THIS MONTH’S STREET PRICES...

BUDGET

AFTER COMPLETING A budget Intel build under the $1000 mark for this month’s cover build, we thought we’d take a few things from there to bring costs down further across both our Blueprint budget machines. First things first, we decided to upgrade our Intel i3-12100 to a newer Intel Core i3-13100F. Yes, it being an F model means it requires a GPU. However, because we are adding one, we can save a few bucks on the CPU. Also, this 13th gen i3- 13100F is cheaper than the previous i3-12100 by $13, so for this system, it’s a no-brainer. It will more than likely require a BIOS update on our motherboard, though. This may require you to have an older CPU to boot it up into the BIOS, so always bear that in mind when upgrading to the next-gen CPU, even if it states it’s compatible.

The other change to the Intel budget machine was to bring in the Intel ARC A750 we used from our cover build to replace the Asus TUF Gaming EVO OC GeForce GTX 1660 Ti 6GB GPU. The latter card went from $260 last issue up to $300 now. The Intel card is newer, cheaper, and has faster GPU and clock speeds, and we experienced comfortable 1080p gaming. Other than the CPU/GPU changes, the build remained the same. We saw price decreases on our motherboard and SSD, and our total price went down by $100. It’s now close to our AMD machine in overall cost.