Market Watch
Mark Williams assesses a sampling of PC systems available this month.
Umart Pluto Ryzen3 1050 TI Gaming PC 2018 V4 $999 | TINYURL.COM/Y7BAEW5C
Fortnite, CS:GO, Rocket League and League of Legends. Are these but some of the games you’re looking to play on a budget? Then this system is right up your alley.
Strictly for 1080p gaming, this system will provide a lot of fun for the money. The CPU is AMD’s lowest Ryzen CPU on offer currently, but for undemanding games this quad core is more than enough to power the paired GTX 1050 Ti graphics card, which is nicely suited to these types of titles at 1080p resolutions.
The 8GB of system RAM is standard fare, but the nice touch is the 500GB SDD. Skipping a HDD all together to have the largest capacity SSD possible for the budget is really nice.
KEY SPECS: CPU: AMD Ryzen 3 2200G, Cooler: OEM, Motherboard: Asus Prime B450M-K, Graphics: Asus Phoenix GeForce GTX 1050 TI 4GB GDDR5, Memory: Team Elite DDR4 2400MHz 8GB, Storage: Samsung 500GB SSD 860 EVO, Power Supply: 550W, Case: Casecom TZ-39 ATX
JW Computers GMR X5000-i792080TI $4,999 | TINYURL.COM/YC5BVNX9
Looking for the best possible gaming PC available? This is it. While the CPU might not be Intel’s highest end consumer i9 part, this octo-core CPU actually performs better for gaming in most benchmarks. The 16GB of RAM is perfect, too. Sure, 32GB is possible, but is largely unnecessary for gaming for the foreseeable future.
The graphics card is the best possible option available currently too. 4K, VR, multi-monitor; you name it this will run it. Storage has also been nicely selected. A big SSD for the OS, programs and some games, with a well-sized 3TB HDD for extra storage. This system is about as perfect as it gets without wasting money.
KEY SPECS: CPU: Intel Core i7-9700K, Cooler: Cooler Master MasterLiquid ML360R, Motherboard: Asus ROG STRIX Z390-F GAMING, Graphics: ASUS Dual RTX 2080 Ti Advanced Edition 11GB, Memory: Adata XPG 16GB DDR4 3000Mhz RGB, Storage: ADATA 512GB XPG SX6000 SSD, Seagate 3TB BarraCuda HDD, Power Supply: Inwin 750W, Case: Inwin 307
PC Case Gear Omen 580 Gaming System $1,299 | TINYURL.COM/YCRZ7MV6
Looking for a great bang for your buck deal? Look no further. This system has a nice lower midrange feel to it. A six-core 12-thread processor is sufficient for any modern game and paired with a Radeon RX 580 means 1080p will be buttery smooth and even 1440p gaming will be quite a reasonable ask.
The 4GB on the graphics card is the main limiting factor for high resolution textures at 1440p and general performance at higher resolutions.
A nice SSD and HDD combo have mass storage well covered. And all housed in a chassis with internal lighting set to the ever popular red and black combination this’ll look the part anywhere.
KEY SPECS: CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 2600, Cooler: OEM, Motherboard: Asus Prime B350M-A, Graphics: Asus Radeon RX 580 Dual Gaming OC 4GB, Memory: Team T-Force Dark 3000MHz 8GB DDR4, Storage: Kingston SSDNow A400 240GB SSD, Seagate Barracuda 1TB HDD, Power Supply: Be Quiet! Pure Power 10 500W, Case: Phanteks Eclipse P300
PLE Computers Home Ryzen APU Force $809 | TINYURL.COM/YCPJMMNW
AMD’s APUs make for a solid option at the low end of the market. The Ryzen 5 2400G is a quad-core eight-thread CPU with what is essentially an RX 550 or GT 1030 already integrated, meaning gaming at 1080p should be possible in most games depending on graphical detail options chosen. Impressive for an integrated GPU!
While the processor is great for those on a budget, some other areas of this system are quite lacklustre. The primary two culprits being system memory and mass storage. Running a system solely on a hard drive in 2018 is basically a sin these days. The capacity is nice, but the system responsiveness hit really isn’t worth it. The 4GB of system RAM is bare minimum too for Windows 10 and anything but basic programs.
If you’re eyeballing this system, the $50 upgrade to the 480GB SSD option and $74 option for 8GB total RAM would be money extremely well spent.
KEY SPECS: CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 2400G, Cooler: OEM, Motherboard: Asus Prime A320M-E, Graphics: Onboard (RX Vega 11), Memory: GeIL 4GB Single DDR4 Pristine C16 2400MHz, Storage: WD Blue 1TB HDD, Power Supply: eVGA BV Series 450W, Case: Deepcool Tesseract Black/Red Mid Tower