Blueprint
The APC team’s picks for a part-by-part perfect PC build to suit your budget.
Changes across the board were minimal for the budget build this month, so it’s unlikely you’ll see much difference in performance. The key alteration was the switch from the conventional Ryzen 5 2600 to the 2600X version, with its expanded overclocking potential. The 2600X was inexplicably cheaper this month, even though neither item was on sale with any of the big online retailers. The max boost frequency is 0.3GHz higher, and the overall performance should be slightly superior to last month’s setup. The 2600X also comes with a beefier cooling solution; the AMD Wraith Stealth is replaced by the taller Wraith Spire. We’ve also shifted from Gigabyte to EVGA on the GPU front; we’re down from two fans to one, and the boost clock is a little less impressive, but the EVGA GTX 1660 XC Black is quieter and currently the cheapest GTX 1660 card on the market. We didn’t really want to admit it, but yes, an AIO cooler for this build was overkill. We’re out to make some savings this month, and a pricey cooling solution represented the perfect place to trim the fat in this build. To that end, we’ve opted for AMD’s high-end air cooler, the Wraith Max, which comes with RGB lighting and near-silent fan operation, while still providing sufficient heat dissipation for all but the most savage of overclocking attempts. We’re putting that cooler on to a different board, too: the MSI B450M Gaming Plus, a slight upgrade from last month’s B450-A and it’s a bonus $14 cheaper. The key change here, though, is going from Nvidia to AMD with our graphics card. For no extra cost, the RX 5700 provides slightly better performance and an extra 2GB of VRAM for your system. Right now, it comes bundled with a three-month pass for Xbox Game Pass on PC, too.
“We’re out to make some savings this month, and a pricey cooling solution represented the perfect place to trim the fat in this build. ”
At the time of writing, we didn’t have access to the RTX 2080 Super cards – expect to see one in this build next issue. For now, though, Zotac’s twin-fan offering of the original RTX 2080 is significantly discounted, so we’ll be swapping to that from last month’s MSI GPU saving us $150. Given the 2080 Super will have the same baseline price point as the 2080, and won’t be likely be discounted anytime soon, snapping up a cut price high-end card like this is a good call right now.
While the Gigabyte Aorus RGB SSD remains great value, we decided to use the spare cash from the GPU to splash out, going for Samsung’s 970 Evo M.2 drive. While we lost 12GB of storage, Samsung remains the king of SSD write speeds, netting us an extra 300MB/s of maximum transfer rate for just $20 extra.
As usual, there’s no call to trade out our CPU and motherboard here. Asus’s Prime X399-A has been one of the best-value X399 boards in the game for a while, and Threadripper prices are staying stalwart, even in the face of Ryzen 9. Upgrading the processor in this build would throw a significant price hike into the overall system; bear in mind that if you’ve got the extra $320 to upgrade to the 2970WX, splashing out at extra $100 or so on a superior motherboard is almost always a worthy investment.