BUDGET

BOTH BUDGET BUILDS have seen small savings this month, although only the Intel system managed to dip below the $800 mark. Intel’s current lead is mostly due to a decent price drop on the i5-9600K processor, which now costs a very attractive $190. We’ve made plenty of changes here; first, both motherboards are now Phantom Gaming 4 models from ASRock. The Intel build has received the Z390 mobo because it’s the most affordable option, but the AMD build has given us a chance to both upgrade and make a saving with a new B550 board, bringing us forward a generation.

This should see minor general improvements in performance and power management, but the crucial addition is PCIe 4.0 support, allowing us to use 4th-gen M.2 SSDs for maximum transfer speeds. We’re not doing that yet, though. Why? Because this is a budget build, and currently the smallest PCIe 4.0 drives available are all 500GB models costing upwards of $100. Still, there’s a good range of cheap, low-capacity SATA III SSDs available now, so we’ve swapped the boot drives in both builds for 120GB Teamgroup GX1 SSDs. If cheaper PCIe 4.0 SSDs become available soon, we’ll take advantage of them.