BUDGET

ANOTHER MONTH of drought, another month of ridiculous prices. Unfortunately, there’s no longer any stock of graphics cards at their recommended retail prices, so what we’re going to do is just list what GPU we would recommend you buy if stocks were available at their RRP, and tell you what that price should be, then compare it to what you would actually have to pay if you went out and purchased it from the scalpers.

That does mean things are a little different from usual, and it’s more difficult to compare these builds against those from last issue, but going forward, it should give us a nice base to work around. Sadly, this drought doesn’t look likely to abate any time soon, and with the fabs that are being built taking years before they start producing chips, we could be in this position for a long, long time.

That said, there is some good news. Well, sort of. In the AMD build, the 450W Corsair CV power supply has come down in price by around $20, and we’ve made some savings on the storage, too. Sadly, the processor has gone up by $5, and the price of our OEM OS keys have gone up by $7, too. We’ve also had to swap out the memory and motherboard for the cheapest options we could find, in a vain attempt to keep the prices as low as we could.