THE BUILDS
THIS MONTH’S STREET PRICES...
LAST ISSUE, we paid more attention to the overall costs of the budget builds and tried to level the playing field. With increases across the board for PC components, our costs had risen to the point where they weren’t exactly budget builds anymore. So we made a few adjustments to bring prices down while still of fering well-rounded PCs. With changes to the PSU, GPU, SSD, and HDD for the AMD machine, we managed to bring the price down, but a few extra swaps this time around have lowered it even fur ther.
First, we swapped out our A SRock X570 Steel Legend ATX AM4 motherboard and replaced it with an MSI B550M PRO-VDH WIFI Micro ATX mobo. Although it’s a smaller Micro ATX form factor board, it does ever y thing we need it to and saves $15. Our biggest saving came when downgrading our GPU, instead of sticking with our A SRock Radeon RX 6600 XT Challenger D OC 8GB, we opted for a 6500 XT card, an Asus TUF Gaming OC Radeon RX 6500 XT 4GB GPU, saving us $90. We kept the same HDD, SSD, and RAM configuration but chose a smaller PSU as the larger EVGA offering from the last issue was no longer on sale. These changes bring our overall price for the AMD machine down from $921 to $805—a saving of $116. There’s a small hit to per formance, due to our GPU and motherboard alternatives, but nothing that will be a major detriment to this build.