APC Australia - September 2019

PA RTSLIST

As you can probably tell just by glancing at the table, we
made a lot of adjustments to our Turbo build this time
around. Those adjustments have led to a saving of $413.
Not bad!
We decided to shift over to MSI with its RTX 2080
Ventus 8G. It’s the same $1,049 cost as the Asus Turbo RTX
2080 used in the last few builds, but has a better cooling
solution. We mixed up our CPU cooling, too; it seems
Cooler Master is the flavor of the month this issue,
because its MasterLiquid ML360 enabled us to upgrade
from 240mm to 360mm of radiator space – which can be
fitted either to the top or the front of the Nzxt H700i – and
saved us $10 compared to the previous Kraken X52.
As expected, we also had to change out the PSU again,
thanks to the constant price shifts, so we’ve gone with a
reliable 850W model from Corsair this month. We also
switched over to G.Skill R AM, using a 32GB kit from the
Ripjaw series at 3,200MHz – a slight gain over last
month’s 3,000MHz memory for the same cost. Our final
change was an upgrade to storage – no longer content
with four terabytes, we’re upgrading to two of Seagate’s
3TB BarraCuda hard drives. We also considered swapping
out the Gigabyte Aorus RGB M.2 drive for a Patriot
VPN100 of the same size, but ultimately decided that the
drop in speed wasn’t worth the potential saving.

Tu r b o

“Component prices remain relatively stable, and, as with the

other builds on these pages, the very low cost of storage helps

a great deal with keeping costs under control. ”

UPGRADE OF

THE MONTH

3TB

Seagate BarraCuda Compute HDD

$119, WWW.SEAGATE.COM

All right, we know – HDDs aren’t sexy. This one is no

exception; hold it in your hand, and it’s little more than

a heavy metal rectangle. But this HDD is particularly

good value; a mere $119 for three terabytes of storage,

and we’re using two of them in our turbo build. By

comparison, if we wanted 6TB using the 2TB drives we

were using previously, it would be an almost identical

cost – but we have removed the extra hassle of setting

up cables to a third drive. As such, we feel pretty

comfortable naming this drive (the ST3000DM008

model) our Upgrade of the Month.

PART PRICE

CASE NZXT H700I $219

PSU 850W CORSAIR TX-M SERIES 80+ GOLD NEW $179

MOBO ASUS PRIME X399-A NEW $419

CPU AMD THREADRIPPER 2950X $830

COOLER COOLER MASTER MASTERLIQUID ML360

RGB AIO NEW

$179

GPU MSI GEFORCE RTX 2080 VENTUS 8G NEW $1,049

RAM 32GB (2X 16GB) G.SKILL RIPJAWS

@ 3,200MHZ NEW

$299

SSD 512GB GIGABYTE AORUS RGB M.2 NVME $180

HDD 2X 3TB SEAGATE BARRACUDA COMPUTE NEW $238

OS WINDOWS 10 HOME 64-BIT OEM $140

APPROXIMATE PRICE: $3,732