INTEL’S STEAL OF A SYSTEM COULD HAVE BEEN CHEAPER

WHEN IT CAME to building this PC, the most important decisions revolved around how best to attempt the cable management, and what limited cooling you could achieve with the included fans.

Overall setup was a cakewalk. A quick installation of Gigabyte’s chipset and motherboard drivers gave us a rig that ran smoothly with little issue. Getting the games up and running was trickier, with most erroring on first attempt. We found we had to directly install the VGA driver from Gigabyte’s site, something we usually leave to Windows Update, then force a DirectX install on top of that.

Choosing which game to benchmark was tricky, as we didn’t meet the minimum spec for a lot of them. Metro2033 was our first attempt, but upon successive crashes, we caved in and opted for an old favorite, Riseof theTomb Raider (at the lowest settings and 1366x768). Impressively, on integrated graphics we managed an almost watchable 11fps in-game. Although that doesn’t sound like much, you could play some of the older classics at lower resolutions without too much of an issue.

In its current state, the Intel machine breaks our $300 budget by 41 bucks. It would’ve been possible to drop that price simply by shrinking the SSD and using a cheaper EVGA PSU, but we advise sticking with a named brand in case of power surges. That aside, for day-to-day office use, it’s exceptionally good value for money. If you were looking at upgrading in the long term, for gaming we suggest grabbing a 500GB HDD and potentially a GTX 1050 or RX 470, for around $143 in total. For a home theater machine, simply grab yourself a 1TB HDD for around $50, and you’d be on to a winner.