$1,100 RYZEN BUILD

Time for AMD to get its game on

LENGTH OF TIME: 1–2 HOURS LEVEL L OF DIFFICULTY: EASY

THE CONCEPT

WE HAVE a bad habit of focusing too much on the high end, and not enough on what really matters. Say what you like, but the halo products aren’t what make or break a company. And although manufacturers make their biggest margins on the most expensive components, it’s the mid-range and budget sections of the spectrum that secure the most market share. Which is why, more often than not, they’re the more interesting products. Ask any of our team which processor interested them the most over the last two years, and the answer almost always falls down to either the Pentium G4560 or the Ryzen 3 1200.

Anyone can spec out a high-end, pixelcrushing, calculation-solving monster. But it takes a true master to get the most out of a tighter budget. Every dollar counts—far more so than with the inefficient price-hiked parts of the high-end machines. And that’s what we wanted to look at this time around. The concept was simple: Take a $1,100 budget, pick mid-range components, and come out with a solid, fun, and fast 1080p gaming machine, using AMD parts for the GPU and CPU.

The Ryzen 3 1300X was the base for this build. After numerous high-priced systems, it was nice to get a little more down to earth with a budget part, a stock cooler, and some neat money-saving ideas, without losing out on the speed we associate with systems that can cost twice the price of this one.

CHOICES, CHOICES

WE’VE BEEN ITCHING TO TRY out this case for a while. Phanteks’ P300 case is an astonishing achievement of budget-busting ingenuity. Featuring tempered glass, RGB LEDs, a sophisticated internal chassis design, PSU cover, dust filters, room for 280mm AIOs, and extensive storage support, this beautifully crafted case comes in at just $64. Honestly, it’s almost impossible for us to recommend any other chassis at this price point right now. Regardless of your budget, it’s simply too good.

As we said, we decided to go with the Ryzen 3 1300X as our base; a quad-core part, with enough grunt to pump through AAA titles with ease, especially at that 60fps sweet spot. On top of that, we added Gigabyte’s Aorus Radeon RX 570 refresh. With higher clock speeds and 4GB of VRAM, it’ll make quick work of any of our 1080p titles, and look pretty flashy while doing it. Its compact size also helps with the build, because it doesn’t look as though we’ll run into any clearance issues with it.

Amazingly, under full load, this system should draw an estimated 326W from the wall at most, so we opted for a nonmodular 500W Bronze PSU from Corsair. Although we don’t intend to overclock our Ryzen chip, having the extra headroom is useful in case we change our minds later down the line, and also helps if we ever decide to upgrade to a beefier GPU.

For storage, we stuck with that old staple of the modern system: a 120GB SSD for the OS and a 1TB-plus (in our case, 2TB) HDD for everything else. Samsung’s 120GB 750 Evo comes in at a reasonable $78, and provides a perfect platform for this build, while the WD Black is more than enough for our gaming needs.