Boson 3.0 $350 Gaming PC Build - March 2016 #Helpful Post

Hey guys, this is Austin,

and it's time for a new version

of one of my most popular PC builds.

Say hello to the Boson 3.0.

While there are a lot of advantages

in getting into PC gaming,

the price is not always one of them.

That's where this build comes in.

For $350, you're getting a computer

that can match or exceed

the level of console performance, for about the same price.

Inside, this is a huge upgrade over the previous build.

We're going from a dual-core

to a quad-core AMD Athlon X4 860K.

With a lot of games these days

straight up requiring 4 cores,

the 860K is still a solid performer,

being able to clock up to 4GHz,

which is definitely not bad for a budget CPU.

When it comes to budget builds,

having a decent CPU is important,

not only to be able to play games today,

but also to give you a little bit of reassurance

they'll still be able to play the latest

and greatest in a few years.

Paired with a GIGABYTE A68H motherboard,

you're getting a fairly basic setup

that'll still get the job done.

You've got all the expected things,

such as USB 3 as well as SATA 3.

The real star of the show, though,

is the XFX Radeon R7 360 graphics card.

When it comes to a build that's less than $400,

your choice of graphics card is especially important,

and with the R7 360, you're getting a lot of firepower,

that's roughly equivalent

to what you'll find in the latest consoles.

Based on AMD's latest GCN Architecture,

and paired with two gigabytes of GDDR5 memory,

this has some serious horsepower.

When it comes to Grand Theft Auto 5,

you're able to play at medium settings

at 1080p with decent frame rates.

You'll have to bump things down

to low at 1080p for The Witcher 3,

but it's still absolutely playable.

Pick a slightly less demanding title like Rocket League,

and you're able to play at 1080p on high settings,

and still get really respectable frame rates.

Counter-Strike GO is also another game

that the Boson 3.0 has no problem handling.

We're still able to play on high settings,

and the frame rates are no joke.

When you take a step back

and compare to the previous generation Boson,

the Fire Strike score tells the story.

This is over three times as powerful

when it comes to graphics performance.

Housing the build is the Rosewill R363 case.

Now it's fairly straightforward,

however it's totally fine for this build.

You've got plenty of room inside to work,

and it also comes with a bundled 400 watt power supply.

The Boson 3.0 is also using eight gigabytes

of Crucial Ballistix memory.

Now, eight gigabytes is enough to run

basically any game out there right now,

however it's very easy for you to upgrade

to 16 gigabytes a little bit later on,

if you feel like you need to upgrade.

For storage, I thought a little bit outside the box,

and went with a 120 gigabyte ADATA SSD.

The advantages of an SSD are huge.

It speeds up almost all aspects of a computer.

However, 120 gigabytes is not exactly

a ton of room for games,

so for a little bit more you could upgrade to a larger SSD,

or you could also swap it out entirely,

and use a one terabyte Western Digital Blue hard drive.

Considering there's plenty of room inside the case

for several other hard drives,

you could also just stick with the SSD,

and add extra hard drives as you need them.

And that's one of the best parts

of building your own computer.

You can customize it however you want.

If you guys are curious,

I actually have a full tutorial

showing you how to build a Boson 3.0,

and you guys can go check that out.

I also have links to all the parts I use

in the description of this video.

So hopefully you guys found this helpful,

and I will catch you in the next one.