Special Operations Group

Having recently built my new rig I figured I'd show off my pride and joy and see what you guys think. So the aim was to have something that could play the majority of games in 1080p so I was going for more of a cost effective enthusiast build while still providing upgrade options.

So without further ado, the parts... The rhyme and reason.

Motherboard: MSI B450 Pro Carbon AC

For the purpose of futureproofing my rig, I went with the most solid motherboard in the B450 class. This allowed me to avoid the BIOS/CPU compatibility conflict present in B350 boards. It also boasts some great features for overclocking and will allow for those vital upgrades.

Processor: AMD Ryzen 5 2600

AMD have proven to be great competition for Intel in the last couple of years. While Intel still remain to be superior, the Ryzen 5 2600 is hard to beat in its price bracket. It's a hex core with 12 threads at a stock of 3.4GHz with an awesome boost feature taking it up to 4GHz.

Graphics: Zotac Geforce GTX 1060 6Gb AMP!

There is some competition to consider when picking this card up but considering this GPU was build from the ground up with quality in mind, Zotac have done an awesome job and is factory overclocked to boot. I really think this was great value for the performance.

Memory: Vulcan T-Force 8Gb (2x4Gb) 3000Mhz DDR4

I considered 2x8Gb modules here but I couldn't justify for the price for my current needs. I decided to take advantage of the four memory slots and expand by a further 2x4Gb in the future. The only trade off was not dual channelling 2x8Gb modules which I doubt would effect performance too much. I opted for the 3000Mhz speeds to feed that hunger AMD CPU's typically have and are definitely present in their Ryzen series.

SSD: ADATA 240Gb SU650

With a low price point and with reasonable performance of read/write speeds up to 520/450MB per second, this was a no brainer with the obvious drawback in capacity. I do plan to upgrade this to a larger capacity in the future but I am looking to a Western Digital 1TB HDD first.

Power: EVGA 450W BR 80+ Bronze

Does what it says on the tin. EVGA is a great brand when it comes to power supplies and will be more than enough to power my rig. However, I do plan to replace this with a more tidy modular supply from the kings, Seasonic.

Case: Fractal Design G

Fractal Design are a Scandinavian company and I'm pretty sure creating amazing looking things is in their DNA. This mid case is great value, it has reasonable cable management options, comes with two tool free storage slots, two front mounted fans that provide reasonable airflow and a tempered glass side panel. Sweet.


The total for this rig sits at £682


Would you do anything differently, have any ideas for the future potential of this build or any feedback in general, please share.. I always like to expand my knowledge in the area of building, its become a bit of a hobby for me.


Picture Album: https://photos.app.goo.gl/GRuV5dJjQB4xRPnB8

Nice looking rig for a good price.

personally i would have gone for Intel, sad for the price but in gaming Intel is superior to no extent.

But from my professional view.
Intel is best for gaming. and high end AMD processors are better at workstation tasks(high Demand apps like video editing.) the point here is games take from 1 to 4 cores(in some cases 8), and this is where single core performance is important.
but the Processor should run any game you want it to.

the memory gpu and motherboard are good for the price tag of the build.

the SSD i always use Samsung as i have good experince with their SSD's. But this is also a comparison of speed, time between failure and the price tag.

but yea thats just my view IT is my work and more, so i don't look at prices that much. Have fun with it and see you in game sometime.

Nice looking rig for a good price.

personally i would have gone for Intel, sad for the price but in gaming Intel is superior to no extent.

But from my professional view.
Intel is best for gaming. and high end AMD processors are better at workstation tasks(high Demand apps like video editing.) the point here is games take from 1 to 4 cores(in some cases 8), and this is where single core performance is important.
but the Processor should run any game you want it to.

the memory gpu and motherboard are good for the price tag of the build.

the SSD i always use Samsung as i have good experince with their SSD's. But this is also a comparison of speed, time between failure and the price tag.

but yea thats just my view IT is my work and more, so i don't look at prices that much. Have fun with it and see you in game sometime.

Cheers Sander and ye I agree with your comments. I'm a massive fan of Samsung products so I may very well replace my ADATA SSD with Samsung. Intel are fantastic and I can appreciate their ability to develop incredible processors. However, I was going for the cost effective build and AMD tend to strike a chord there.

All that said, it has been absolutely flawless thus far. I recently picked up Hitman 2 and from the looks of it, it runs at a max of 60FPS and this rig remained capped at the max. Ultimately I will be looking to run Cyberpunk 2077, so I may look in to overclocking, running 16gb of RAM and that improvement on the SSD.

Cheers for your input mate

Its been a while since I built a PC... erm AMD Athlon 64 anyone? :p

Looking up some of those parts and from my knowledge of PC's. I think that is a great price to pay for that performance. Should just about run SWAT 4 now

How long did it take to build?

Wow Athlon 64! I was a little ahead of that with their Phenom series, this is only my second build so you can imagine the gap I've had myself.

I definitely feel I've hit the sweet spot for an enthusiast build and have no real complaints so far. I do find the stock cpu cooler to be a little noisy but I'm quite funny with that sort of thing.

It took roughly two hours, I did some fiddling with the cables to get them as tidy as possible, that tempered glass side panel makes you really conscious of the look lol.

I've also picked up a 21 inch AOC HD monitor 75hz refresh, 1ms response time for £75. My only gripe with that is the blacks don't pop very well, they look more washed out but for the price, can't complain.

Added a few more pics to the album of it alive and kicking.

I really like that case... bet it looks awesome in the dark. Really nice job. You have got me wanting to make a new PC after 10 years myself now!

It certainly does, unfortunately the motherboard doesn't present the white LED's very well, it seems to get mixed with a bit of red and gives a pink'ish colour, so I'll work a little more on the look at a later date. I have been using MSI Afterburner and Kombuster to see the loads.. Right now the GPU is the weak link so I will be looking in to overclocking. Firstly though, gotta improve the temperature so I think a radiator for the CPU is on the cards and a powerful fan for the bottom of the case to disperse the heat from the graphics card.. That should cool things right down

Start that savings jar buddy, its always fun to do