THIS MONTH’S STREET PRICES...

BUDGET

CES HAS COME and gone—you can read about all of the latest news on page 32. One of the most exciting launches for us hardware folk, however, had to be Nvidia’s Super line-up. Now all three are out there in the wild, they’ve shaken up what GPU should fit where in your next build.

The thing is, our budgets aren’t quite so generous, and sadly only one of the cards made it into this month’s blueprints. But more on that later—we’ve got a budget build to go over first. This month has been fairly hectic. A number of parts have changed across both systems, with memor y, SSD, and motherboards all on the chopping block for both builds.

AMD in par ticular saw an increase in the CPU price, countered by a drop in the GPU. The bigger problem, however, was the TeamGroup SSD we snatched up last issue. It was too expensive this time around, so we’ve chucked it in favor of Adata’s Legend 800 SSD. On top of that, we’ve bumped up our motherboard selections on both the Intel and the AMD rig for something a bit more premium and futureproofed. For AMD, we’ve dropped the A620 Plus and gone for the X670-P from Asus. For Intel, Asus’s Prime B760 was swapped out for the MSI Pro Z790-S. Both are premium solutions, and both bump up the price, but they do bring better power deliver y, a more premium BIOS, and more I/O than their counterpar ts for not a huge bump in overall price.