THE BUILDS THIS MONTH’S STREET PRICES...
BUDGET
WOW! Our Intel system looks like a whole new PC. The only things staying the same are the SSD (the T-Force Cardea Graphene Z44L is still one of the best-value PCIe 4.0 drives) and the Corsair 4000D Airflow case, everything else is new. The budget Intel rig was lagging behind the AMD system with its i5-12400 chip and RTX 3050 GPU, so both have been upgraded. The CPU is now the i5-12600, which is closer to the Ryzen 5 5600X in terms of performance with a similar price, beating it in multi-core workloads and significantly in single-core performance.
The GPU has jumped up a rung in the Nvidia hierarchy with an RTX 3060 from Gigabyte, which sits beneath the RX 6600 XT in the AMD build in terms of performance. Despite the lower RRP of the 3060, the 6600 XT is currently the cheaper card to buy, with GeForce GPU prices falling slower than Radeon ones.