AMD’S BONKERS BUDGET BOX $300 PRICE TAG ACHIEVED

OUR AMD BUILD looks quite dainty compared to Intel’s behemoth. The microATX Core 1100 offers little room for cable management, though. We tucked a lot of the cables inside the 5.25-inch bay, while sticking the Kingston SSD to its side with double-sided tape.

We contemplated using AMD’s more price-aggressive and newer X4 845 quad-core CPU, but it lacked integrated graphics. So we opted for the three-year-old A87600. Still featuring a quad-core processor clocking up to 3.8GHz, it should be a meaty choice. However, we had trouble getting it to clock any higher than 1.9GHz with 50 percent utilization in most of our CPU-intensive benchmarks. It took several reinstalls of the chipset and some BIOS tinkering to get it to hit the mark, and even then consistency in other benchmarks failed on several occasions.

We were impressed with how well it ran in-game, though. Even with that ageing APU architecture, frame rates in Riseof theTomb Raider (on low settings at 728p) were impressively comfortable, nearing 30fps, demolishing Intel’s Iris HD 530 graphics. All of which bodes well for the low-end offerings coming up with Ryzen, too.

Simply buying a better graphics card and throwing a larger hard drive at it may not be the best upgrade choice. AMD’s single-core performance has always held it back and can lead to bottlenecks. It’s pricier, but for gaming we recommend investing in an A107890K for better single-core performance, on top of the 500GB HDD and GPU of your choice, bumping the upgrade price up to $300. If it’s a home theater you’re after, a low-end GPU might do you more favors, with an RX 460 2GB and 1TB HDD setting you back $140.