maximumpc.com JUN 2019 MAXIMUMPC 73
GETTING THIS BUILD running was
unexpectedly tricky. Gigabyte motherboards
can be capricious, and this X470 was no
exception; upon loading Windows and
investigating, we found that our 3,200MT/s
RAM was running at just 2,400MT/s. Cue
a venture into the BIOS setup, where we
struggled to locate anything that would
help—bizarrely, though, upon restarting, the
memory was running at full speed, despite
us not changing any settings. Sometimes,
jumping into the BIOS is all that’s needed.
The lack of a proper M.2 drive in this build
means it’s not the fastest thing imaginable
when it comes to storage bandwidth,
although the Adata SU800 is a reliable piece
of hardware that won’t demand replacing
anytime soon—unless we decide to upgrade
to a M.2 drive, the main thing we’d like to
change about this build. That’ll drive up the
price of this PC significantly, but serious
gamers might want faster load times. Bear
in mind that this build only has enough PCIe
lanes for one M.2 SSD—if you want to fit
yours in the secondary M.2 slot, you need to
change which port is prioritized in the BIOS.
For 1080p gaming, the 1660 Ti is a
budget-friendly beast, powering through
our benchmark tests, and performing well
for online gaming. This build isn’t going to
be blasting 4K-quality rendering out, but it’s
efficient and quiet. While it’s not an RTX GPU,
a recent update made ray tracing available
on this and the previous generation of GTX
graphics cards—however, the trade-off in
frame rate isn’t even close to worth it.
The Eclipse P300 is great to work in;
compact, well designed, and minimalistic,
but with enough space to fit bulkier internal
builds than this. Were we to keep sprucing
this build up, we’d likely opt to drop a third
120mm Phanteks fan in the front, and the
P300 also comes with a small integrated
RGB light unit on the glass-paneled side. For
those looking for a gaudier display, the case
can be fitted with Phanteks RGB lightstrips,or connected to a compatible motherboard
with an RGB adapter for a bit of extra cash.
The glass side panel is great for showing
off your build. There’s plenty of space for
cable management behind and beneath
the motherboard, too, so it’s not difficult to
keep things tidy. We didn’t use them in this
build, but the case has two HDD brackets at
the front, should you desire extra storage.
There isn’t much else we’d like to change—
perhaps with a bit more cash, we’d have
sprung for a more powerful CPU cooler, but
the included AMD one worked just fine.READY FOR ACTION
(^1)
AMD’s own Wraith coolers
come packaged with most
CPUs. These are pretty small
affairs, but they do the job well
enough, and save you a few
bucks. As you might have
guessed, we’ve got quite a
surplus of them in the office.
(^2)
The mounting plate is solid
metal—no rubberized slots
to feed cables through here.
Fitting the bulkier power cables
through these holes proved a bit
of a squeeze, so be careful not to
damage them.
(^3)
MSI’s GTX 1660 Ti Gaming X
is a sweet-looking piece of
gear that produces some decent
graphics. More budget-friendly
options are available, but you’ll
miss out on a factory overclock if
you go down that route.
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BENCHMARKS
ZERO-
POINT
Cinebench R15 Multi (Index) 1,152 1,258 (9%)
CrystalDisk QD32 Sequential
Read (MB/s) 3,400^564 (-83%)
CrystalDisk QD32 Sequential
Write (MB/s) 1,720^524 (-70%)
Rise of the Tomb Raider (fps) 60 98 (63%)
Total War: Warhammer II (fps) 46 60 (30%)
Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon
Wildlands (fps)^39 51 (31%)
3DMark: Fire Strike (Index) 11,101 14,114 (27%)
0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%
Our zero-point consists of an AMD Ryzen 5 1600, 16GB of Crucial Ballistix Sport LT @ 2,666MT/s, an EVGA GeForce GTX 1060
3GB, and a 250GB Samsung 960 Evo M.2 PCIe SSD. All tests were performed at 1080p at the highest graphical profile.