A beginner’s guide to assembling a budget gaming desktop
By: Swayamjit Saha
Tags: Pc Building, Amd Ryzen, Beginners Guide

Photo by Timothy Dykes on Unsplash

Recently, I built a desktop for my dad; a moderate budget one keeping in mind to add up components in the cabinet which can run the applications seamlessly and can at least run GTA V at 60fps. Honestly, I would like to thank my senior Arkajyoti Choudhury and tech guru Bharat Nagpal (founder of iGyaan), without whom I believe that the journey would have been quite-a-hectic.

To start off, I used an AMD Ryzen 3200G APU with Vega Graphics as the king of the throne room, followed by an Asus A320M budget-gaming motherboard, which includes an AMD AM4 socket to hold well the Ryzen 3000 series processors. The word APU is a hybrid term which conventionally signifies Accelerated Processing Unit; a microprocessor with in-built graphics processing units (GPU). I used 2X 8Gb DDR4 3000MHz Crucial Ballistix RAM modules to stick into the motherboard; a 480Gb Crucial SSD to carry-in fast booting speeds for the machine, a decent file-sharing speed and fast-loading of applications! Also, the Ryzen 3200G APU comes with a thermal wrath cooler out of the box, which to my knowledge is one of the best coolers to come-in-handy when you’re in a real tight budget; it is applied with thermal paste so you really need not worry about getting a new one!

Now, for the outer case, I used an Antec N200 medium tower gaming cabinet which, is a good hunk since you get a really good-looking LED front strip to flaunt off, a fan at the back next to the I/O shield, magnetic dust filters at the top and bottom of the tower and a transparent black shield to view the ambience inside! I used a Thermaltake 450W Power Supply Unit to charge the components inside but, I believe if you can invest a little bit more go for the 550W module as it will be great if you’re planning to install a dedicated GPU later on. For my build, since the budget was tight and we didn’t want to add a GPU later on, I went for the Ryzen 3200G APU which has a decent capability of handling some seriously daunting games! To add a crisp of lightness inside, I used an USB LED lightstrip and tucked it around the four corners to spotlight what’s inside! I routed the cables of the PSU through the vent-holes of the cabinet to skip the mesh inside and it looks something like this.

Finally, here’s what you can take from this story:

It’s not rocket science to build a desktop for the first time until you just be a little bit extra-conscious while placing the processor in the socket of your motherboard, aligning with the marked notch and pulling the lever down to secure the position. Bingo! If you’re a gamer, try to go with a conventional CPU and then integrate it with a GPU to unleash the real performance of gaming. Always, remove the cooler brackets before-hand installation of the cooler; support the mount bracket at the back and diagonally fix the screws of the cooler until you screw them tight! While removing the cooler, you should not press hard on the chipset instead, you should turn the cooler a few degrees and then slowly apply pressure upwards until it comes out. Breaking the myth: Yes, the default thermal paste is good to go and you are not required to apply external thermal paste before installation. If you want to apply an external thermal paste, you should remove the paste from the cooler with a thin cloth and then re-apply your paste.