THE BUILDS

IT FINALLY LOOKS like prices are stabilizing somewhat, certainly compared to last issue.

Our blueprints this month have had some significant price decreases across the board, particularly for AMD processors. We’ve gone a bit off the cuff with these budgets builds, too, but more on that in a little bit.

AMD saw the Ryzen 5 7600 fall by $30, and the motherboard drop by another $6, along with a plethora of price increases across the SSD, RAM, PSU, and motherboard, leading to a $19 overall price increase, nullifying our decreasing CPU there.

Fortunately, we decided to go a bit renegade this month, retesting some of Intel’s latest GPUs, and have opted to swap the RX 7600 for an Intel Arc A750 8GB. Both cards feature 8GB of VRAM, and without a doubt the 7600 is the higher-performing card (averaging around 86fps in our 1080p testing suite versus 74 for the Arc A750), but where Intel has the edge is on price. ASRock’s challenger D variant clocks in at $190, giving us 0.39fps per $ spent, versus the RX 7600’s 0.33fps per $ spent. Both of those are way above what we’d consider good. Our favorite value GPU right now, the 4070 Super, only averages 0.26fps, for example.

For our Intel build, we’ve actually done the old switcheroo, and subbed in the 7600 from our AMD build. Still far cheaper than the 4060 we had from last issue, it’s more than capable at 1080p, and even 1440p if we’re honest, making it a surefire pick. We’ve also dropped down to a slightly lower-spec 14400F CPU. It saves us $40 in total, but does mean that we lose four cores.