SO, WHAT DID $600 GET US?

WE’VE MADE IT TO the finish line of this budget-end rig. Right from the offset, we knew this was going to be a good-looking machine, even though we’d set ourselves a strict price bracket within which to work. Much of that is down to the NZXT H510 Flow case that houses our machine. With its sharp lines and better airflow from a revised front panel, it’s great value for money and a big improvement from the previous H510 case. For under $100, it’s a great case that brings the looks of your build bang up to date.

Our chip is a promising component—a mid-range Intel Core i5 CPU for under $150 is still a good and solid brain with plenty of potential performance, despite dating back to the Comet Lake lineup. Unfortunately, our SSD isn’t the strongest and if we could do this build over again, we’d try to grab a faster M.2 drive to boost those read and write times. The 480GB capacity should be enough, but we know that can disappear in no time, and slotting a 1TB drive in here would have been ideal.

With no dedicated GPU to help us out, we weren’t expecting miracles. You can see from the benchmarks that these scores aren’t especially comforting. Of course, on our gaming benchmarks, we’re running at 1080p with max settings. In reality, you are more likely to be playing on low to medium settings to get a higher and playable frame rate, but it’s always good to see what systems will push out when they’re stretched.

What we can say is that, compared with our $400 build, spending an extra $200 is worth it for the extra gaming performance. Moving from the i3-10100 to the i5-10400 gave us two more cores

and four more threads to play with and the extra 8GB and 200MHz from our RAM certainly makes things smoother. For dayto-day requirements, this build should have more than enough performance to carry you through these tasks. On the other hand, it goes without saying we wouldn’t recommend rendering an 8K video on this system.

Though it’s a solid machine, it would benefit from the help of a dedicated GPU to get those frames higher—but that’s where our budget constraints start to kick in. If we‘d introduced a GPU into this rig, then we’d also need an AIO to keep things nice and cool. Even adding a reasonablypriced unit, such as a GTX 1050 Ti, would add near enough 50 percent extra on top of the original budget.

For a price of $900, you could take an alternative route down the gaming laptop line and find something just as capable with the added benefit of portability. Of course, our build has future-proofing in mind, with the opportunity to adapt and upgrade, but this alternative is definitely worth considering as well.

In hindsight, looking at this case now, 1 the one thing that sticks out like a sore thumb is the blue Intel sticker on the stock cooler. Take yours off for a cleaner look. In an ideal world, we would like to have 2 had some custom cables to tidy this motherboard up, so that it matches the clean aesthetic of the case. However, as we’ve said, there was a budget to stick to. There’s always room for more RAM 3 going forward on a build. Using two DIMM slots out of the four available leaves the mobo looking a little sad and empty. Of course, an M.2 SSD would have 4 helped the build and increase the read-write speeds for the system. It would also have reduced the number of cables, creating a cleaner-looking setup.