For my 2nd build of 2020, I have a budget build that I originally built for my friend Kenny to play Left 4 Dead 2, Sea of Thieves, and Destiny 2. The build was thrown together purely from spare parts I had lying around in my house, but I was still able to throw together a nice entry level system for him. There was one problem though, the Fractal Design Define R4 case was way too big for his needs. To quote his girlfriend: "What is that, and where are you planning on putting that?" To my disappointment, the build wasn't getting appreciated or utilized, so I decided to just scrap the build and find a better home for this system.

CPU / Motherboard / Ram

This i7-920 was a spare CPU from a separate X58 build. I would have liked to use a 6-core Xeon in this build, but the motherboard was giving me some weird booting error messages when I first built this system. I'm pretty sure I updated the BIOS, or at least attempted to, but eventually the error messages related to "hardware changes" stopped occurring, and I kept the i7-920 in there to avoid any more errors.

The motherboard also had a weird quirk where it would stop booting and start beeping after a reboot. Also the onboard sound wasn't working anymore, so I had to add a spare usb sound card I had lying around from an old headset. Overall this motherboard I picked up on /r/hardwareswap was really old, so I was happy to just toss in my spare i7-920, dial in a mild overclock, and call it a day. Ram was just some spare value sticks I had lying around to add up to 12GB.

CPU Cooler

I used this cooler on a previous X58 build with great success. The white heatsink looks absolutely awesome and does a great job of keeping temps low. Unfortunately due to tariffs, this cooler is now around $35 on Amazon. I'm hoping it goes back down to around $25, because this cooler looks and performs great for the price.

Storage

I think I bought 6 of these drives to start off 2019 and I'm finally getting through my last one in early 2020. Great drives for the price, I hope SSD's don't go up too much in 2020.

Video Card

I originally had a GTX 970 in this build for my friend Kenny, but I decided to downgrade it to a GTX 960 for flipping the build to lower costs. Since this is such a low-end budget build, even a slight change in price would help sell it faster.

Case

This case was leftover from a build I flipped back in 2019, and it's been just collecting dust in my closet. It's huge, old, missing a foot, and has some scratches on the acrylic window, but it still keeps temps and noise very low. The case is past it's prime relative to 2020 standards, but it definitely gets the job done. I'm really glad I held on to this case for so long and it helped keep the cost for this build even lower.

Power Supply

Great budget PSU from Amazon. I think I got this on Prime Day and was super hyped for the deal. Definitely overkill for the GTX 960, I wish I had a GTX 770 or 780 at the time to utilize the extra wattage. Still, a great value for the price for builds like these.

Conclusion

I'm not sure how much use this computer even saw with my buddy Kenny, but the buyer that eventually picked this PC up from me was more than happy with the size and look. He told me he was going to play some Rust with his buddies, and the small imperfections on the case didn't bother him at all. I'm super happy I was able to work through the initial boot error messages, and that the build is being used and appreciate by someone else. This might make me want to use older, less aesthetically pleasing cases in the future. Thanks for reading!