THE BUILDS
THIS MONTH’S STREET PRICES...
BUDGET
IT FEELS LIKE EVERY MONTH, we’re bracing ourselves for a new set of hardware launches. With CES finally landing, we’re being graced with a whole heap of them all at once. New AMD and Nvidia cards, and new Intel GPUs have launched roughly at the same time, although admittedly the Intel ones a little sooner.
That said, right now, they’re all a bit of a mystery in the world of Maximum PC; we’re still awaiting review samples and units to land with us, to figure out how exactly these cards tick. Nvidia has already announced that the RTX 5070 will deliver just as much performance as an RTX 4090, but at almost one quarter of the cost. Whether that’s true remains to be seen.
The long and the short of that? Unless you find an astonishingly good deal, it’s worth avoiding picking up a graphics card until the official reviews launch (at which point we’ll have rejigged our Blueprints segment here as well).
With that in mind, we’re changing a lot in our budget builds, predominantly in the land of AMD, finally dropping the Ryzen 5 7600 and bringing in a 9600X, plus a new B850 board (we’ve got one in for the next issue). That has skyrocketed the cost of our build up quite a bit, not only as the mobo and CPU bumped up the cost, but also as we needed to add a standalone CPU cooler. For our red build, we still slid under $1,000, but only barely, with the total cost shooting up by $138 on last month.