Wraith
Bettyswollocks
So I was tasked to build a RIG for my uncle a few weeks back to replace his ageing and quite relic like P4 3.0Ghz Prescott and I thought well how hard could it be well quite apparently he uses his RIG as an office/light production for converting vinyls to MP3 and scanning old photos and pictures which he then edits and saves digitally for either himself or friends with a little light gaming and web browsing. His needs aren't too much of a challenge really and any old second hand laptop would do the trick to be honest but he wants new and full warranties.
To which he hits me with the budget of £500 I think OK this should be interesting and hell it's been a while since we've seen budget builds on the forums so it's going to be shared with you guys to see what you think.
Recently I had the pleasure of spending 2 glorious weeks at TTL towers (I'm coming back GUV real soon) and in that time met with the newest members of the Ryzen family and became quite enamoured with them so my choice right off the bat was the Ryzen 3 1200 and why the hell not it's a little power house and compared to his rather dated P4 (press hot) it's a massive step up. CPU - £98.48
Next step is something cheeky to fit the 1200 into and seeing as he's strapped for space it has to be Micro ATX so I went with the MSI A320M Grenade, it is the center piece and quite a pretty little board and has future upgrade potential including faster Ryzen CPU and M.2 socket. Mobo - £62.45
Right motherboard sorted onto the next bits, RAM, he has been running 4GB for years and I knew straight away this could get pricey given the current market so opted for 8GB of HyperX Fury at 2133Mhz more than enough for his basic needs. RAM - £66.34
GPU was next to aid him in his image editing and light gaming so staying within the budget and along the AMD theme we decided on the Powercolor RX460 2GB. GPU - £84.95
Now seeing as this is pretty much a low power build and not to stressing we still have to stick to the rules and not cheap out on the power delivery so our PSU of choice was the EVGA 430W it has all the usual connectors including a 8Pin PCIe connector which we won't be using as the RX460 doesn't need it.. but the upgrade option is there. PSU - £33.94
Filling in the blanks we have a single 1TB Toshiba Sata drive and 2 optical drives (I know don't shout at me). HDD - £37.97, ODDs - £23.95
To house all this hardware I could have gone cheap and nasty with something from CIT with a 3rd rate 500w PSU included but that is just wrong and I couldn't live with myself if the RIG craps out somewhere down the road and I knew I'd failed. So I looked to Fractal, why not I've used 3 of their cases now and I'll stick with what I know. So the choice in the end was the Fractal Core 1100 Micro ATX. Case - £34.54
Well there we have it the completed build, which came to a grand total of £442.62!!
It's a lovely little machine and I'd be tempted to build another as a daily RIG for myself. So what do you guys think? More love for the budget build or should we all just stick too our big RIGs.
To which he hits me with the budget of £500 I think OK this should be interesting and hell it's been a while since we've seen budget builds on the forums so it's going to be shared with you guys to see what you think.
Recently I had the pleasure of spending 2 glorious weeks at TTL towers (I'm coming back GUV real soon) and in that time met with the newest members of the Ryzen family and became quite enamoured with them so my choice right off the bat was the Ryzen 3 1200 and why the hell not it's a little power house and compared to his rather dated P4 (press hot) it's a massive step up. CPU - £98.48
Next step is something cheeky to fit the 1200 into and seeing as he's strapped for space it has to be Micro ATX so I went with the MSI A320M Grenade, it is the center piece and quite a pretty little board and has future upgrade potential including faster Ryzen CPU and M.2 socket. Mobo - £62.45
Right motherboard sorted onto the next bits, RAM, he has been running 4GB for years and I knew straight away this could get pricey given the current market so opted for 8GB of HyperX Fury at 2133Mhz more than enough for his basic needs. RAM - £66.34
GPU was next to aid him in his image editing and light gaming so staying within the budget and along the AMD theme we decided on the Powercolor RX460 2GB. GPU - £84.95
Now seeing as this is pretty much a low power build and not to stressing we still have to stick to the rules and not cheap out on the power delivery so our PSU of choice was the EVGA 430W it has all the usual connectors including a 8Pin PCIe connector which we won't be using as the RX460 doesn't need it.. but the upgrade option is there. PSU - £33.94
Filling in the blanks we have a single 1TB Toshiba Sata drive and 2 optical drives (I know don't shout at me). HDD - £37.97, ODDs - £23.95
To house all this hardware I could have gone cheap and nasty with something from CIT with a 3rd rate 500w PSU included but that is just wrong and I couldn't live with myself if the RIG craps out somewhere down the road and I knew I'd failed. So I looked to Fractal, why not I've used 3 of their cases now and I'll stick with what I know. So the choice in the end was the Fractal Core 1100 Micro ATX. Case - £34.54
Well there we have it the completed build, which came to a grand total of £442.62!!
It's a lovely little machine and I'd be tempted to build another as a daily RIG for myself. So what do you guys think? More love for the budget build or should we all just stick too our big RIGs.
