IS IT WORTH ENTERING AT THE BUDGET END OF NEXT-GEN GEAR?

WE’VE MADE IT to the end of our building process. These smaller builds are less stressful than some of the mini-ITX ones—certainly less than the custom water-cooled systems. Watch this space though, as we want to hop on that train soon! Anyway, this budget-end system, like most, is fairly straightforward to put together. We luckily had no real issues, aside from the SSD, as we couldn’t use the uppermost SSD slot due to the pre-existing heatsink. It just wouldn’t fit with the NZXT heatsink covering it. This led to us using the second slot instead, which does have its drawbacks. We’d always recommend using the top slot. However, when we tested our SSD on our read/write speed benchmarks, it still performed very well. The Adata XPG Gammix S70 Blade is a fantastic storage option for any build, especially at its current price.

The only other issue we faced was that when we first tried to turn the PC on, it was stuck in a boot loop cycle. All the lights would turn on, and then about a minute later it would restart. To overcome this, we updated the BIOS using the flashback method, with a clean USB drive formatted to FAT32. This is our favorite method, as you don’t even need to get to the BIOS to do this, or even have a CPU on the motherboard. Just hold down the BIOS FLBK button for a few seconds, and let it do its thing—not bad, hey? Anyway, this resolved our issue, and meant that we were ready to crack on with our system.