PC blueprints

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

We’re making quite a few changes this month. First (forgive us for not going down the list in order) we tweaked the RAM by a small amount, swapping from Patriot’s Viper Elite memory to the Viper 4 Blackout to kick the frequency up to 3,000MHz from 2,666MHz in the old build. Bigger changes came in the form of a new PSU, Thermaltake’s Smart 450W model, and a manufacturer change for the motherboard, sticking with the B450M format, but swapping to Gigabyte’s budget model. Everything else stuck around in terms of price; the Ryzen 5 2600 still comes with three free months of Xbox Game Pass, so snap that up.

Rejoice! The Asrock X570 Phantom Gaming 4 is finally no longer on sale, and a new contender has risen to claim the “cheapest X570 motherboard” crown. As usual there’s not much in it, though, with MSI and Asrock within a few dollars. It’s Gigabyte once again, though, with its X570 UD board – fairly similar to the outgoing board, really. We’re trading out our memory for G.Skill’s Aegis line, sticking with 16GB and 3,200MHz to keep our performance in line without letting the price rise. $10 is saved by switching to an MSI 5700 graphics card – one with a small but appreciated factory overclock, too. And, with SSD prices getting ridiculously low we found a very nice Adata drive for under a hundred dollars for 480GB.