maximumpc.com aUG 2019 97
blueprint
Sponsored by a part-by-part guide to building a better pcWe managed to shave nearly 20 dollars off our mid-range build
this month. That’s enough for a game or two (or seven, if Steam
has a sale on). Making that saving was something of a struggle,
though, because the processor and SSD both jumped up in price
this time around, and power supply prices remain high, so we
decided to take a hit on the cooler, and downgraded to the non-
RGB version of Cooler Master’s MasterLiquid Lite AIO. Next up was
the RAM: Ballistix is out, and G.Skill’s Ripjaws is in, saving us 11
dollars. Then we came to the power supply—our previous choice
(the Corsair CX550) was no longer on sale, so we had to scrabble
around for a similarly affordable unit. We decided to give more
of the limelight to Cooler Master, choosing its 550W MasterWatt
unit. Lastly, we offset the CPU’s rise in price by opting for a slightly
cheaper motherboard, the MSI B450-A Pro.We took a long, hard look at the budget build blueprint this month,
and you can probably figure out the reason why—it’s plastered
all over the front cover of this very issue. Obviously, this is a
somewhat different build from our $350 machine, but we thought
perhaps there were lessons to be learned. As it turned out, that
wasn’t really the case. Some of the components in this budget
build dropped in price of their own accord, and while we briefly
dabbled with the idea of swapping over to an Intel processor,
ultimately it wasn’t worth the change. The only change we did
see fit to make was to go back to TeamGroup’s T-Force Vulcan
memory, saving ourselves five dollars with little to no difference
in performance. RAM pricing is in constant flux, though, so we’d
always encourage you to have a bit of a hunt around for good sales
when deciding which memory to go for with a new build.
INGREDIENTS INGREDIENTSPART PRice
case Fractal Design Meshify C $90
PSU 550W Cooler Master MasterWatt 550
80+ Bronze NeW
$59
Mobo MSI B450-A Pro NeW $100
cPU AMD Ryzen 7 2700 $240
cooler Cooler Master MasterLiquid Lite 240 AIO NeW $55
GPU MSI GeForce RTX 2060 Ventus 6GB $350
RAM 16GB (2x 8GB) G.Skill Ripjaws V Series
@ 3,200MT/s NeW
$73
SSD 250GB Samsung 970 Evo Plus M.2 PCIe $78
HDD 1TB Seagate Constellation ES 3.5-inch $36
OS Windows 10 Home 64-bit OEM $100PART PRicecase BitFenix Nova TG $47PSU 450W EVGA 450 BR 80+ Bronze $38Mobo ASRock B450M R4.0 AM4 $65cPU AMD Ryzen 5 2600 $150GPU Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1660 6GB $220RAM 8GB (2x 4GB) Team T-Force Vulcan
@ 3,000MT/s NeW
$40SSD 120GB Crucial BX500 2.5-inch $20HDD 1TB Seagate Constellation ES 3.5-inch $34OS Ubuntu Desktop Linux 18.04 LTS 64-bit $15Approximate Price: $629 Approximate Price: $1,181
Budget mid-range