Blueprint
The APC team’s picks for a part-by-part perfect PC build to suit your budget.
Last month we gave this machine a major shake-up, and it’s performing well, so no need for any radical changes this month. In fact, there’s only one change, and that’s due to the Kingston SSD we used last month being difficult to find in shops. So instead, we’ve turned to Adata, and its SU650. Not exactly a performance offering, but it’s incredibly affordable for a 120GB boot drive, and it’s still faster than a traditional spinning drive. With only one hardware change, you’d expect the overall price to remain largely the same, but the new Adata SSD we’ve popped in here is $21 more than the Kingston A400 120GB from last month, which pushes the overall cost just north of $800. With second-gen Ryzen chips now doing the rounds, we are expecting a price drop on the AMD Ryzen 3 1200 any time now. At the time of writing it’s holding steady at the same $145 it was last month, but keep an eye out, it’s still a great low-cost CPU, and well worth being the basis of a budget system.
The specification for our mid-range machine has remained stable this issue as well, with the only change being the graphics card, as we found the MSI card for $10 less than the Zotac we used last issue. At the time of writing, the GeForce RTX 2070 is imminent, but we’re not sure how it’ll perform in ray tracing and DLSS titles, so we will hold fire on recommending it for now. Of all the RTX cards, this is the one that has the most sensible pricing, so it’s worth watching this space. As with our budget build, there’s little else that has seen a price drop over last month’s system, and once again, it’s the AMD processor that we expect to soon see fall in price. The Ryzen 7 2700 is a second-generation Ryzen CPU, though, so that price drop may just be AMD trying to spoil the launch of Intel’s 9000-series chips. It will be interesting to see whether the Core i5-9600 can throw a monkey wrench in AMD’s plans next issue.
“You could save a little going with a cheaper case, provided you choose something that fits in a 240mm AIO cooler – which will be almost anything on the market. ”
The 2950X in this “Turbo” build represents impressive value for money, so we see no need to swap it out yet. If you’re looking for serious multithreaded performance, you’re going to be pushed to come up with anything that can beat the 16-core, 32-threaded monster we have here. We did list the price incorrectly last month, though; apologies for that.
As ever, there are bargains to be had on processor, motherboard, and RAM bundles, which are worth checking out at the time of purchase. You could save a little going with a cheaper case, provided you choose something that fits in a 240mm AIO cooler – which will be almost anything on the market.
The big change here is the inclusion of the GeForce RTX 2080, which costs considerably more than the GTX 1080 Ti we had last month, and is something of a contentious addition, even in the office. The team is split evenly between sticking with the 1080 Ti for now, and saving a big chunk of cash, and those backing the potential of what RTX may bring. Ultimately, it’s your call. We’re listing the Gigabyte Gaming OC card here because it’s the cheapest we could find that still has respectable cooling. Asus offer an RTX 2080 Turbo for the same price, but it uses a cooler that’s very similar to the last gen reference card and only has a single fan, so the Gigabyte gets the nod this issue.