Blueprint

The APC team’s picks for a part-by-part perfect PC build to suit your budget. Budget Mid-range

No changes. There’s been very minor price drops this issue in our budget build, making the same box a barely worth metioning $3 cheaper. There’s little we’d change here: The Ryzen 3 1200, although last-gen, is a strong entry-level processor, and the AB320M-DGS with a BIOS upgrade will happily support any Ryzen 2 part, if you’re interested at a later date. The one thing we’re not super-happy with is the GPU. Gigabyte makes some mighty fine cards, but Nvidia’s GTX 1050 GPU is just not powerful enough for our 1080p aspirations. The difference between that and the GTX 1060 3GB is staggering, and worth the extra $60–$80 if you can stretch that far. If gaming isn’t your thing, you could forsake the GPU, and replace the Ryzen 3 1200 with a Ryzen 3 2200G. Its integrated graphics will be able to drive your everyday content at 1080p just fine. Just bear in mind you’ll struggle with more demanding graphical tasks. No changes to the mid-range, either. Intel may be stretching its legs in this market segment, but it just doesn’t hold that value position right now, and that’s a biggy for us. We’ve always been about maximum power—it can be as expensive as you like, but if it’s not good value at that price, it’s time to throw it out. We’re still waiting to see a 9th-gen Core i5 sample from Intel, so for the time being, we’re sticking with our Ryzen 7 2700. It’s a fantastic processor, especially for those into overclocking, and AMD’s Ryzen Master software makes the job a cinch, and is something we regularly turn to if we can’t be bothered to keep booting back into the BIOS. The GTX 1070 Ti also provides a fantastic amount of performance for the price still—expect an easy 60fps at 1440p across most titles. It’s a little like a refined GTX 1080, just using lower-spec memory, and with a few more CUDA cores disabled.

“The 2970WX does take some tweaking to get it running right; it doesn’t have immediate plug and play capability, and that’s a big deal for us. ”

It looks like we don’t have any major changes to our Turbo build this issue, either. The ones we have tweaked – PSU, GPU, and RAM – are all just variants of ones we had last issue. We’ve opted for a $10 more expensive Corsair RM power supply, the white variant, as it comes with pre-sleeved white cables; a 32GB kit of RGB Trident Z memory at 3200MHz, as opposed to last issue’s 3000MHz (no longer available at that price); and the RTX 2080 has transformed into a Gigabyte variant, again with a white color combo to match the PSU, cables, memory (if configured), and mobo.

There’s a few obvious changes we could have gone for. The 24-core Threadripper 2970WX, for instance, would be an obvious contender, but because it’s more of a workstation part, as opposed to a gaming or mainstream part, we’re reluctant to recommend it, because these builds are designed around that all-arounder principle. The 2970WX does take some tweaking to get it running right; it doesn’t have immediate plug and play capability, and that’s a big deal for us. Storage is pretty strong here, though, as is the cooling. One thing we would recommend on that front is potentially investing in a bit of extra case fan cooling, because both the RTX 2080 and the 2950X can punch out some serious heat. In hotter parts of the country, that may be a necessity.