At a Glance: NZXT BLD Starter PC Plus Review

NZXT’s BLD Start PCs are designed to be cost effective gaming desktops that are built entirely from aftermarket components. In other words, you could build this entire system by yourself with the exact same parts. Typically, building a gaming computer of your own will net you more bang for your bucks, but this system’s relatively low price tag may make you think twice about building a custom PC of your own.

Design & Hardware

This pre-built system comes built inside of one of NZXT’s H500 PC cases. The base model retails for $899 and features an MSI B450 Tomahawk motherboard with an AMD Ryzen 5 2600 hexa-core processor and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 graphics card. For a base model, it also comes rather well equipped with 16GB of TeamGroup T-Force Delta DDR4 RAM clocked at 3,000MHz and a 512GB SSD.

Add in a copy of Windows and it would cost you right around $850 to build this system yourself, which means you save relatively little by opting to go in that direction. That’s also not considering the added time required to build it on your own.

Our sister site PCMag tested one of these systems. The model they received is labelled as the NZXT BLD Start PC Plus, which features an upgraded Nvidia GeForce GX 1660 Ti graphics card and twice as much storage space. The 1TB SSD utilized by NXZT in this system is one of Intel’s 660P series M.2 NVMe drives that features read/write speeds of up to 1,800MB/s. These upgrades feel well worth the cost, as it just raises the system’s price to $999.

Benchmarking

PCMag tested this system with several benchmarks and compared the results against a few other pre-built systems that they tested before. None of these systems are evenly matched, and all of them are available in multiple hardware configurations, which limits what we can learn by comparing the test results. As these systems do sort of compete with each other, it does gives us some insight into which is better for the price, as well as helping readers like you to know which offers a level of performance that is adequate for your needs.

Kicking things off with Cinebench R15 to test the CPU, we get rather predictable results. The AMD Ryzen 5 2600 simply can’t quite stand toe-to-toe with the faster Ryzen 7 2700X inside of the Origin PC Neuron or the Core i7 CPUs powering the Lenovo and Digital Storm PCs. It does turn in respectable performance numbers though.

3DMark’s graphics tests also bear no surprises. The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti inside of the NZXT BLD Starter PC Plus easily surpasses the slower RX 580 and scrapes by the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060. It fails to compete with the RTX 2070 and RTX 2080 GPUs, but it’s literally not supposed to by design.

We see essentially the same results in real-world benchmarks on Far Cry 5 and Rise of the Tomb Raider.

Conclusion

Considering that this system offers solid performance and comes at a price just slightly above the cost of its parts, this is really a no-brainer. If you want a decent gaming PC and either don’t have time to build a custom one or don’t know how to, then NZXT’s BLD Start PC Plus is an excellent solution. Its closest competitor is the Lenovo Legion T730, but that system costs $1,529 and offers worse gaming performance as well as a smaller SSD. The faster Digital Storm Lynx and Origin PC Neuron as configured both cost considerably more.

The HP Pavilion Gaming Desktop tested here does present a strongly priced if slower alternative. It retails for $569.99, but at the added cost of swapping the SSD for an HDD and cutting the RAM in half. All things considered, I’d recommend the NZXT as the best pre-built system here.

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