A nifty rig that won’t hurt your wallet
W
e love gaming at Maximum PC,
but we have to pull ourselves
back from time to time, and
remember that some people just want
a good, reliable computer to do their
work on. Heck, we spend most of our
time busily writing away in Google Drive
on rigs packing graphics cards worth
hundreds if not thousands of dollars. You
know, you can build the most powerful
PC available, but if you’re not going to
push the limits of what its hardware is
capable of, you’re practically washing
money down the drain.
With that in mind, we took a look at
building a machine that we could use
for that thing we all dread: good, honest
work. Pre-built systems are popular
for simple desktop work—writing, web
browsing, and so on—but it’s in this areathat you may find a good saving can be
made. A reasonable desktop system
could set you back anywhere between
300 and 600 dollars, were you to saunter
down to your local tech hardware store
with the intention of leaving with a
ready-to-use PC. Sure, building a system
takes effort, but if you’re a tech-head
like us (or you’re looking out for a pal
who needs a new computer), you know
that there’s cash to be saved here.
So, we laid out the plans carefully. To
keep the price down, we set ourselves
a budget of $350. This meant that a
CPU with integrated graphics was
a must; adding a GPU of any repute
would instantly tank our final price.
We didn’t want this system to be too
cheap, though—savings needed to
be made elsewhere to ensure that wecould secure a decent motherboard
and memory. Dual-channel memory
was also a must; we didn’t want to
skimp here. This build needed to be
fairly fast, with specs that compared
favorably to pre-built systems available
for around the same price. Perhaps we’d
even get some games running on it, we
thought. Perhaps.
Oh, and we’re putting Linux on it.
That’s going to be fun. Some of you
reading this might be Linux-savvy, but
spoiler alert: We’re not. We prefer the
warm, familiar embrace of Windows 10
(and we’re going to be installing it on this
build to run our benchmarking software
anyway). But Linux is free, and we do
like free things. This could be a tough
build to make work, but we’re filled
with determination. –christian guytonIngredIents street prIceCase Corsair SPEC-05 $45
Motherboard ASRock B450M Steel Legend $90
CPU AMD Ryzen 3 2200G $87
Memory 8GB (2x 4GB) Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 3000 $50
PSU 450W EVGA 450 BT 80+ Bronze $35
Boot Drive 120GB Crucial BX500 SSD $20
Storage Drive 500GB Toshiba DT01ACA050 HDD $23
Cooling AMD Wraith Stealth $0
Operating System Linux $0
ToTAL $ 350
build a kick-ass PC
24 MAXIMUMPC aug 2019 maximumpc.com
B u i l d a $ 350
kick-ass Pc
prices correct at time of printing.