BUDGET
WE’RE BEING very aggressive with our budget builds this issue. There have been a number of tweaks and changes to really try and make the most out of the budget we have, and see if we can’t drop the price to sub-$900 without compromising too heavily on performance while we do it.
Our AMD build had a few subtle changes in price, with last month’s spec dropping by $2. Still, we’ve swapped the motherboard for the ASRock B650 PG Lightning to save even more. It’s still a full-fat ATX board, with suitable power solutions, plenty of connectivity, and decent memory support, too.
Also, after seeing how aggressively prices have fallen on the DDR front, we’ve upgraded to a 32GB kit of DDR5 as our minimum budget spec moving forward. Admittedly, 5600 C46 isn’t the best spec out there, but it’s $12 extra for double the capacity. The final tweak comes in the form of our secondary 1TB PCIe SSD, where we’ve gone for the Crucial P3 SSD, as it’s slightly cheaper (by $4) than the MSI Spatium from last issue.
You might also be tempted by AMD’s latest 8400F chip. Six cores, 12 threads, no iGPU, and a full PCIe complement sounds tempting, but clock speeds are lower, and the cache has been halved compared to the 7600.