BUDGET

WE’RE IN A BIT OF AN ODD PLACE at the moment. There’s a huge demand for new products that’s far outstripping the supply, and on top of that, because of Black Friday (we’re actually writing this two days before), prices have annoyingly crept up across the vast multitude of PC parts, as retailers prepare to decrease the price again to simulate a sale-like atmosphere. This is one of the big reasons why we always recommend going to a site like Tom’s Hardware or PC Gamer, or even TechRadar when it comes to sourcing good deals. These boys and girls do the legwork for you, to hopefully sift the wheat from the chaff, so to speak.

Unfortunately, despite our best efforts, and because of these market shenanigans, we’ve seen both of our builds steadily increase in price, with the AMD build increasing by an incredible $53, and the Intel build up $51. This is even with some hefty concessions made on both builds in terms of performance. We’ve had to drop to a 250GB Samsung 980 Pro in the AMD build, down from the 500GB we featured last issue, and change out the memory to some OLOy 3,000 MHz RAM instead. Our Intel machine has also seen some significant change, with us going for the positively old 500GB Samsung 970 Evo M.2 PCIe 3.0 SSD (still a darn quick drive), and changing to the Core i5-10400F as well, which lacks integrated graphics. Most frustratingly, the 500GB 970 Evo is still cheaper than the 256GB XPG SX8100 we featured last issue. Just be wary: If you do plan to build this rig without the graphics card, you will need to opt for the standard Core i5-10400 instead, or rummage around your spare parts bin for a GPU.