THE CONCEPT

THE IDEA BEHIND our budget builds is simple enough—construct the most affordable machine possible for the smallest pile of cash. We’re not utter masochists, though, so while it is possible to build a machine even cheaper than we have here, there are some quality-of-life choices that we see as a bare minimum. We won’t, for instance, touch nonbrand hardware, because we’ve been down that road before, and in our experience, such cornercutting never ends well—especially when it comes to cases and power supplies. But it does mean that even before we start, there are potentially further savings to be made. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here; let’s get back to the concept….

What makes this budget build possible is AMD’s new Raven Ridge APUs, specifically the Ryzen 3 2200G. Here is an APU that packs a semi-decent graphics processing unit alongside a quad-core chip for just $100. That it also happens to net you a decent little air cooler as well is just more reason to be impressed by the crazy value for money on offer. It doesn’t take much more hardware to turn that most budget of AMD chips into a useful system.

So, what can you do with a modern AMD APU? Pretty much anything you want, bar high-end gaming. It’ll handle older games with only the subtlest of tweaking, and even give newer games a good try. Those four cores mean it can handle processor-intensive tasks well enough, but if you’re looking for workstation levels of performance from a budget chip, we’ve got some bad news: you still get what you pay for, and for serious power, you’re going to have eye up the higher echelons of the Ryzen stack (and cough up for a graphics card).