THE BUILDS
THIS MONTH’S STREET PRICES...
BUDGET
AFTER THE HEAVY INFLUX of new components to our Intel budget build last issue, including a new CPU and GPU, we kept the changes to a minimum this time around. The only changes of note here are a new B660 motherboard from ASRock, swapped in to trim the overall price without sacrificing performance, and a new SSD from PNY which should exactly match the MSI Spatium M450 in the AMD system in terms of performance. The AMD build gets a new motherboard, snapping up Gigabyte’s B550 Aorus Elite for $125. It’s $5 more expensive than the previous mobo, but the Aorus Elite is the superior board so it’s a fair tradeoff. As a result, both of our budget-build motherboards now have RGB lighting, an unintended but not unwelcome addition.
A sale saw the price of our Ryzen 5 5600X processor drop by $20, while the Core i5-12600 held steady at $230, making the AMD chip currently the cheaper option—although the Intel CPU still has an edge in overall performance. Another sale brought MSI’s Mech edition of the RX 6600 XT GPU down below $400, making it currently the closest 6600 XT to the card’s original retail price. It replaces an XFX GPU, which didn’t change in price.