THE CONCEPT

THESE BUILDS have been an interesting exercise in budgeting, that’s for sure. We usually work at the crazy end of the system-building spectrum here in the labs, and as we’ve mentioned in the past, it’s far easier to get expensive components in than more affordable gear. Which, although truly hysteria-inducing at times, makes working on a project like this far more satisfying.

That said, this isn’t the first time we’ve looked at such affordable rigs. Back in March 2017, we were given a $300 budget, and told to tackle a similar challenge, albeit with 8GB of DDR3, a 256GB SSD, and some terrible, terrible, terrible processors. No, seriously, just how far things have come in processing performance in the last year is staggering. But more on that later.

So, what was the idea behind these two projects? In short, to keep things simple. Build two systems with a suitable upgrade path, and plenty of grunt to drive some modern 1080p titles, at medium settings or so. And to do it without breaking the bank. As memory and GPU prices have skyrocketed over the last two years, the game has changed significantly when it comes to pricing up rigs like this, and that $300 budget that we once strived for is—today, at least—a complete non-starter.

Admittedly, we haven’t included the price of the OS with these machines, because we’re focusing more on the hardware, but you can pick up Linux for free, and an OEM copy of Windows 10 is pretty cheap nowadays. Anyway, now the waffle is out of the way, let’s break down just what went into this very special Intel build.