maximumpc.com OCT 2019 MAXIMUMPC 97
blueprint
Sponsored by a part-by-part guide to building a better pcBIG CHANGES AHEAD this month for our mid-range build. The first
step was to upgrade the processor, going straight for the high-
quality Ryzen 5 3600X, with a hefty base clock of 3.8GHz. These
new 3000-series CPUs aren’t too power-hungry either, meaning
we could safely dial back the PSU to Cooler Master’s 500W
Silencio. Although this won’t leave too much additional power
for overclocking, the Ryzen 3000 processors don’t have much
overclocking headroom anyway. To support the new CPU, we
needed a new motherboard: the X570 Phantom Gaming 4 from
ASRock, one of the best value X570 boards available right now.
We’re opting for the stock Wraith Spire cooler here to keep the
price down, but if you’ve got the money to spare, an AIO cooler isn’t
a bad idea. Lastly, we’ve changed up the memory and HDD to help
offset the extra cost of the CPU and motherboard.WE PLAYED WITH THE IDEA of putting some new toys into the
budget build this month, what with the advent of the Ryzen 3000
series of CPUs, but ultimately we opted to keep the cost down.
New X570 motherboards, which are really needed to get the most
out of those processors, are expensive, while the trusty ASRock
B450M R4.0 just keeps getting cheaper. We also swapped out the
GTX 1660 GPU from EVGA to Zotac to preserve the price, and last
month’s Geil RAM was no longer on sale, so back to Team Group’s
T-Force line we went, sticking with a two-piece kit that would offer
comparable performance. Perhaps the biggest change here was
finally switching out Seagate’s trusty Constellation hard drive
for its Desktop ST1000DM003 model of the same size, which is
slightly cheaper but has a larger cache of 64MB, as opposed to the
Constellation’s 32MB.
INGREDIENTS INGREDIENTSPART PRICE
Case Fractal Design Meshify C $90
PSU 500W Cooler Master MWE 500 Silencio 80+
Bronze NEW
$55
Mobo ASRock X570 Phantom Gaming 4 NEW $145
CPU A MD R y zen 5 360 0X NEW $250
Cooler AMD Wraith Spire NEW $N/A
GPU Sapphire Radeon RX 5700 8GB $350
RAM 16GB (2 x 8GB) Ballistix Sport LT
@ 3,200MT/s NEW
$70
SSD 250GB Samsung 970 Evo Plus M.2 PCIe $70
HDD 1TB Seagate Desktop ST1000DM003 NEW $32
OS Windows 10 Home 64-bit OEM $100PART PRICECase BitFenix Nova TG $60PSU C o r s air V S 4 5 0 8 0 + W hi te 4 5 0 W $50Mobo ASRock B450M R4.0 AM4 $60CPU AMD Ryzen 5 2600X $160GPU Zotac Gaming GeForce GTX 1660 6GB NEW $220
RAM 8GB (2x 4GB) Team T-Force Vulcan Z
@ 3,000MT/s NEW
$42
SSD 120GB Crucial BX500 2.5-inch $21HDD 1TB Seagate Desktop ST1000DM003 NEW $32OS Ubuntu Desktop Linux 18.04 LTS 64-bit $15Approximate Price: $660 Approximate Price: $1,162
BUDGET MID-RANGE