THE BUILDS
BUDGET
ALTHOUGH WE CONSIDERED properly swapping out the motherboard in our AMD Budget build this issue, ASRock’s Phantom Gaming 4 remains the most affordable full-ATX scale B550 mobo on the market. Stock availability has seen it come off sale though, so we’ve made a slight swap over to the AC model, adding Wi-Fi to this machine. We’ve got a new chip too; high demand for the Ryzen 5 3600 has seen it jump in price, while a sale has made its big brother the 3600X actually come in cheaper. We’ve left the GPU as is: MSI’s RX 5600 XT is still the best-value version of the card.
The AMD build has been peeking at the Intel build’s notes, and is following suit with the same GeiL Evo Spear memory kit at a higher 3,000MHz frequency. Inexplicably, this kit is slightly cheaper than the 2,400MHz kit in the Intel system. Both systems now have upgraded SSDs too: Team Group’s GX2 model as opposed to the GX1 we were using previously, a newer iteration of the same SATA drive at the same capacity for a mere $2 more.