THE BUILDS
THIS MONTH’S STREET PRICES...
BUDGET
THIS ISSUE’S been an interesting one for blueprints. What we’re seeing across the industr y is a slow but steady increase in SSD prices across the board. Almost ever y single SSD pick we had from last issue has increased by $20-30. This is likely down to those bumper New Year and Black Friday deals finally subsiding.
However, we’re mildly concerned that this may be a continuing trend across the industr y, depending on how NAND pricing continues moving for ward. It’s one to watch, for sure.
Our budget builds for this issue have remained reasonable, all things considered. Changes were minimal—we’ve swapped a few components out across the two builds, both of those cases being the memor y across the systems and the primar y SSD. We’ve opted for the 1TB Crucial P3 Plus PCIe 4.0 drive for our OS, as the MSI Spatium M450 had increased significantly.
We also changed up the memor y. Teamgroup’s Elite Plus DDR5 @ 4800 had climbed by $20 for AMD, so we swapped it for the non-heatsinked Elite variant for a slightly lower price. The Patriot Viper Venom @ 5200 kit seemingly disappeared from stock entirely, so we’ve gone for the 5600 kit for only $3 more.