Maximum PC - UK (2020-03)

maximumpc.com MAR 2020 MAXIMUMPC 97

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REJOICE! THE ASROCK X570 PHANTOM GAMING 4 is finally no longer

on sale, and a new contender has risen to claim the “cheapest X570

motherboard” crown. The king is dead, long live the king, etc. It’s

Gigabyte once again, with its X570 UD board—fairly similar to the

outgoing mobo, really. There’s not too much else to be changed

here, what with the Ryzen 5 3600X on sale for a staggeringly low

$205; nobody’s beating that price. We considered using that spare

cash to make a big upgrade here, but ultimately decided to leave

it for now. Remember that next issue, when the price of this build

jumps back up over $1,200. We’re trading out our memory for

G.Skill’s Aegis line, sticking with 16GB and 3,200MT/s to keep our

performance in line without letting the price rise. Lastly, we’re

making that same change as the Budget build, replacing our

Seagate drive with Western Digital’s 1TB RE3 model.

WE’RE MAKING QUITE a few changes this month. First (forgive us for
not going down the list in order) is the HDD, which we’re changing
in both the Budget and Mid-Range builds. The cheap Seagate drive
we had been using is no longer quite so cheap, so we’re swapping
to a different manufacturer, but keeping the product more or less
the same. It’s still a 7,200 rpm hard drive with 1TB of capacity.
We tweaked the RAM by a similarly small amount, swapping
from Patriot’s Viper Steel memory to the Viper 4 Blackout to
save a few bucks. Bigger changes came in the form of a new
PSU, Thermaltake’s Smart 430W model, and a manufacturer
change for the motherboard, sticking with the B450M format,
but swapping to Gigabyte’s budget model. Everything else stuck
around in terms of price; the Ryzen 5 2600 still comes with three
free months of Xbox Game Pass, so snap that up.

INGREDIENTS INGREDIENTS

PART PRICE

Case Fractal Design Meshify C $85

PSU 500W EVGA 500 BR 80+ Bronze $55

Mobo Gigabyte X570 UD NEW $140

CPU A MD R y zen 5 360 0X $205

Cooler A MD Wr aith Spire N/A

GPU XFX Radeon RX 5700 8GB $330

RAM 16GB (2x 8GB) G.Skill Aegis @ 3,200MT/s NEW $65

SSD 500GB Sabrent Rocket M.2 PCIe SSD $110

HDD 1TB Western Digital RE3 WD1002FBYS NEW $28

OS Windows 10 Home 64-bit OEM $100

PART PRICE

Case BitFenix Nova TG $63

PSU Thermaltake Smart Series 80+ 430W NEW $36

Mobo Gigabyte B450M DS3H NEW $68

CPU AMD Ryzen 5 2600 $120

GPU EVGA GeForce GTX 1660 Super Black 6GB $230

RAM 8GB (2x 4GB) Patriot Viper 4 Blackout

Series @ 3,200MT/s NEW

$44

SSD 120GB Adata SU650 SATA III $23

HDD 1TB Western Digital RE3 WD1002FBYS NEW $28

OS Ubuntu Desktop Linux 18.04.3 LTS 64-bit $15

Approximate Price: $627 Approximate Price: $1,118

BUDGET MID-RANGE