The Gigabyte Rig Review

Conclusion

The idea of the all AMD system is something we like a lot. Not only have they produced a huge improvement on older architecture with the Zen setup – X570 and 3rd Generation Ryzen – but the Navi GPU has somewhat slipped under the radar as a great option for anything at 1080 or 1440 and not all that bad at 4K.

When we did the ROG setup it was partly to show off how much of your system can be a single brand, but also what a big lump of cash could bring to your desktop. With the Gigabyte setup we looked more seriously at the kind of build that people would actually do themselves. After all, whilst there are some people for whom money is no object, for the majority of us pennies are very hard to come by. Could you therefore produce a system which had good all-round performance whilst leaning slightly more towards the gaming world for a figure which is within the reach of the average user?

Unlike ASUS Gigabyte have a smaller overall range so for the cooling and case we turned to BeQuiet and we were delighted with the results. The Pure Base 500 case is easy to work with and looks very nice without going too hard down the road of flash and flair. Instead it is built around the idea of being solid, providing good cooling, nice to look at with a neutral aesthetic allowing the user to go down either the stealthy route or heavy RGB as is their preference. The cooling was provided by a combination of Dark Rock Slim CPU cooler and Silent Wings 3 case fans. Even saturating the system with as much heat as we could generate we didn’t break the 90°C barrier and in regular use you wont even see temperatures as high as we obtained. Lastly in the BeQuiet setup we utilised the Pure Power 600W PSU. If you’ve been familiar with BeQuiet it is probably largely due to the excellence of their PSUs and the Pure Power is no exception with plenty of smooth efficient power.

We’ve previously reviewed all three of the main elements of the Gigabyte system, the Ryzen 5 3600, the Gigabyte X570 Aorus Pro motherboard and the Aorus RX 5700 XT GPU. On their own they were impressive and combining them here doesn’t diminish their stature. The Aorus Pro motherboard in particular combines a lot of desirable features with some attractive looks. Perhaps the one element that really helps it stand out from the competition is the pricing. We all know that the PCI Express 4.0 elements of the latest AM4 motherboards are expensive but Gigabyte have managed to pass on the smallest price increase to the consumer. Any money you can save without compromising performance allows you to beef up other areas of your system, or even just drizzle some RGB trinkets upon it. What we particularly liked was how the early tests followed exactly what you’d expect when you’re comparing a Ryzen 5 3600 to a Ryzen 7 3800X, but as we moved towards benchmarks which better replicate real world performance the gap narrowed considerably until we reached the gaming FPS when there almost was nothing to separate them.

If you’re on a budget but still want the ability to use your system in almost every use that we ask of them in these modern times then the combination of Gigabyte components on BeQuiet foundations brings surprising performance without breaking the bank.

  

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