BEST EVER BUDGET PC
Get it done for half a ton
Get Windows 10 for less
PC ❘ £500 from Palicomp www.snipca.com/32913
This budget desktop PC comes in a medium-sized case that’s plain and simple except for some decorative cut-outs and a ‘Gamemax’ logo down the front. Weak illumination from the rear fan LEDS does little to showcase the components behind the glass left panel, but when you peer closely at what you’re getting for half the price of the classic thousand-pound PC, you might feel a little more excited.
Its plain appearance hides an exciting array of specs for a budget desktop PC
Palicomp has started with AMD’S Ryzen 5 2600 processor – not the more capable 2600X that we saw in the AMD Abyss RYZ6 (see our review, Issue 549, page 22), although if you’d prefer that, Palicomp’s online configurator lets you substitute it for £36 extra. Both chips are overclockable, and this system comes overclocked to ‘approx 4.0GHZ’, according to Palicomp’s specifications. The exact speed achievable will vary – the point of overclocking is that you’re pushing a chip beyond the rating its manufacturer gave it off the production line, so there’s an element of luck – and we found ours running at 3.7GHZ, a modest increase over the standard 3.4GHZ.
The 2600 has been superseded by the 3600, but with six cores handling up to 12 simultaneous threads, the old chip is no slouch. Our tests scored it comfortably higher than the PC Specialist Vortex L1 (£599 from www.snipca.com/26306, see Issue 564, page 22), with its brand new six-core Intel i5-9400f processor, across all types of work, excelling (as we’d expect from a Ryzen) in the most demanding tasks.
It’s accompanied by a dedicated graphics card, something you might expect to sacrifice in this price bracket. True, the AMD Radeon RX 560 is a low-end GPU and comes with a meagre 2GB of its own memory, but it’s more than enough to put any system relying on the CPU’S integrated graphics processor to shame. You’ll have to dial down resolution or quality settings to get some games running smoothly, but we haven’t seen better 3D performance for this money.
We’re used to seeing desktop PCS fitted with a small SSD for speed and a large hard drive for space. This one compromises with a single SSD, installed on the fast NVME interface via the motherboard’s single M.2 socket, with a reasonable 512GB capacity. In our tests it showed a good sequential read speed of 1,838 megabytes per second, with write speeds less impressive at 988MB/S. That’s a lot slower than the top SSDS on the market, but actually very good by budget desktop PC standards. You might want more speed for something like 4K video editing, but then you’d be looking at a pricier system all round.
If you need more room for files, two 3.5in bays will take internal hard drives, and Palicomp will fit a 1TB drive for £45 or 2TB for £60. There are two 2.5in bays for more SSDS as well, albeit limited by the SATA interface to 500-odd megaybtes per second. With plenty of USB 3.0 ports, including two of the 10Gbps Gen2 variety (taking traditional USB plugs but supporting higher speeds), you could also add hard drives or basic SSDS externally.