The Footman – The budget Intel PC for 1080p gaming for £600, $650 or €700

The Footman is next evolution step over the Thrifter, with a target price of £600, $650 or €700 (plus or minus 10%). While still a budget an entry-level gaming PC, it is capable of good 1080p performance in all current games, including AAA titles, at a fairly high level of detail (even though you might have to drop the resolution in some cases). The build is almost entirely made of parametric filters, to stay as close as possible to the target price.


CPU

The core of this build is the Kaby Lake Intel i5-7500. It gives true 4 core performance and until the launch of Ryzen CPUs it has been the default option for a non-overclockable gaming PC. This component comes with a stock cooler so there is no need for a 3rd party one.

Motherboard

We have here the same motherboard filter as the Thrifter: a board with H270 chipset will give the best balance of price and features for this build.

RAM

While the vast majority of games today work fine on 8GB of memory, in real life use people will have other programs running in the background. Having 16GB of RAM will allow this build to keep its performance no matter how many tabs you have open in your browser. The filter picks the cheapest 2x8GB kit available at the moment. Once more speed doesn’t really matter at this level.

Storage

The WD Caviar Blue 1TB inherited from the Thrifter is being augmented by a 120GB SSD. This will allow faster boot times into Windows and faster launch of programs.

Video Card

The 1050Ti is a step above the other entry-level cards being between 20-30% faster, depending on the game. It allows true 1080p gaming experience in all titles, with the caveat that the more demanding AAA games will require you to dial down the settings a notch or two.

Case / PSU

These parts are the same as in the Thrifter build. I’m going for the cheapest possible case having a rating of at least 4 stars, however at this level any case will do. The PSU filter searches for at least 400W and 80+ efficiency. I rely on the compatibility filter to make sure all components fit inside the case.


Upgrade options:

Unfortunately at this moment there is no direct step up from this build. The current surge in crypto-currency mining has cause all the mid-level graphic cards (GTX 1060, RX 470/570, RX 480/580 and even GTX 1070) to be either out of stock or reach absurd price levels.