The Five Hundred Buck Gaming Machine

It has been a month or more after the disappointment of the previos aborted attempt at a Ryzen build and I subsequently purchased a brand new MSI motherboard for the project, and as I had decided to build my "most modern" computer for my own daily driver, I wanted to use a larger, obsolete, used Antec case I had been saving which of course immediately goes against the most modern label.

I believe the project was completed today, I say that as I will know better when I've done some stress testing over the next week or so and monitored temperatures, memory timings, etc. I know now that at times, when a project appears to be finished, there may still be a few hurdles to vault before the end.

I'm interested in the total build cost, so without further ado, the new motherboard is an MSI Proseries, B450M at $83.99, the boot drive, a 500GB NVME M.2 Western Digital, was $53.75 and they were both from Amazon and include taxes and shipping. Interestingly, the M.2 was "open box" from Amazon Warehouse deals and arrived in perfect shape, twenty percent lower than their already low price.

The used items were the Ryzen 3 1200 and heatsink, at $70.49 and the 16GB G-Skill DDR4 at $61.96 and the Power supply, a new Corsair CX450M at 59.49 although it could be a used CX450M that I bought for just $15, however, I will record the higher price.

Additional items, the used Antec case with DVD and a Gigabyte WiFi card. I would estimate conservatively at $30 and that Asus Nvidia GTX 960 Mini 2GB graphics card was the most expensive item at $140 which I believe to be the most I have paid for a graphics card in the last year or so.

The Antec case included a couple of 120mm fans which I may add back in to this build, however, as I want a quiet computer, I will wait and see. They will not represent extra cost. It was apparent that one more system fan was rquired to keep the GPU temperature at a reasonable level.

I think that's it, so total cost for my "most modern" computer is $499.68 which I think is quite the bargain in these days of rapidly accelerating GPU prices, the GTX 960 is a native DirectX 12 card and it will easily handle the games I will be playing. In addition, the motherboard will handle several CPU upgrades over the next couple of years, when prices inevitably drop.

All prices in Canadian dollars.

Note. I added a single 120mm cooling fan to exhaust from the back of the case, it is a 4 pin PWM fan that is controlled via the motherboard, it is quiet and the overall sound level from the PC is very good.