THIS MONTH’S STREET PRICES...

WE’D LIKE TO SAY it’s time to upgrade our AMD budget build’s processor, but stock availability is still hamstringing our efforts. Since we don’t need the integrated graphics offered by the Athlon 3000G, we contemplated upgrading to a Ryzen 3 3100, doubling our core and thread counts. But this chip is still largely out of stock, and with no 5000-series budget Ryzen 3 CPU on the horizon, we’re left with the dual-core 3000G. It’s a bit cheaper this month, at least.

The AMD machine does get a few fun new additions, though. We’ve got a new motherboard, the MSI Pro B450M Pro-M2 (we don’t know why it has “Pro” in the name twice either), and a new SSD, the Falcon NVMe drive from Adata. It promises upward of 3000MB/s read speeds in a PCIe 3.0 system, and comes at an excellent price for a quarter-terabyte of M.2 storage.

Our Intel build saw prices dropping across the board, with the Core i3-10100 falling to a very reasonable $142 and the Gigabyte B460M mobo dropping by 10 bucks, too. Both GPUs we recommend for the two budget systems have seen mild drops in street price, no doubt aided by crackdowns on cryptocurrency farming, but they’re still far above what you should pay. Second-hand GPUs are still flooding sites like eBay, but be careful; cards that have previously been used for crypto mining may suffer from reduced longevity.