Published on August 18th, 2015 | by Bob

PC Build Guide – J̶u̶l̶y̶ August 2015

Welcome to the J̶u̶l̶y̶ August 2015 version of our PC build guides. As always, we have implemented hard price limits ($500, $800, $1300, $1800) on ourselves and have had to make tough decisions with each build. Your personal budget will likely be flexible, but we hope this will give you a baseline. You can of course spend more or spend less, but you run into a case of diminishing returns at either end. Please keep in mind that pricing information is immediate and may not necessarily reflect real prices by the time you have read this article. For a full explanation of the builds and in-depth hardware discussion, check out the video above.

We missed July. Sorry. Sort of. It was rather busy, with our master of ceremonies, Mark AKA NikonPunch moving across the country to begin a new career. It was a rather good time to miss, however, as the market transitioned in a bunch of different places: Windows 8.1 to Windows 10, Haswell to Skylake, DDR3 to DDR4, AMD R9 200-series to R9 300-series. The effects of those transitions (some still in progress) significantly affected prices on some of our core components, and we had to make some difficult choices.

This was felt most profoundly with our $500 build. Directx 12 is “right around the corner” and we’re seeing plenty of evidence that it heavily favors multiple cores compared to DX11. Gordon Mah Ung of PC World took a rather interesting approach in testing the DX12 demo of Ashes of the Singularity. Is it representative in any sense of what we’ll see in DX12? No one seems to be sure, but it’s what we’ve got right now. Ryan Shrout of PCPerspective analyzed it in both video and article form as well.

For these reasons, we chose to include two $500 builds this month – one geared towards single thread performance (A) and one geared towards multi thread performance (B). This just happens to include our first AMD build in a very, very long time. Intel Core i5 CPUs have historically been much too expensive for the $500 build, and in recent months we’ve relied on the Core i3 4160 along with a Z97 board on a favorable sale. Unfortunately that wasn’t in the cards this month. The show above will explain all of our choices in much greater detail, answer questions on hardware, and go over some recent tech news. Give it a watch!

The Starter – Option A

The Starter – Option B

The Sweet Spot

The Enthusiast

The Professional

Tags: air cooling, amd, asus, Build Guides, corsair, CPU, g.skill, gigabyte, gpu, Hardware, intel, liquid cooling, nvidia, pc building

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Bob

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