Blueprint

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

Unfortunately, the price of our Budget build has risen a little this issue. The BitFenix case rose and the trusty Asrock B450M motherboard we’ve used for ages has finally dropped off sale, so we’re swapping it out for an MSI B450M motherboard for the same price. We also swapped the Cruicial SSD for an Adata SATA drive. The SU650 isn’t particularly exciting, but neither was the part it replaced; it’s a SATA drive, it’s cheap, and it’s effective. We looked into improving the processor, too, but the Ryzen 5 2600 is still an excellent deal.

We’ve have managed to save almost $100 on this build, and then spent almost all of it on a very exciting upgrade. A few minor changes were made in the name of keeping the price down. We’ve also swapped to an XFX model of the Radeon RX 5700 GPU, which represents most of our savings, along with a new motherboard – moving away from Gigabyte, we’re now using an Asrock X570 Phantom Gaming 4. We needed to keep that X570 format, because the big and exciting change here is a shift over to a shiny new PCIe 4.0 M.2 drive, the MP600 500GB from Corsair, taking advantage of the Ryzen 5 3600X’s fourth-generation NVMe support for super-fast data transfers. All up not bad at all for an overall $14 increase over last month.

“We’d love to change some more things, but there’s plenty of stuff coming in the near future that will be exciting to see, primarily for this high-end build. ”

We’ve decided to wear a bump in the price, this month, but it was worth it. A switch to Gigabyte’s Turbo Edition RTX 2080 Super is a big jump over the 2070 Super we ran previously. A particularly pleasing change for this build was the RAM; we stuck with G.Skill, but moved over from Sniper X to the Ripjaws V series, which cost us $20 less, and also has a lower CAS latency for improved performance. It’s nice when things work out, isn’t it?

We then decided to get ahead of ourselves in a different area. While the Threadripper 2950X doesn’t support PCIe 4.0 for speedy new M.2 drives, the next generation of Threadripper does, so we’re going to prep our Turbo build with Adata XPG’s Gammix S50 1TB, a fourth-gen NVMe SSD that’ll be ready to unleash hell with ultra-fast transfer speeds when a Threadripper 3000 CPU is inevitably shoved into this build.

We’d love to change some more things, but there’s plenty of stuff coming in the near future that will be exciting to see, primarily for this high-end build. We contemplated going down to a 240mm radiator AIO cooler, but if we’re going to be using upgraded parts in the near future, we’ll stick with the powerful and good-value ML360 from Cooler Master, for that crisp triple-fan cooling setup.