Blueprint
The APC team’s picks for a part-by-part perfect PC build to suit your budget.
We’d settled on the Ryzen 5 2400G as our processor of choice for the budget build earlier, and if you’re after a standard rig that can have a fair shot at old video games, while doing basic workloads, the G’s for you. But we’re not ones to rest on our laurels, so we’ve swapped it out for something a little more exotic. As GPU prices are continuing to plummet, GTX 1050s are now hitting that sub-$200 price point. They don’t offer the same impressive price-to-performance ratio as the likes of the GTX 1060 (and we always recommend you stump up for that if you can), but they’re still pretty impressive nonetheless. We’re talking at least 40fps in most AAA titles. To go with that, we’ve picked a Ryzen 3 1200. Although a little long in the tooth, its 16 PCIe lanes, versus the 2400G’s eight, make it a better performer with a dedicated GPU. And with a solid four cores, it beats the competition at the same price, too. We’re reworking where our mid-range sits, to try to position it between a PC that is capable of 1080p gaming, and one optimised for 1440p. At least initially — once this issue’s over, we’ll revert to type, and inevitably continue to shift the pricing around to try to get the spec as cheap as humanly possible (not that we haven’t done so already). So why the upheaval? Well, it all falls down to those GPUs, and trying to find a nice balance between price and performance. The GTX 1070 Ti, despite being somewhat of a mixed-bag GPU, is a fairly respectable card. It performs almost as well as a GTX 1080. Coupled with a solid processor, the Ryzen 7 2700, our overclocking processor of choice, and a decent all-in-one cooler, and what you’re left with is an insanely cost-effective, 1440p gaming machine. In fact, looking at the spec, it’s not too dissimilar from the Masterclass rig we did this very issue. The only real difference being the storage and motherboard.
Several changes come into play this month in our Turbo build. So, why the big change-up? Well, it all starts with our Intel processor of choice, the Core i9-7900X. It’s the Intel processor to go for right now: 10 cores, 20 threads, high clock speed, solid performance. Delid it, and you’ve got yourself a pretty chilly processor, too. Thing is, its price jumped all the way from $895 to $1,100. That’s a no-go for us, as it’s no longer competitive. The solution? Well, because Threadripper+ is now readily available, and pretty comfortable in both games and extreme workloads, we’re happy to suggest it again over the 7900X.
Single-core performance is up, memory latency down, and overall clock speed increased. This does mean we’ve had to swap the motherboard out (annoyingly for one that’s $120 more), but we’ve leveraged costs elsewhere, opting for the same cooler we were given to test the 2950X, a new memory kit at a higher frequency than last issue (for less cash) and a somewhat more substantial graphics card.
Storage has come down a touch, too, so overall we’re better off, ironically, and there’s an additional six cores and 12 threads to play with, too. Why no RTX 2080? Well, to be honest, we’re just not willing to recommend a GPU that effectively won’t provide any more performance, for $500 more, on the pretense that some games might have slightly better reflections at some point in the future.
“Why no RTX 2080? Well, to be honest, we’re just not willing to recommend a GPU that effectively won’t provide any more performance, for $500 more”