maximumpc.com MAY 2020 MAXIMUM PC 85
blueprint
Sponsored by a part-by-part guide to building a better pcTHE PARTS THEY ARE A-CHANGIN’. Our Mid-Range build is making
the shift over to Intel this month; we’ve been all over AMD
for long enough. The Core i5-9600K we’re using is a bit more
expensive than the third-gen Ryzen chip it’s replacing, but it also
outperforms it on average by a small amount, and removes the
need for an expensive X570 motherboard. So, we’ve got ASRock’s
Z390 Steel Legend coming in, too, and a powerful Corsair A500
air cooler, because we’ll be missing the free Wraith cooler AMD
provides. We’re slightly increasing our available power with a new
550W CV PSU, also from Corsair. We’re making the same memor y
change as in the Budget build, and swapping over to MSI for the
GPU, because the XFX RX 5700 was no longer on sale. Lastly
replacing the SSD with a cheaper, more suitable PCIe 3.0 drive,
the BarraCuda 510 from Seagate, on sale for just $80.A MODEST OVERALL PRICE DROP from our last issue, thanks to some
small reductions here and there, means the Budget build is in a
really good place right now, so we’re not making too many changes
here. A switch back to the 2x 8GB Team T-Force Vulcan Z memory
kit was predicated by the GeiL Evo Potenza RAM no longer being
on sale, and we also swapped back to a twin-fan GPU, specifically
Zotac Gaming’s standard 6GB model of the GTX 1660 Super, which
happened to be 10 dollars cheaper than the previous Asus GPU.
We also made the change from Adata to Patriot’s Burst 2.5-inch
SSD, sticking with the same amount of SATA storage (to keep
our boot-ups nice and swift), but saving ourselves a few dollars,
because the Adata SU650 is also no longer on sale at the time of
writing. Patriot’s drive is super-cheap and will do everything we
need it to do here.
INGREDIENTS INGREDIENTSPART PRICE
Case Fractal Design Meshify C $85
PSU 550W Corsair CV550 80+ Bronze NEW $55
Mobo ASRock Z390 Steel Legend NEW $135
CPU Intel Core i5-9600K NEW $230
Cooler Corsair A500 Dual Fan NEW $100
GPU MSI Radeon R X 5700 8GB NEW $332
RAM 16GB (2x 8GB) Team T-Force Vulcan Z
@ 3,000MT/s NEW
$68
SSD 500GB Seagate BarraCuda
510 M.2 PCIe SSD NEW
$80
HDD 1TB Western Digital RE3 WD1002FBYS $27
OS Windows 10 Home 64-bit OEM $100PART PRICECase BitFenix Nova TG $65PSU EVGA 400N1 400W $35Mobo ASRock Fatal1ty B450 Gaming K4 $95CPU AMD Ryzen 5 2600 $125
GPU Zotac Gaming GeForce
GTX 1660 Super 6GB NEW
$220
RAM 16GB (2x 8GB) Team T-Force Vulcan Z
@ 3,000MT/s NEW
$68
SSD 120GB Patriot Burst 2.5-inch SATA III NEW $27HDD 1TB Western Digital RE3 WD1002FBYS $28OS Ubuntu Desktop Linux 18.04.3 LTS 64-bit $15Approximate Price: $678 Approximate Price: $1,212
BUDGET MID-RANGE