Blueprint
The APC team’s picks for a part-by-part perfect PC build to suit your budget.
Some of the components in this budget build dropped in price of their own accord, and while we briefly dabbled with the idea of swapping over to an Intel processor, ultimately it wasn’t worth the change. We did spot the BitFenix Nova TG case for just $49 at CPL and MSY, which is considerably less than the $75 most other shops sell it for, so that’s a nice saving. The only change we did see fit to make was to switch from the 3000MHz Patriot Viper memory to a Kingston Fury kit. RAM pricing is in constant flux, and right now prices are relatively high. As such we’ve taken the decision to go with a slightly slower 2,666MHz kit, because sticking with 3,000MHz memory while prices are so high just added too much to the overall cost, and in balance the speed drop won’t make a substatial difference to overall performance. We’d always encourage you to have a bit of a hunt around for good sales when deciding which memory to go for with a new build or upgrade. We managed to shave $180 off our mid-range build this month. That’s enough for a game or two (or seven, if Steam has a sale on). Making that saving came mainly from exchanging the Asus ROG Strix B450-F Gaming motherboard for a cheaper MSI board of similar features and capabilities, and moving to an MSI GTX 2060 graphics card instead of last month’s more expensive Zotac equivalent.
Elsewhere component prices remain relatively stable, and, as with the other builds on these pages, the very low cost of storage helps a great deal with keeping costs under control. We only wish other segments of the industry could be as stable as this with pricing!
“Component prices remain relatively stable, and, as with the other builds on these pages, the very low cost of storage helps a great deal with keeping costs under control. ”
As you can probably tell just by glancing at the table, we made a lot of adjustments to our Turbo build this time around. Those adjustments have led to a saving of $413. Not bad!
We decided to shift over to MSI with its RTX 2080 Ventus 8G. It’s the same $1,049 cost as the Asus Turbo RTX 2080 used in the last few builds, but has a better cooling solution. We mixed up our CPU cooling, too; it seems Cooler Master is the flavor of the month this issue, because its MasterLiquid ML360 enabled us to upgrade from 240mm to 360mm of radiator space – which can be fitted either to the top or the front of the Nzxt H700i – and saved us $10 compared to the previous Kraken X52.
As expected, we also had to change out the PSU again, thanks to the constant price shifts, so we’ve gone with a reliable 850W model from Corsair this month. We also switched over to G.Skill RAM, using a 32GB kit from the Ripjaw series at 3,200MHz – a slight gain over last month’s 3,000MHz memory for the same cost. Our final change was an upgrade to storage – no longer content with four terabytes, we’re upgrading to two of Seagate’s 3TB BarraCuda hard drives. We also considered swapping out the Gigabyte Aorus RGB M.2 drive for a Patriot VPN100 of the same size, but ultimately decided that the drop in speed wasn’t worth the potential saving.