BUILDING TO A TIGHT BUDGET

WITH THE PROCESSOR SELECTED, the rest of the component selection is simply a case of assembling budget-conscious hardware to make our chip of choice truly shine. The main component to focus on here is the RAM, because Ryzen APUs love a high-speed memory bus. Not only does the CPU get more bandwidth to play with, but the graphics side of things can strut its stuff so much faster because of it. This is why we grabbed the 8GB kit of Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4-3000 memory, which just so happens to be the most expensive component in this whole build. Yup, more expensive than the processor itself.

You obviously also need a decent motherboard to make the most of these two, and here we reached for MSI’s value-tastic MSI B350 PC Mate. For a budget board, it manages to pack in a lot of great features, including isolated audio circuitry, with separate layers for left and right channels, USB 3.1 Type-C, and support for M.2 drives at up to 32GB/s. Not that our budget extends to an M.2 drive, but the option is there. Which brings us nicely to the storage side of things: We’ve elected to use the same storage for the Intel and AMD builds, which is made up of a 120GB Kingston SSDNow UV400 and a 1TB Western Digital Caviar Blue drive. Giving plenty of storage for applications and data, as well as speedy storage for the operating system.

That leaves the last two components of our build: the chassis and the power supply. Zak was suitably impressed with the budgetconscious MasterBox Lite 5 from Cooler Master (see the full review on page 85), and while it’s not the cheapest box you can throw your machine in, it has plenty of great features that make building in it a good experience. The Corsair power supply, meanwhile, offers great value for money, at just $24 for this 450W model.