Maximum PC - USA (2019-06)

maximumpc.com JUN 2019 MAXIMUMPC 97

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A SUDDEN, UNWELCOME HIKE in the prices of Corsair’s all-in-one

coolers had us re-evaluating our mid-range build this month,

eventually opting for a far more affordable (if slightly less flashy)

option: Cooler Master’s MasterLiquid Lite—try saying that five

times fast. Cooler Master lives up to its name; similar in scale to the

Hydro H100i Pro we had been using, the MasterLiquid Lite comes

packed with RGB lighting and produces minimal noise. Oh, and it’s

40 dollars cheaper than Corsair’s offering. Sold! Elsewhere, we

swapped out the RAM, too—again choosing the T-Force Vulcan

series, using a 16GB kit this time. Team T-Force might not be the

highest-end memory brand, but it does the job. We gleefully saw

that prices were dropping all over the place for this build; the Ryzen

CPU dropped by 10 dollars, and the mobo by five. Overall, this build

comes out at a winning $57 cheaper than last month.

THERE WASN’T TOO MUCH WORK to be done on the budget build
this month. There was a slight rise to the cost of Seagate’s hard
drive, but there was nothing we saw fit to do about that—the fact is
that Seagate drives are the still best value around for beefy HDD
storage, so we took the hit. Elsewhere, though, we were able to
trim the fat a little—swapping out our ADATA Ultimate SSD for a
Crucial BX500 of the same size saved us a few dollars, and we
traded out the RAM, too, getting rid of the American Patriot Viper
memory for the 8GB kit from Taiwanese manufacturer Team
Group’s T-Force Vulcan line, with only very minor trade-off in
performance. This made for a small saving, enough to offset the
five-dollar price rise on the ASRock B450M motherboard. Most
other components held steady this time around, resulting in an
overall price change of just three dollars less.

INGREDIENTS INGREDIENTS

PART PRICE

Case Fractal Design Meshify C $90

PSU 550W Corsair CX550M 80+ Bronze $60

Mobo Asus ROG Strix B450-F Gaming $130

CPU AMD Ryzen 7 2700 $240

Cooler Cooler Master MasterLiquid Lite

240mm RGB AIO NEW

$70

GPU Zotac Gaming GeForce RTX 2060 6GB $350

RAM 16GB (2x 8GB) Team T-Force Vulcan

@ 3,000MT/s NEW

$85

SSD 250GB Samsung 970 Evo Plus M.2 PCIe SSD $88

HDD 1TB Seagate Constellation ES 3.5-inch HDD $38

OS Windows 10 Home 64-bit OEM $100

PART PRICE

Case BitFenix Nova TG $55

PSU 450W Corsair VS450 80+ White $40

Mobo ASRock B450M R4.0 AM4 $65

CPU AMD Ryzen 5 2600 $165

GPU Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1660 6GB $220

RAM 8GB (2x 4GB) Team T-Force Vulcan @ 3,000MT/s NEW $50

SSD 12 0 G B C r u c i a l B X 5 0 0 2. 5 - i n c h S S D NEW $22

HDD 1TB Seagate Constellation ES 3.5-inch HDD $38

OS Ubuntu Desktop Linux 18.04 LTS 64-bit $15

Approximate Price: $670 Approximate Price: $1,251

BUDGET MID-RANGE