For June 2020 I built a $1000 gaming and editing machine utilising the new MSI B550M Mortar Wifi.  With an AMD Ryzen 3600x at it's heart, ably supported by a EVGA RTX 2060 KO this is capable of 1080p and 1440p gaming at "competitive" frame rates.

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A bit about my choices...

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As I've never built on the AMD platform before I needed to invest and it seemed an ideal time to base this build on the new B550 chipset.  Given my own preference I wanted a smallish tower and Wifi was a must (it's difficult to run Ethernet around a house that was built in the 19th century).  To my mind the MSI B550M Mortart Wifi is the baby brother of the B550M Tomahawk, so it seemed a sensible choice for this build.

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The Ryzen 3600x..... I'm afraid I may have fallen foul of "...but it goes up to eleven.." mindset!  I didn't want to overclock and at the time of purchase the differential with the 3600 vanilla was $20, so I plumped for that.  6 cores and 12 threads because I plan to be doing a fair bit of editing on this machine.

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The GPU was the best bang for buck at the £300 price ceiling so I opted for that.  If I'm honest, and following on from the CPU comments, I perhaps should ahve squeezed a bot more out and gone for a 2060 Super but hindsight is always 20:20.

 

I wanted to be able to clock the memory at 3600 as this appears to be the sweet spot for the Ryxen processors.  Would I have noticed a material difference if I'd opted for slightly slower and saved a few quid - probably not.

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Storage - this is one of those areas where I get a bit cross with "budget builds"!  Putting a 250 Gb SSD in a build and saying you can upgrade later is a bit naughty - I'm already up to 500 Gb and I've only installed 5 games.  Yes you can achieve that cheaper that $115 for a 1 Tb NVME, but you need more that 240 Gb to start with!

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PSU and case were primarily budget driven, PSU prices are high at present and I wanted a PSU that could do more than support this system, so 650W bronze at $75 was the best I could do.  I think the case is a doozy, for $50 with 4 RGB fans included  it's pretty and cheap rather than just pretty cheap.

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I'm really please with how it went together and the performance.  The build video is below and if you're interested do check out the separate video that provides benchmarks and game testing.

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