NZXT is expanding its 'BLD' service to Canada after launching the unique service in the US just over a year ago. What exactly is BLD? If you missed our coverage from last year, BLD is the name of NZXT's custom desktop PC building service, with a twist.
Instead of picking a system build based on name, size, or a specific set of components, NZXT presents you with a list of popular games and asks you to choose three that you are interested in playing, either at 1080p or 1440p. You then select a budget and preference towards AMD or Intel, and NZXT will configure a system (sans monitor and peripherals) around those selections.
The recommended setup is based on data collected from "over ten million gaming hours." For whatever build comes up, NZXT provides a framerate prediction for each of the three games you selected, claiming accuracy within 10 percent.
It's been a long time since we played with BLD, so we kicked its tires one more time. Our selections: 1440p, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Shadow of Mordor, The Witcher III, $1,500, AMD. The system it recommend consisted of a Ryzen 5 2600X processor, 16GB of G.Skill Trident Z DDR4-3000 RAM, MSI GeForce GTX 1070 Armor 8G graphics card, and a 500GB Samsung 860 Evo SSD for $1,463.91.
From there, we could click on "lower price builds" or "higher price builds" to see other options, or hop into the configurator and tweak the components. It's pretty much how we remembered it, except the labor charge has since been cut from $350 to $99, and it's now available in Canada.
"Expanding into Canada is the obvious next step for BLD," says Johnny Hou, NZXT’s founder and CEO. "Since we launched BLD, we have received countless questions about when BLD is going to be available internationally. That is why we are excited to bring BLD to Canada. It marks the first step in our goal of making PC gaming easily accessible to gamers around the world."
Go here to give BLD a whirl. Note that prices are listed in US dollars and convert to Canadian dollars at checkout.
