’t the tidiest build we’ve ever done, it’s good enough in terms of airflow, and because no one can see inside, it doesn’t need to look any better than this. The case comes with a single fan installed at the rear, which we’ve left in place to help with the overall airflow — important when dealing with a traditional CPU air cooler.