SMASHING THROUGH A THERMALTAKE CHASSIS

LENGTH OF TIME: 1–2 HOURS LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY: MEDIUM

YOU KNOW WE MENTIONED how much management likes slapping a big number on the cover of the magazine? Well, you can see where this build went early on. Originally, it was based on a $799 budget, and although that’s certainly possible, it didn’t meet that perfect price to performance ratio we wanted to achieve, so after a hell of a lot of tweaking and nagging, we managed to bump that figure up to $999.

Actually, it came to a bit more than that initially, with the final price tag at $1,025, but checking prices just before going to press saw it slip back down to our initial goal. Spot on it in fact. You can probably build for less anyway, especially if you already have some form of Windows license, and if you’re upgrading or migrating a system, simply entering the key upon installation, or logging in to your account and authorizing the edition of Windows, will happily authenticate the system, and give you full access to all of those Windows features we love. So, the total hardware cost is just $899.

We could have saved a bit of cash here and there, particularly with the storage (Samsung’s 860 Evo SSD is now $70 for a 500GB version), but on the whole, we’re pretty happy with how the whole thing turned out. It’ll be pretty nifty at 1080p gaming, and our processor of choice, the Ryzen 5 2600, is actually the best value processor we’ve seen to date.

DECISIONS, DECISIONS

From the outset, we knew we wanted to roll with a Ryzen 5 2600, and either a Vega 56 (surprisingly affordable nowadays) or an RX 590. Reason being that both cards represent a pretty strong value proposition these days, and as we hadn’t had a good look at Vega 56 for some time, we thought it might have been worth a second try.

After much debate, we finally settled on the RX 590, because it pulled us below the $999 mark, and still provided us with solid frame rates at 1080p. 16GB of RAM seemed like a sensible decision, too—8GB setups seem to have gone the way of the dodo, and with ever expansive Chrome footprints and a myriad other apps sucking up memory nowadays, having more capacity should make the world of difference. Pairing that capacity with a high frequency should also help keep our Ryzen sample running at full tilt.

The last things we had to consider were the case and the SSD. We would have liked to have featured Fractal Design’s Meshify C Compact for this build, but, we just couldn’t get it in time, unfortunately, so we chose the Thermaltake Level 20 VT instead. Although visually striking, it is a bit of an anomaly, thanks to its layout. If we were to redo this build, either Fractal’s Meshify C Compact or our favorite mATX case from NZXT (the H400i) would be our preferred choice.