OVER PRICED?

OUR AIM WAS to piece together a machine for under $1,500, but we rolled in at $147 over this (although prices are in constant flux, so that may have changed by the time you read this). There are plenty of ways to stay under this budget, though, from halving the memory on offer to using a stock GTX 1660 Ti, as opposed to this overclocked version. The more enterprising among you may wish to give a Linux-based OS a shot – don’t let us tell you what to do (except for in the steps below, of course).

To store everything away, we’ve got a budget case from Phanteks, the Eclipse P300. Inside that, we’re throwing in an X470 Aorus Ultra Gaming motherboard from Gigabyte, supporting a Ryzen 5 2600 processor. Its six cores mean this PC will still be able to handle more demanding software, and like most Ryzens, the chip comes with its own AMD-branded Wraith Stealth cooler, enabling us to save a few of our precious gold coins in the pricing department. These coolers aren’t flashy, but they’re relatively efficient and – more importantly – compact, making them good for smaller builds like this.

That’s not all we’re plugging into this mobo; two sticks of G.Skill’s Flare X RAM give us 16GB of memory at 3,200MHz, plenty for the vast majority of games and applications. The GeForce GTX 1660 Ti is front and center, of course. There’s only a single storage drive in this build – an Adata Ultimate SU800. Packing half a terabyte of storage, this chunk of plastic and silicon is a great budget option, making it a good choice for OS booting, while still being capable of squirreling away plenty of those big games. Lastly, this build is powered by a Corsair CX450 PSU. There was no need to go flashy on the power supply – prices have jumped up a little lately, so sticking with something simple was the way to go.