THE BUILDS
THIS MONTH’S STREET PRICES...
BUDGET
CREATING A BUDGET build for under $1K may not result in a top-end machine, but it does force you to think about how to spend your money wisely. With new AMD and Intel chips coming towards the end of the year, we hope this will reduce the price of the current budget-end CPUs, freeing some cash to spend elsewhere.
We’re not quite there yet, though. Our AMD machine sees two changes this time. First, we save $30 by swapping from ASRock to MSI for our GPU choice. Out goes the 6650 XT Challenger D OC and in comes the 6650XT MECH 2X OC. We’ve managed to maintain an OC card for less money, so it makes sense. We can’t complain about out-of-the-box overclocking for this price.
By changing our previous Corsair Vengeance LPX CL16 to PNY’s XLR8 Gaming EPIC-X RGB we also get a splash of color in our AMD machine. Costing an extra $2 and performing similarly, it’s a cheap upgrade. A price hike in our previous HDD meant that we had to bring in Seagate’s SkyHawk Surveillance 7200 HDD to replace the awkwardly-named Seagate ST4000NM0024. This change is made on both the AMD PC and the Intel one.