First off, I will not be making a habit of tearing apart other builders, nor throwing shade at people attempting to build a machine for the first time! I’m always available for advice, or help with customising your system, and more importantly, optimising your budget to ensure the absolute best value you can get. So when I say £700 for a machine, that is the best you can get for your £700 without a penny wasted!
Then this machine appeared on my timeline and I saw the perfect opportunity to share some of that expertise and why it’s important;
A Boutique Build PC – Quoted price of over £650.
The machine above is listed as a Ryzen 5600 4.4Ghz, 8Gb RAM, GT 1030 and 1Tb NVME drive with water cooling.
Take a look at this photo, see if you can see what we’ve noticed. Got it? First thing that caught my eye was the AIO has been mounted upside down, which was a distraction, but go me thinking about the rest of the system. Also with the AIO, with the radiator mounted so low in the case, those air bubbles over time are going to hit that pump and cause all kinds of issues later down the line!
While the description is a bit vauge, I’m making the assumption this is a 5600X, with AIO. While the 5600X is a fine chip, for £30 less you can get a comparable 5600G, with its onboard GPU that’s MORE powerful than the GT1030 this system has been specced with. Once funds become available, plug in a full GPU and off to the races you go. With an AIO the overclocking headroom is pretty high on the low TDP of the 5600G and on the B450 board fitted here would give just about equal performance…
But that brings me onto the 8Gb RAM. While 8Gb is about sufficient for most gaming workloads, where this system would be crippled is with that single DIMM. I would take one of two options personally, 2 DIMMs of 4Gb each to run in dual channel mode, doubling the throughput, ensuring at least a speed of 3000Mhz to utilise that onboard GPU to it’s best, or take the savings on the CPU, and upgrade to a dual channel 16Gb kit.
Further savings are gained by removing the need for the GT1030, which ultimately is a waste of money for anything now days other than the more powerful of headless servers for at most, Plex video encoding locally. These funds could’ve been used on the RAM, or optimising the storage for a 500Gb NVME, + 2Tb HDD storage, or even a 1Tb SATA SSD. Going the other way for fans of unicorn puke, why not finish a full ARGB fan setup with matching RGB RAM?
A recycled Retrodex build, comparable in performance for £450
Ultimately however, please don’t take this as a warning from boutique builders, lord knows, I am one! The moral here is be careful what you are buying, check previous work and please do ask your builder questions! A custom PC is a very personal thing and the right experience with your builder goes a long way the the long term enjoyment of your machine!
One last picture for you of the inside of the MSI/Ryzen build, comprising of a Ryzen 3 1200, 8Gb dual channel @ 2666Mhz RAM, 500Gb SSD, 1Tb HDD, GTX1060 and a slew of ARGB for that unicorn touch! Performance at 1080p medium in most games hits 60fps and very rarely dips! Speak to you all soon!
Clean and tidy cable management.
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