Blueprint

The APC team’s picks for a part-by-part perfect PC build to suit your budget.

Prices have been climbing across the board this month, much to our frustration. Even the trusty Crucial BX500 cost us a few dollars more, although it refused to be unseated from its throne as the king of bargain-bin storage. Team Group’s T-Force Vulcan Z memory also remained the best-value 8GB kit around. There wasn’t much we wanted to change; rising GTX 1660 prices necessitated a quick switch over to a Gigabyte model of the GPU, although we were tempted by the similarly priced single-fan 1660 Phoenix from Asus. The main change this time around was downgrading back from the AMD Ryzen 5 2600X to the regular 2600, retaining the six-core model, but losing 0.2GHz of base clock speed.

Only a minor saving on the mid-range build this time around, primarily found in a small price drop on the Ryzen 5 3600X. X570 motherboards have remained expensive, and while we’re hoping for a price drop soon, we’ve had to switch to the Gigabyte X570 UD in the meantime to maintain our overall build price. Following that, we also switched up the memory, using Team Group’s flashy T-Force Delta RGB to keep our price and performance the same while adding a little more pizazz to this rig. While we did explore other possibilities regarding the GPU, the fact remained that Sapphire’s Radeon RX 5700 was still the best value card for this system.

“A bit of evaluation determined that 360mm of radiator space was overkill for cooling the Threadripper 2950X, so we swapped it out for a 240mm AIO cooler from the same Fractal Design product line. ”

There were a few things to tweak on our turbo build this month. A bit of evaluation determined that 360mm of radiator space was overkill for cooling the Threadripper 2950X, so we swapped it out for a 240mm AIO cooler from the same Fractal Design product line. Regarding the processor itself, we’re taking an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” approach and sticking with the 2950X. The X399 Phantom Gaming 6 from Asrock remains the best-value X399 motherboard on the market, so there’s no need to get rid of that either.

When we came to the GPU, we saw that last issue’s “Upgrade of the Month” (the EVGA GeForce RTX 2070 Super Black) had risen in price, so we’ve gone for a more conservative option: the Zotac Gaming RTX 2070 Super. This twin-fan model is cheaper than EVGA’s card, and has nominally the same performance. We also swapped out the RAM to a slightly more affordable Sniper X kit from G.Skill, keeping the capacity and speed the same to ensure that this system doesn’t experience a drop in performance.

Lastly, with the cash we saved, we decided to upgrade the SSD to a Samsung 970 Pro, netting us faster transfer speeds and 12GB of extra storage. PCIe Gen 3.0 M.2 drives have dropped significantly in price since the release of the new Gen 4.0 motherboards and SSDs, and we’re very happy to take advantage of that fact.