Blueprint

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

Budget

Every month, we look through the ingredients for our budget build and find certain elements that simply don’t need changing. Asrock’s B450M R4.0 motherboard remains one of the best-value AM4-socket motherboards on the market, and the classic 120GB Crucial BX500 is still extremely cheap. With the release of the GTX 1660 Super, it’s an obvious upgrade choice; just $10 more than our previous standard GTX 1660, while bringing 10–15 percent better performance. With a few other small savings, we’ve been able to significantly improve the graphical performance of this machine while only raising the price by $10.

Mid-range

We had a few changes to make to our mid-range build this month, although most of them were quite minor. The Sapphire RX 5700 rose a little while Gigabyte’s offering dropped a little in price, so we’ve switched. With the cash we saved across this build, we opted to improve things somewhat by swapping out the 250GB SSD for a larger 500GB model of the Samsung 970 Evo Plus. This cost just $10 more. Double the M.2 storage on our primary drive will make this build even better for gaming, with more space to store your games for improved load times via the speedy connection of PCIe 3.0. Our previous EVGA PSU is now hard to find, so we’ve switched to a far more common and just as cheap Silverstone 500W unit.

“Like an ailing furniture store being beaten into submission by online sales, Asrock’s sale price for this motherboard seems to get a bit lower every time the sale is supposed to end. ”

Turbo

The X399 Phantom Gaming 6 is on sale again! Like an ailing furniture store being beaten into submission by online sales, Asrock’s sale price for this motherboard seems to get a bit lower every time the sale is supposed to end. A quick switch in cooler from 240mm to a 360mm model – more specifically, the MasterLiquid ML360 from Cooler Master – gives us improved cooling for our Threadripper 2950X CPU, and costs only $10 more. We’ve also swapped out the PSU for the Corsair RM850, keeping our wattage the same.

With those savings in place, we turned our aim to a significant upgrade elsewhere. We’re making a big change, then: upgrading our GPU to the RTX 2080 Super Ventus OC from MSI. This will take our price up a fair bit, but we can live with that. The change will bring this machine from a high-end 1440p system to a PC capable of proper 4K ultra gaming. It also makes ray tracing a much more viable prospect in triple-A titles, if flashy unsettlingly realistic graphics are what you’re after. If that’s not your bag, but this system still appeals, the RTX 2070 Super is still an awesome GPU, don’t get us wrong – we just felt it was time for a change.