READY FOR ACTION

GETTING THIS BUILD running was unexpectedly tricky. Gigabyte motherboards can be capricious, and this X470 was no exception; upon loading Windows and investigating, we found that our 3,200MT/s RAM was running at just 2,400MT/s. Cue a venture into the BIOS setup, where we struggled to locate anything that would help—bizarrely, though, upon restarting, the memory was running at full speed, despite us not changing any settings. Sometimes, jumping into the BIOS is all that’s needed.

The lack of a proper M.2 drive in this build means it’s not the fastest thing imaginable when it comes to storage bandwidth, although the Adata SU800 is a reliable piece of hardware that won’t demand replacing anytime soon—unless we decide to upgrade to a M.2 drive, the main thing we’d like to change about this build. That’ll drive up the price of this PC significantly, but serious gamers might want faster load times. Bear in mind that this build only has enough PCIe lanes for one M.2 SSD—if you want to fit yours in the secondary M.2 slot, you need to change which port is prioritized in the BIOS.

For 1080p gaming, the 1660 Ti is a budget-friendly beast, powering through our benchmark tests, and performing well for online gaming. This build isn’t going to be blasting 4K-quality rendering out, but it’s efficient and quiet. While it’s not an RTX GPU, a recent update made ray tracing available on this and the previous generation of GTX graphics cards—however, the trade-off in frame rate isn’t even close to worth it.

The Eclipse P300 is great to work in; compact, well designed, and minimalistic, but with enough space to fit bulkier internal builds than this. Were we to keep sprucing this build up, we’d likely opt to drop a third 120mm Phanteks fan in the front, and the P300 also comes with a small integrated RGB light unit on the glass-paneled side. For those looking for a gaudier display, the case can be fitted with Phanteks RGB lightstrips, or connected to a compatible motherboard with an RGB adapter for a bit of extra cash.

The glass side panel is great for showing off your build. There’s plenty of space for cable management behind and beneath the motherboard, too, so it’s not difficult to keep things tidy. We didn’t use them in this build, but the case has two HDD brackets at the front, should you desire extra storage. There isn’t much else we’d like to change— perhaps with a bit more cash, we’d have sprung for a more powerful CPU cooler, but the included AMD one worked just fine.

AMD’s own Wraith coolers 1 come packaged with most CPUs. These are pretty small affairs, but they do the job well enough, and save you a few bucks. As you might have guessed, we’ve got quite a surplus of them in the office. The mounting plate is solid 2 metal—no rubberized slots to feed cables through here. Fitting the bulkier power cables through these holes proved a bit of a squeeze, so be careful not to damage them. MSI’s GTX 1660 Ti Gaming X 3 is a sweet-looking piece of gear that produces some decent graphics. More budget-friendly options are available, but you’ll miss out on a factory overclock if you go down that route.