Blueprint

The APC team’s picks for a part-by-part perfect PC build to suit almost every budget. Budget Mid-range

Our most affordable recommended build isn’t quite skimping the bottom of the parts and price barrel. Instead we seek bargains, and there are some remarkably low-priced items that are perfectly fine for heavy use and that you needn’t pay more for.

The BitFenix Nova GT case is fantastic value and the brand is one we’ve trusted for a long time — though there’s certainly a lot of action currently going on in the budget case area, so hunt around. This machine does what it sets out to do brilliantly and any adjustments to performance-related parts would either see the price rise dramatically, or the performance take an unnecessary tumble in order to save just a few dollars. Taking the RAM as an example, we could have saved $15 by dropping down to DDR4-2400 memory, but that would have hurt performance significantly, and we ultimately deemed that a false economy. This is currently as good as it gets for under $700. For this midrange build, it was a choice between the Intel Core i5-8400 and AMD Ryzen 5 2600. A $50 price difference may not seem like much, but it was enough to force our gaze over to AMD’s second-gen Ryzen chips. Of these, the six-core Ryzen 5 2600 was the stand-out value option. With its 3.4GHz base clock and 3.9GHz max boost, you get a lot of performance for a lot less than the Intel alternative. For the motherboard we were more than happy to pick up the Asus ROG Strix B450-F Gaming. This is a great board, with plenty of quality features, including high-definition audio and twin M.2 sockets, for just $209. As Ryzen benefits from faster RAM, we picked up a 16GB kit of G.Skill Ripjaws RAM that operates at 2,133MHz, though this is still relatively conservative. On the graphics front, the EVGA GeForce GTX 1060 is an extremely well priced GTX 1060 that can handle most games provided you’re not running an extreme resolution monitor.

“It doesn’t have the balls-to-the-wall multicore performance of Threadripper, but its single-core prowess rounds out a competitive solution, especially for those in the professional gaming arena. ”

Try this on for size: With AMD’s latest second-gen Threadripper (filled with delicious Ryzen 2 architectural goodness) and Nvidia’s GTX 2000 series (with 4K killing gaming cards) just now available, this build will be approaching the realms of obsoletism. We have examples of each being tested right now in the Labs with reviews in this issue, but we aren’t quite ready to recommend them until likely next issue, when you can expect all of this to change quite dramatically.

This does give us an opportunity to take another look at where we’re at, however. Our Intel build is fairly well balanced. It doesn’t have the balls-to-the-wall multicore performance of Threadripper, but its single-core prowess rounds out a competitive solution, especially for those in the professional gaming arena. We’re not talking esports athletes, but streamers and content creators. Intel’s single-die architecture is still very well optimized for most AAA titles. Couple that with 10 cores pumping out a chunky 4.3GHz, and you’ve got enough throughput to stream and game at high quality on the same rig.

Within the next month, we’ll likely see AMD retake that title, offering more cores for less money at an even higher clock speed, and really cementing itself into that progaming, media creation outlet with its X series, and then the WX series being more useful for the small-scale CAD CAM developers. But until then, just hold fire.