The Budget Build

Oh boy, is it good to be back doing a good ol set of recommended builds again. Welcome to the first ever PC Blueprints', er… blueprints. Did we do that right? This time around things are going to be a bit different.

Below you're going to find our recommended builds for both Intel and AMD at a budget price point, updated each and every month for your reading leisure. But, we have radically changed up the format, taking some stuff away and adding in some extras as well.

Along with UK pricing and e-seller links (affiliate-free), you'll also find product page URLs, plus eventually a full complement of estimated performance results too (once we get the core components in for them). You can also subscribe to these articles by becoming a member (or a subscriber if you want to support the project) to receive those monthly email blasts and more (fingers on the pulse with a newsletter here at PCB, you love to see it).

For those of us who remember the heyday of Maximum PC, you may recall we opted not to include coolers or fans in our budget blueprints, but not any more, no sir. This time around those are included as standard. The OS, though? We've scrapped that entirely. Still, we highly recommend you either pick up and tie a permanent license to an email address and your Microsoft account for permanent usage or, alternatively, grab a one-time-use OEM key from a site like G2A or Kinguin instead.

With all that said and done, let's talk budget builds. Usually we'd be updating these from month to month and talking about the changes over time, but as this is our first ride out with the new format, it's going to be a bit more of an explainer and less of an "argh, GPU prices have risen again" kinda vibe piece. To that end…

For our AMD system, we've opted to go for one of Team Red's more affordable 9th gen chips, the Ryzen 5 9600X. To be clear, a 7000 series Ryzen 5 is equally a good pick if you can find one in stock, and the performance difference isn't that great between the two. Certainly not for gaming. Still, the improved efficiency and stronger single-core performance on the 9600X are nothing to sniff at.

We've paired that with 32GB of DDR5, clocking in at around 6400 MT/s with a C38 latency. It doesn't have the sharpest real-world speeds, but that frequency should tie nicely with the 9600X's infinity fabric, boosting performance. We've also gone with a pretty potent SSD combo for both builds in the form of a 1TB Crucial P510 as our OS SSD (featuring Phison's latest hyper-efficient 7nm E31T controller) and a 2TB PCIe 4.0 SSD from Teamgroup for all of our secondary storage.

Graphics cards right now are in a bit of a tricky spot, certainly on the budget end. There's not a huge selection here; for our AMD build, we've opted to go for Intel's Arc B570 as our card of choice. It delivers solid performance at 1080p and is relatively affordable at $280 / £240, although it will struggle at higher resolutions without FSR or XeSS support.

As for the other bells and whistles, the Hyte Y40 satisfies all of our chassis needs, complete with 280mm AIO support for the, err, AIO. For our red rig, we've slapped in a be quiet! Pure Loop 2 280mm to fit the bill here (we recommend mounting that as an intake in the side-vent location), and have paired that with a set of Phanteks' latest M25G2 fans, a triple pack of 140mm (two for the AIO and one in the basement as intakes), and then a triple pack of 120mm fans to act as an exhaust in the roof. 

For our Intel build, there's not a huge amount of change here across the board. We've gone with a Core i5-14600K for the CPU, mostly because it's still widely available, and amazingly, absolutely dominates the newer Core Ultra 5 265K in terms of price to performance. 

We've then paired that with 32GB of Teamgroup T-Create DDR5 @ 6000 MT/s (as we're not dependent on it for CPU performance) and then kept pretty much everything else the same, bar the GPU and the cooler, oh, and the motherboard, of course. 

For graphics, we've gone with the Gigabyte Eagle OC Ice RTX 5060 8GB instead, which has a 15% performance uptick compared to the B570, but for a little extra cash ($300/£293 at time of writing). As for the cooler, similar to our AMD build, we've opted for another 280mm unit in the form of the Fractal Design Lumen S28 RGB V2. Slightly more money, but slightly better styling, and similarly those Phanteks fans can operate in the same manner as they did in the red build.

AMD BUILD

Total: $1,338 / £1,228
Power Draw: 379W

INTEL BUILD

Total: $1,333 / £1,349
Power Draw: 486W

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