THE BUILDS
THIS MONTH’S STREET PRICES...
BUDGET
WELL FOLKS,
there we have it: two whole new generations of processors, and well, we’re still recommending the last generation across the majority of our builds. It’s a little bit wild out there right now. What’s the big holdup, then? Why aren’t we jumping ship to Intel and AMD’s latest and greatest? Simply put, it’s all a matter of price. Right now, both Team Blue’s 14th gen and Team Red’s 7000 series have been hit with a serious RRP hammer; the numbers don’t lie, and we’ve seen price drops of well over $100 in some cases over the last few months. This is, of course, intended to try and shift the remaining stock out of Intel and AMD’s warehouses, yet bizarrely, given how little extra performance you’re getting with the new chips, it has had the effect of making the older chips insanely good value for money. Weird, huh?
Our budget builds, then, have seen very little change outside of us just trying to hold on to those prices wherever we could. We’ve shifted both builds over to a new 650W EVGA PSU, in the process bumping up that maximum capacity by 50W in anticipation of new GPUs potentially drawing more juice in the coming months, but otherwise, there was very little that needed shuffling around. Pricing sort of flattened out between the two of them. Our AMD system in particular was an example of this, coming in at just $9 less than it was last month.