THE BUILDS
THIS MONTH’S STREET PRICES...
BUDGET
SO, THE TIME HAS FINALLY COME, we can upgrade our budget AMD’s CPU. We have opted for the Ryzen 3 1200 CPU and seeing it in stock on Amazon.com was a joy, to say the least. The Ryzen 3 3100 would have been way better, but at around $345, it’s more than double the price of the Ryzen 3 1200. At around $40 more than our previous CPU, we can now double our cores, but unfortunately, it won’t double our threads just yet. Hopefully, in time, the Ryzen 3 3100 will slip into the budget build and make this a great full package.
Also in our AMD build, we hunted around and found some similarly-priced RAM sticks with a slight speed increase @ 3200MHz instead of @ 3000MHz. Crucial Ballistix 16GB (2x 8GB) DDR4-3200 CL16 Memory is a bit of a mouthful, but it will help us get that extra little bit of speed and future-proof it slightly. At $5 cheaper, we can’t complain either. These changes help us improve our build whilst still not pushing the budget too far. When you are building your own custom rig, it’s worth its weight in gold to look around. Yes, it can be time-consuming but, eventually, you’ll get to know the market like the back of your hand.