96 MAXIMUMPC JAN 2022
a part-by-part guide to building a better pc
blueprint
THIS MONTH’S STREET PRICES...
INTEL’S 12TH-GEN ALDER LAKE CHIPS are finally here, but they don’t
make it into the budget build. On top of this disappointing news, our
i3- 10100 is currently out of stock, so we made a slight upgrade to
the Core i3- 10105 with Intel’s UHD Graphics 63 0. It’s a similar chip,
so it’s not a big change to the overall build, although the i3-1 0105Approximate Price: $1,2 13 or $1,8 25 Approximate Price: $1,1 12 or $1,4 32AMD INGREDIENTS INTEL INGREDIENTS
PART PRICE
STREET
PRICE
Case Corsair 400 0D Airflow $95PSU 5550W Corsair CV 550 80+ Bronze NEW $54Mobo ASRock B5 50 Phantom Gaming 4/ac AM 4 $100CPU AMD Ryzen 5 3600 $240GPU ASUS TUF Gaming Radeon
RX 6700 XT OC 12 GB NEW
$480
$1,0 92RAM 16GB (2x8GB) G.Skill Trident Z Neo
CL 16 @ 3 600MHz NEW
$95SSD 512GB XPG GAMMIX S50 Lite
PCIe 4 .0 M.2 SSD
$70HDD 2TB WD Blue 7200 HDD NEW $47OS Windows 10 Home 64 -bit OEM $32PART PRICE
STREET
PRICE
Case Corsair 400 0D Airflow $95PSU 5550W Corsair CV 550 80+ Bronze NEW $54Mobo MSI B460M PRO-VDH WIFI Micro
ATX LGA1 200
$109CPU Intel Core i3-1 0105 NEW $130GPU MSI Ventus GeForce RTX 3060 12GB NEW $490 $810RAM 16GB (2x8GB) G.Skill Trident Z Neo
CL 16 @ 3 600MHz NEW
$95SSD 500GB Samsung 980 NVME
M.2 PCIe 3 .0 SSD
$60HDD 2TB WD Blue 7200 HDD NEW $47OS Windows 10 Home 64 -bit OEM $32performs marginally better with a slightly higher clock and turbo
speed. At the time of writing, it has a respectable $ 40 saving to its
normal $ 170 price tag, so it’s a decent time to pick one up.
Three parts find themselves on both the Intel and AMD budget
systems. Due to a stock change, we had to change our memory
around on the AMD budget build and the Intel budget build. For just
$10 more, we swapped out the Crucial Ballistix CL1 6 for GSkills
Trident Z Neo CL 16 RAM. This is the same spec as the Crucial
Ballistix RAM, so was the most suitable we could find at the price.
The next change was to the PSUs. For the Intel build it was
previously the 50 0W Aresgame AGV500 at an 80 + Bronze efficiency.
On team AMD, the 5 00W Evga BA was the choice with an 80 + Bronze
efficiency rating. This time, these have both been swapped around
for the ever-so-slightly more powerful 5 50W Corsair CV550 unit
that has the same 80 + Bronze rating.
Both builds also got an upgrade in HDDs from 1 TB to 2 TB for
a whopping increase of $8. With a sale on Newegg bringing these
down from $ 70 to $ 47 it was near impossible not to make the
change, especially considering the 1 TB variant is sitting at $ 39.
SSDs remained the same as they still perform strongly in the rigs
and the prices haven’t shifted, which is always good to see.
The last major change for these machines is the availability of
GPUs. It is hard to recommend graphics cards that cost nearly
double the MSRP, but they are there for those who don’t want to
wait for more stock to come out. It’s annoying for everyone, but at
least there is some street price stock, rather than no stock at all.