WITH THE BUILDS WELL AND TRULY SHAKEN UP by our dear editor last issue, it’s now time to introduce some new cases. The Intel and AMD builds at each price range will still share the same case, and for our budget systems it’s the simple but effective Corsair 4000D Airflow.
Following last month’s changes, we’re now focused on trimming the price and making small improvements. Multiple price drops on components in both builds (CPUs, our power supply, and the ASRock mobo in the AMD build) have given us a bit of money to play with, but we’re keeping it sensible. A motherboard shift from Gigabyte to ASRock in the Intel build helps us make a further saving, and both builds have new memory: Ripjaws Series V in the AMD machine, and TeamGroup T-Force Dark Z in the Intel one, saving five and nine bucks respectively. We’ve dialed the memory speed in the Intel machine back to 3,200MT/s; if you can find a cheaper DDR4-3600 kit then great, but the Core i5-10400 won’t benefit as much from the higher speed compared to the Ryzen.