WE ARE STILL in the throes of supply shortages right now. And you can see that across both our budget builds. We’ve managed to claw back some costs, but sadly GPU prices on the low-end are still at unmanageable levels, and stock is precarious. To that end we’ve swapped to the MSI Radeon RX 5500 XT Gaming X for our AMD system, and the GeForce GTX 1650 Super OC on Intel. Both are roughly the same price, and perform similarly—the 1650 Super edges out the 5500 XT for performance and is slightly cheaper too, although both are floating above their RRPs annoyingly.

We’ve also had to swap out our Intel processor from the Core i5-10500 to the Core i3-10100. This saves us a ton of cash, bringing that processor price down to just $114. It’s still slightly more costly than the AMD Ryzen 3 3100 in our Red build, but it does perform ever so slightly better, and of course comes with Hyper-Threading, so you still got those four cores and eight threads.

Memory is a bit of a sticking point for this build, but we’ve kept the 16GB in play. Theoretically you could possibly get away with 8GB of DDR4 if you really need to shave off some cost, but it’s only about $15-20 cheaper than picking up a 16GB kit, and that extra memory headroom will do a ton of good. One place you could save money on this build would be by dropping the secondary storage, saving you $40 on each build. Alternatively, with the Intel setup you could take the GPU out of the equation entirely and bring the price down to just $493. Sadly that’s not possible with the AMD system as the Ryzen 3 3100 lacks integrated graphics.