THE BUILDS
THIS MONTH’S STREET PRICES...
BUDGET
THIS MONTH has been a little weird. In some segments of the market, the entry-level stuff has held fast. Yet, on the top end, once more we’ve had massive swings as manufacturers vie to one-up each other on volume sold, without compromising too heavily on their margins. Not one key area has gone up consistently, either. Some CPU pricing has dropped on AMD’s side (not surprising, given the announcement of the Ryzen 9000 series), and PSUs have crept up, but that’s about it.
We’ve actually made some sizable changes to both our Intel and AMD rigs this month, with each receiving a new SSD in the form of the 1TB Kingston NV2, replacing the Crucial P3. Not only is the NV2 slightly cheaper at $56 versus $61, it also packs better stats, thanks in no small part to its PCIe 4.0 pedigree.
For our AMD system, we’ve swapped out the motherboard, shifting from ASRock’s B650 PG Lightning to Gigabyte’s Eagle AX, and we’ve ditched the TeamGroup T-Create Classic kit for the Patriot Viper Venom setup. It’s slightly more money than last time, but it’s got far better performance stats, clocking in at 6,000 MT/s and a CAS latency of 36, versus last month’s 5600 and CAS latency of 46. That’s a big difference that should translate to far better in-game and general CPU performance too.