Decided to sell my i7 Ivy Bridge laptop and build with the funds from that. It was a $1000 laptop and I upgraded it with 16gb ram (from 6gb), SSD, second HDD, etc. Anyway I figure it is worth about $600 and so that is the budget I decided on for the new build.
I found a Thermaltake Core V21 cube case on sale for $50 at amazon, and I love the Core X71 that I put my Threadripper 1950x build in, so I decided to try the little cube case. That limited my MB choices to ITX or microATX, which was fine since I wanted a compact build. I wanted built-in wifi so after a lot of shopping around I decided on the ASRock B450m/AC microATX board. It fit the budget and had no unneeded features.
In terms of CPU I waited specifically for the 3000-series chips to launch, so I could grab a previous-gen chip off ebay cheap. Which I did. The used Ryzen 5 2600 fit the budget perfectly and seemed like a solid choice for gaming. Speaking of which I found a really cheap used GTX 1060 6gb, which also fit into the budget nicely. All told I got it done for $14 under my $600 budget and I have replaced a slow(ish) laptop that could barely play games (has GTX 650M) with a capable gaming rig for 1080p and medium+ settings. Plus I can play youtube and load web pages at the same time without the youtube stream stuttering like hell.
John Hammersley reacted to duplexmortician in Loving my new Ryzen 5 2600 build
