a part-by-part guide to building a better pc

BUDGET

THIS HAS BEEN one of the most difficult times to talk about hardware, especially when it comes to pricing up builds. To give you some perspective on how the shortages, scalpers, and miners have put a strain on this industry, our AMD budget build went from $693 last issue to $1,092 this issue, with identical parts. That’s a $400 increase (or 58 percent) in cost in the space of a month, for exactly the same components. And even with extensive changes to that build, we’ve still only managed to mitigate the price increase to $157 more. But for that we’ve lost access to eight PCIe graphics lanes (So we’d be running 8x PCIe 3.0 instead of 16x PCIe 4.0 for the GPU), two cores, four threads, and we have 25 percent of the L3 cache we did have, and no access to PCIe 4.0 either.

However, we’ve kept the motherboard’s chipset the same, so if stock does come back we should be able to upgrade that  processor to a Ryzen 3 3100 at a later date, but it’s actually really difficult for us to recommend buying this build right now. If you need a PC, and we mean desperately need a budget PC, then this is a good recommendation. But honestly, hang tight and hopefully by summer things will have worked themselves out.