THIS MONTH’S STREET PRICES...

THERE AIN’T NO stopping the turning of the worlds, and the same is true of our Blueprints. This issue, we’ve seen some significant changes across the board, including a revamp of our mid-range build to be a little less ambiguous, and a little more, er, midrange. Yep, that’s right. And what’s triggered all this? Escalating prices, that’s what. Those pesky manufacturers are at it again, and supply and demand has shifted its attention away from the launch of Nvidia’s new Supers and solely on the SSD market.

Our budget builds were first on the block, and saw some significant price bumps, particularly across the motherboard and GPU segments. Although not quite as drastic as some of the shifts in the Mid-range and Turbo builds, the value of the $ dramatically changes when you have less of it. That’s certainly true when it comes to budget PC builds, that’s for sure.

To counteract—and in some ways pre-empt—the shifting SSD market, we’ve been a bit radical with both systems’ storage solutions, downgrading our primary SSD from a 1TB PCIe 4.0 to a 512GB variant. For our backup storage, we’ve shifted to a 1TB PCIe 3.0 SSD instead. It may be slower than a 4.0 drive, but this does give us $45 worth of savings. 512GB is plenty for an OS, and although a little frugal, 1TB of (still super quick) SSD storage for your games and files as a backup drive is more than manageable.