THE BUILDS
THIS MONTH’S STREET PRICES...
BUDGET
IN OUR INTEL BUDGET MACHINE, we see a welcome price drop on both our SSD and GPU this month. This frees up some budget to play with, so we thought we’d switch things up and modernize this rig. The first thing we changed was the motherboard—we’ve stuck with ASRock but swapped from a B660 chipset to a more powerful Z690 Phantom Gaming 4/D5. Not only does this upgrade our chipset but we also now have DDR5 support. These DDR5 sticks have dipped in price since their release and are now more affordable, so it’s time to introduce them to our budget machine.
We swapped out our Corsair DDR4 3200MHz RAM for 16GB (2x 8GB) of Kingston FURY Beast @ 4800MHz. We also changed our previous Intel Core i5-12600 for the K-variant, a faster and stronger chip than before, so updating from DDR4 to DDR5 means the memory speed can increase from 3,200MHz to 4,800MHz which the 12600K supports. In terms of changes, the rest of this machine remains the same and with the fluctuating prices from last month’s budget machine, all these changes and updates ended up costing us $14 more than the previous build.