THE BUDGET BUSTER
GET HANDS-ON AND BUILD YOUR OWN SUPER-CHEAP SYSTEM
SO THE CONCEPT around this is pretty simple—we just love the idea behind the Core i3-10100. When this editor first joined the tech industry, the crème de la crème of desktop processors was whatever quadcore, Hyper-Threaded chip Intel had to offer at the time. That was the end goal. Ryzen wasn’t yet a thing, and anything more than four cores was relegated to the world of HEDT, which was a bit more inaccessible. Motherboards were more expensive, and memory costs immediately shot up whenever you mentioned the phrase “quad-channel.”
Fast forward to 2020, and with the launch of Intel’s latest chips, this little beauty fell into our lap. Well, it was a special request we put in with Intel really, because bizarrely most agencies, PRs, publications, and tech journo outlets don’t spend a lot of time on the small stuff—which is a shame, because it’s fascinating to see how an Intel Core i9-10900K or Ryzen 9 5950X gets filtered down into the lower specced parts, and how they perform in contrast. Many of you will remember that Christian built a solid “office” PC back in our Holiday edition that featured this chip. But this was in a lot of ways quite gluttonous: the price tag was just a bit too high, so it got us thinking; “What is the cheapest PC you can build with this processor at its heart?”
This is what we ended up with. It took a few months to get the parts together, mostly because, again, companies don’t like showcasing their budget ranges, but after some nagging of management, and a few expense forms, we managed to get everything together that we needed to make this little beauty come to life.
Now, you can make this build even cheaper. Instead of that Core i3-10100 you could pick up an Intel Pentium Gold G6400 for $64, swap the memory out for the G.Skill Aegis kit, go for the EVGA 450 BR power supply we recommended, and a Rosewill FBM01 MicroATX tower for $25, and build yourself a rig for just $282.95. However, you would be cutting your core and thread count in half by doing so, and crippling your memory and CPU speeds in the process, which is not so good.
So with that all wrapped up, let’s get to building this magnificent wee beauty, shall we?
STRIP AWAY
WHEN IT COMES to building a system for the first time, it doesn’t matter if you’re a 20-year veteran, or an absolute beginner; the first thing you should always do is start with the case itself. Study it, analyze it, and then carefully remove the panels and place them in the case box, in between the Styrofoam packaging. This way you can ensure that you don’t damage or scratch them, and you won’t lose them either.
With the SPEC-05, this is a simple process. The front pops off from the bottom (carefully pull away from the bottom toward you), the rear panel is held on by two thumb screws (of the non-retainable variety, so pop these in a bowl, or somewhere you won’t lose them), and then the acrylic windowed panel rather bizarrely comes off with hex key screws. After that you can remove the hard drive caddies, and put the small box of accessories out the way. Once that’s all done your case should look like ours here.
THERMAL PASTE TIME
IF YOU’RE building this stock, you can jump to the fourth step, as the stock cooler should have some preapplied thermal paste on the bottom of it. In our case, we’re not so lucky, so we’ve applied non-conductive Noctua paste ourselves. To do this, squeeze a splodge of the stuff into the middle of the processor like we’ve done below. Make sure it’s at least the size of a grain of rice. You can add more—it won’t affect performance in any meaningful way, but it does mean if you remove the cooler later, you may have some mess to clean up. Just make sure your paste is non-conductive, and that you meet the minimum amount we recommend.
This varies according to the processor. HEDT processors require a line or star of paste, and AMD’s Ryzen chips require a little extra too.
PROCESSOR INSTALL
IT’S TIME TO prep the mobo. You can do this inside the chassis, but we recommend doing it outside the case first, so you can test the system before installing it, and if anything fails to function properly, it’s a far easier job to disassemble the whole thing, get it boxed up and shipped back to the supplier or manufacturer.
We’ve begun by installing the processor. This can be a bit sketchy with Intel, as the socket has pins in it that can be bent or broken. And if you bend them, not only will the system not boot, but you’ll likely void the warranty too. To install the processor, lift up the retention arm, raise the bracket (leaving the plastic cover on), then carefully line your processor up with the socket, paying attention to the gold triangle on the bottom-left corner of the processor, and the socket, then gently lower it into place. Position the bracket down over the chip, under the Torx screw, and resecure it with the retention arm. The plastic cover should pop off.
COOL BEANS
NOW IT’S TIME to install the Intel stock cooler. If you’ve installed one of these before, we’ll just say that nothing’s changed with the LGA 1200. There’s no backplate required, and no adjustments that need to be made. Make sure all four mounting pegs have the little arrow facing backward. Line the cooler up with the holes in the mobo, and carefully push it down until it clicks into position on each of the four corners.
Don’t do what we did and assume you then have to turn those four pegs to lock them in place as the arrow suggests—weirdly that unlocked the cooler for us, so we had to remount it again. Then, unhook the fan cable from its mounts on the cooler, and plug it into the CPU fan header on the mobo. In our case we’ve tied it into a little knot so it’s a bit smaller.
MEMORY MOMENTS
WITH THE COOLER installed and the motherboard still outside the chassis, it’s time to install the memory. Now, if you have a motherboard with four slots of memory, double-check with the motherboard manual which slots you should populate first. It’ll likely be every other slot, but some motherboards prefer one set of slots to be occupied before the other.
In our case, as we only have two DIMM slots, we’re installing our memory straight in. Lift up the tabs at either end of the slot, then carefully align your DDR4 memory so that the notches fit together. Each stick of memory and DIMM slot has a notch in it, so you can only install a stick a certain way. It’s not the end of the world if you try installing it the wrong way—once you realize it’s not sliding in, just remove it, spin it round, and install it again.
SNEAKY CABLES
SO HERE’S THE workaround. We’ve installed the motherboard. To do that, install the additional standoffs in their Micro-ATX positions included in the case accessory box—these are denoted on the chassis with an imprinted M-ATX text. Place your rear I/O shield in the case (making sure to bend the protector pins up and out the way of the ports), then place your motherboard in, lining the ports up, and secure it with screws when it’s over the standoffs.
However, before that final step, we’ve run the CPU power cable round to the back of the motherboard tray, up through the cutout that usually gives access to the CPU backplate, then underneath the motherboard, and popped it out the top. Then it’s just a case of plugging it into the CPU power. This keeps the rig looking clean and tidy, and doesn’t hinder or cause any problems elsewhere. With that done, we’ve installed the 24-pin.
PSU CONSIDERATIONS
SO HERE’S AN interesting step that we didn’t originally intend to do. More often than not we always leave PSU installation until the very end—it’s sort of the last piece of the puzzle in terms of cable routing and getting everything installed, and most chassis these days (at least the ones we use) have more than ample cable management to allow that to happen.
We noticed, however, that the SPEC-05 doesn’t have cable cutouts at the top of the chassis to run the eightpin CPU power through, so we’d have to trail it up to the power port, or run it along the top of the motherboard, both of which look grim. There’s a nifty workaround, but we’ve got to install the power supply first to do it. Slot it in to place, then secure it with the thumbscrews provided with the PSU. In any other rig we’d recommend installing the power supply with the fan facing down, but we’ve installed it facing up to act as an exhaust.
SSD IDEAS
LAST BUT NOT least, our SSD. Traditionally you’re meant to install this in the back of the case in the motherboard tray, but we’ve decided to install it in the front—it’s a nice feature to highlight, and we’ve got an acrylic windowed panel, so why not? Line it up with the cutouts, and secure it with four screws from the rear. Then install one SATA power cable (from the power supply), and one SATA data cable (from the mobo box). We’ve gone with a right-angled data cable to make the mobo look cleaner, but it’s finicky to get in the SSD, as that cutout is a little too small for installing the cable.
Once the SSD is in, secure, and powered on, it’s time to wrap up the rest of the cabling. Refer to the mobo manual for your front-panel connections for power, reset and power LED. Then install your USB 2.0 and USB 3.1 headers, and that final three-pin front intake fan, and you’ll be good to go.
AND THERE you have it, our attempt at building the best-value super-budget PC possible today. And hopefully by the time you read this, it hasn’t skyrocketed in price to $1,800 or something ridiculous.
Nonetheless, we’re quite proud of this build—it looks exceptionally clean from a custom PC perspective, even though we’re using very budgetoriented parts, and managing to keep the cables tidy and out of the way has been a relatively painless process. Mounting the SSD in reverse so that it’s facing toward the window looks pretty snazzy, and getting the CPU power cable behind the motherboard looks epic. Even though the board itself is only a Micro-ATX affair, all in all the system doesn’t look empty— in fact it’s nice to see Corsair include cable cutouts specifically for those using Micro-ATX boards in this case.
The build itself was relatively seamless. We didn’t come across any major hurdles, and the biggest bugbear stemmed from the way that acrylic panel is held in place. It has screws securing it to the case, but they require a hex key to undo, which is a bit annoying, especially if you don’t have a set, and there doesn’t seem to be any included with the accessories box (maybe we missed it).
Performance is right where we expected it to be. The i3-10100 does well, scoring high in Cinebench, and overall performs okay ( yes that is actually a high score) in our gaming benchmarks. Throw a few indie games at this thing on low to medium settings at 1080p, and you can easily achieve 20-30fps. It blisters through web apps and office applications, and that’s the real take-away from this kind of machine. One thing we are curious about is how this will function if we throw in an Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti or something similar. We’re still holding out for those at the moment, but once we get one in the
MaximumPC offices, we’ll throw it in this beauty and figure out how far we can push it with a (hopefully one day) affordable upgrade.
So in hindsight, what would we upgrade or change? Well, the SSD. 240GB is fine for what this rig is intended to do (in fact you could probably get away with 120GB), but those write speeds leave a lot to be desired. It’s not noticeable now, but throw in that extra GPU and a game or two, and the extra write space would be much appreciated. On top of that, cooling is just, okay. The chip sits around the 86 C mark under load in a 23 C office. It could be much better— something extra like a Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO would placate us.
That said, this thing is a fine little machine. It kicks some serious butt where it counts with its price tag. Throw this together for a relative or your technophobic friends and it’ll serve them well for years.