Cut-price performance
When it came to putting our budget Intel build together, not a lot went wrong. It was pretty much plug and play. We did have a slight issue installing the eight-pin EPS power at the top of the board, but that was quickly resolved by running the cable under the motherboard itself. It’s a pretty neat fix, although admittedly not one we have to do very often. We could have perhaps dodged this entirely simply by installing the PSU with the fan facing downward, but losing that additional airflow pull-through would have been detrimental to overall temps. Perhaps, if we’d grabbed an additional 120mm fan for the front, we would have considered it, but this was the best way to run it as things stood.
The other bugbear we had to deal with was the incompatibility with the stand-offs. Yep, the Z370 HD3 is labelled as an ATX board, but it’s simply not wide enough to fit on the additional ATX stand-offs in the chassis. That’s not an issue with the case, more with the board. Even if the PCB lacked any additional features, we’d like to see a consistent size for the form factor. After all, it’s not much of a form factor if it doesn’t conform across standards, at least with the stand-offs.
The biggy with this rig is performance. Obviously, this system was going to be demolished by our budget zero-point — that’s $1,100 of kick-arse hardware, including a six-core Ryzen 5 processor, a GTX 1060, and a Samsung 960 Evo — but showing that is a good example of the price-to-performance sweet spot. It’s something that sits in the middle, between the absolute high and low ends of hardware. There’s a point where you’ll end up with diminishing returns in both directions; after all, for twice the cost, you get a hell of a lot more than twice the performance in almost all scenarios, bar computational tasks, and that’s pretty insane.
In a similar vein, this Intel build has taught us how incredible the Ryzen proposition is. Take the APU in the AMD build on page 88 — the difference in graphical performance is staggering, especially when you’re on a budget. But even ignoring that, we’ve been referring to the Core i3-8100 as possibly the most important CPU in Intel’s latest line-up, essentially performing like a Core i5-6600K, but at a fraction of the cost. The thing is, against the Ryzen 5 1600 featured in our zero-point machine, both look like paperweights, because the 1600 nearly doubles the performance in comparison, but for the same money as that i5 today.