THIS MONTH’S STREET PRICES...

BUDGET

THINGS AREN’T GETTING any easier on the GPU front, are they? Prices from resellers (read: scalpers) have dropped a little since our last issue, but stock is still incredibly hard to find, and the aforementioned scalpers are still buying up as many cards as possible. We’re concerned that the arrival of the SSD-leveraging chia cryptocurrency will cause a similar shortage of drives, but the western market seems largely unaffected so far.

Speaking of drives, we’ve got some new additions this month. Western Digital’s terabyte WD Blue HDDs are once again cheaper than Seagate’s competitor, saving us a few bucks on both budget builds this time around. We’ve also shaved 20 dollars off the price of the Intel machine by swapping the boot drive out for a similar P300 SSD from US manufacturer Patriot. Overall transfer speeds may lag a little behind the Samsung drive it’s replacing, but it isn’t likely that you’ll notice a difference.

We’ve got new memory for our AMD budget build: 16GB of G.Skill’s Aegis RAM at 3,000MT/s. This shouldn’t alter performance, but the previous memory was no longer on sale, making the Aegis the budget-conscious option. The AMD Athlon 3000G CPU is still a steal at $90, but that does make it 10 dollars more than last month, so be sure to keep an eye on price trends if you’re looking to buy.