GET HANDS-ON AND BUILD YOUR OWN SUPER-CHEAP SYSTEM

SO THE CONCEPT around this is pretty simple—we just love the idea behind the Core i3-10100. When this editor first joined the tech industry, the crème de la crème of desktop processors was whatever quadcore, Hyper-Threaded chip Intel had to offer at the time. That was the end goal. Ryzen wasn’t yet a thing, and anything more than four cores was relegated to the world of HEDT, which was a bit more inaccessible. Motherboards were more expensive, and memory costs immediately shot up whenever you mentioned the phrase “quad-channel.”

Fast forward to 2020, and with the launch of Intel’s latest chips, this little beauty fell into our lap. Well, it was a special request we put in with Intel really, because bizarrely most agencies, PRs, publications, and tech journo outlets don’t spend a lot of time on the small stuff—which is a shame, because it’s fascinating to see how an Intel Core i9-10900K or Ryzen 9 5950X gets filtered down into the lower specced parts, and how they perform in contrast. Many of you will remember that Christian built a solid “office” PC back in our Holiday edition that featured this chip. But this was in a lot of ways quite gluttonous: the price tag was just a bit too high, so it got us thinking; “What is the cheapest PC you can build with this processor at its heart?”

This is what we ended up with. It took a few months to get the parts together, mostly because, again, companies don’t like showcasing their budget ranges, but after some nagging of management, and a few expense forms, we managed to get everything together that we needed to make this little beauty come to life.

Now, you can make this build even cheaper. Instead of that Core i3-10100 you could pick up an Intel Pentium Gold G6400 for $64, swap the memory out for the G.Skill Aegis kit, go for the EVGA 450 BR power supply we recommended, and a Rosewill FBM- 01 MicroATX tower for $25, and build yourself a rig for just $282.95. However, you would be cutting your core and thread count in half by doing so, and crippling your memory and CPU speeds in the process, which is not so good.