THE BUILDS
BUDGET
WE’RE STARTING to dread putting these build lists together, especially when it comes to the GPU situation. So let’s address that first and foremost. We wrote this piece over a period of 24 hours. Two working days. In that time, the GPU we picked for the AMD build went out of stock overnight, and the GPU we had from last issue for the Intel build skyrocketed in price to a staggering $600. The closest available graphics card, the four-and-a-half-year-old GTX 1050 Ti that’s actually in stock, is now $500, and of course only available on Amazon via certain resellers.
We don’t know what to tell you. Right now, if you’re building these systems, you just have to be on your toes and hope you can pick up a GPU at a reasonable price when it’s available. Between the crypto-boom, the miners, the scalpers, and ordinary folk just trying to buy a damn graphics card, the likelihood of actually being able to get one of anything is near impossible. Fortunately both systems here are configured with integrated graphics as standard, so if you desperately need a rig, you can pick one of these up and run it through integrated, much like our feature build this issue.