THERE’S QUITE THE HIKE on power supply prices this month we’re afraid. But in the interest of variety we’ve got two different options for you, both at 450W: The MWE 450 V2 from Cooler Master in our budget AMD system, and the CX450 from Corsair in its Intel counterpart. The V2 is a bit cheaper, but the CX450 has a better efficiency rating (80+ Bronze vs the V2’s 80+ White certification), so it’s up to you to decide what you want to spend your money on.

AMD INGREDIENTS

Motherboards proved a pricey problem for our AMD build, where we’ve had to swap over to the Asus Prime B450M-A, a slightly smaller Micro ATX board than the previous MSI Pro B450M. Bear in mind that if you don’t buy the Asus mobo new, you may need a 2nd-generation AMD CPU in order to flash the BIOS for Ryzen 3000 compatibility. We’re not changing much else on the AMD build, though. The 120GB SU650 drive from Adata has dropped in price again, making it an absolute steal at just $20.

INTEL INGREDIENTS

We’re shaking things up a bit more over in the Intel machine. First up, the previous motherboard is no longer on sale, so that’s gone. Replacing it is another Asus Prime board, the eye-catching Prime Z390-P. We’re shaving $10 off the overall price by switching over to EVGA’s single-fan GTX 1660 Super Black Gaming, then a few dollars more by changing up the memory for G.Skill’s Ripjaws V Series RAM at the same capacity and speed we had before.