THE BUILDS
Approximate Price: $662
WHAT A PRICE DROP THIS TIME AROUND! This issue enlightened us about one key tidbit of information when it comes to system building: In this day and age of supercharged IPC performance, the desire for a more substantial processor on a base system like this is null and void. As long as your GPU has the necessary heft, and you’re buying a modern CPU, you’re not likely to encounter any bottlenecks. This is where the Pentium G4600 comes in. At $90, it’s a walletpleasing $115 cheaper than the Core i5 we recommended in last month’s issue—and, honestly, you won’t lose a lot by jumping ship. And if you’re just looking for a standard office PC, you can strip out the GPU, swap out the SSD for a 120GB variant, along with a 500GB HDD, and that’ll take this already paltry figure all the way down to an outstanding $438—not including a copy of Windows 10, of course (which we talk about on page 92).
Approximate Price: $1,425
KABY LAKE COMETH, and although it seems to have added very little to overall performance, it’s difficult to argue with a new chipset and slightly better performance for the same price. This month, we decided to piece together something of a themed build. This checks all those clichéd red and black boxes, the color scheme that’s become synonymous with gamers. We also decided to change a few things around in an attempt to bring the storage up to modern-day standards—or at least, more modern. Dropping Samsung’s 850 Evo 250GB SSD, we went with Intel’s 600p M.2 PCIe SSD instead. At only $3 more, this budget offering tops out at nearly 1,600MB/s sequential reads for snappy program load times. Trying to scrape back a bit of cash, we dropped the WD Black drive for a Blue variant instead, saving us a sweet $25, and we also went for an ever so slightly cheaper kit of DDR4.
Approximate Price: $2,769
THIS MONTH HAS SEEN the biggest changes ever hit to our Turbo build. We decided it was time we appeased the small form factor gods by opting for this classy yet powerful microATX system. The decision came about primarily because of the phenomenal saving we could achieve on the EVGA X99 Micro 2. At $183, it’s over $40 cheaper than the MSI X99A SLI Plus from last issue, yet it still provides us with all the connectivity and power we were utilizing anyway. Because of this, we had to swap out the chassis to something more fitting—Fractal Design’s Define Mini C Windowed edition—shaving off another $82, and then managed even greater savings by swapping from MSI’s GTX 1080 Gaming X to EVGA’s SC Gaming ACX, which propped us up with another $60 on top. This meant we could plump for some fancier accessories elsewhere, and still save a boatload. We bumped up the cooler to the stunningly beautiful NZXT Kraken X52 AIO, and could even afford to drop another $30 on Corsair’s legendary Dominator Platinums. We also saw a price drop of $84 on Samsung’s 960 Pro 1TB. What this all adds up to, even with the splurge on prettier cooling and memory, is a saving of $186 over last issue. Pump that into the processor, and you could grab the slightly better specced Core i7-6850K to net an additional 12 PCIe lanes and a 0.2GHz core clock increase at stock. However, we’d advise you to just grab a custom cable kit and some better fans instead.