blueprint a part-by-part guide to building a better pc
THE BUILDS
THIS MONTH’S STREET PRICES...
AH, 2024, a time of change. Here we have it folks, a new generation of CPUs. The cycle continues, and AMD has finally debuted its latest Ryzen 9000 generation chips to the masses.
Only one problem: they’re a bit underwhelming on the price to performance front, and they’re currently beleaguered with some pretty significant Windows bugs, too, causing performance to be sub-optimal. This may change, but for the time being, given how great value the 7000 series is, we’re sticking with the last gen.
This does mean that prices for everything else are pingponging around faster than a bat out of hell, which makes it particularly difficult to price these builds up. Nonetheless, we’ve come up with a list of six fine builds.
Our budget systems have remained relatively solid at this price point, though we have had to make a few changes. Our AMD build received a new motherboard, as the price had bounced up considerably. Alongside that, we’ve also picked up a new set of memory, as the Patriot Viper kit we were using had shot up by close to $30. Instead, for $4 more than last issue, we’ve grabbed Silicon Power’s XPower Pulse gaming sku, which comes in at $4 more than last month, but beats last month’s kit, boosting speeds to 6,400 MT/s and dropping the CAS latency from 36 to 32.