96 APR 2022
a part-by-part guide to building a better pc
blueprintTHE BUILDS
THIS MONTH’S STREET PRICES...
THIS MONTH’S BUDGET improvements are focused on the Intel build,
as we rebuilt the AMD one last month and were unable to find any
reasonable upgrades or cost savings. There’s a lot happening with
Intel at the moment, including an extraordinarily priced CPU that
means we can upgrade a few of the other components, as well asApproximate Price: $1,292 or $1,712 Approximate Price: $1,087 or $1,267
AMD INGREDIENTS INTEL INGREDIENTS
PART PRICESTREET
PRICECase Corsair 4000D Airflow $95PSU 550W Corsair CV550 80+ Bronze NEW $45Mobo MSI MPG B550 Gaming Plus AM4 $160CPU AMD Ryzen 5 3600 $230GPU MSI Radeon RX 6700 XT 12 GB MECH 2X $480 $900RAM 16GB (2x 8GB) Crucial Ballistix CL16
@ 3600MHz
$115SSD 512GB XPG GAMMIX S50 Lite
PCIe 4.0 M.2 SSD
$70HDD 4TB WD Blue 5400 HDD $65OS Windows 10 Home 64-bit OEM
(Windows 11 Compatible)
$32PART PRICESTREET
PRICECase Corsair 4000D Airflow $95PSU 550W Corsair CV550 80+ Bronze $45Mobo ASRock B660 Pro RS NEW $140CPU Intel Core i5-12400F NEW $180GPU Gigabyte RTX 3050 Gaming OC NEW $380 $560RAM 16GB (2x 8GB) Crucial Ballistix CL16
@ 3600MHz
$85SSD 512GB XPG GAMMIX S50 Lite
PCIe 4.0 M.2 SSD NEW
$70HDD 4TB WD Blue 5400 HDD $60OS Windows 10 Home 64-bit OEM
(Windows 11 Compatible)
$32a new high-value GPU entry in the market. The first tweak is the
Intel Core i5-12400F, the same processor featured in our $1300
build this month, minus the onboard graphics processor. You will
need a discrete graphics card for this build, so if you’re unable to
get one, or you’re holding out for whatever reason, be sure to look
at the standard i5-12400 at $210. The i5-12400F, though, is only $25
more than the Intel Core i3-10400 we used to feature in this build but
offers double-digit performance gains in both single and multi-core
operations. It offers incredible bang for your buck, which is why we
wanted to feature a build around it this issue.
Another component of the cover feature has made it into our
budget build, the newly-released Nvidia 3050. We won’t pretend
these are going to be easy to get hold of, but they are selling for a
lot less online than the 3060 card we featured last month. We still
wouldn’t spend any more than $400 on these cards, but it’s your
decision. As we found in our review this month, the 3050 is a capable
little 1080p card with plenty of memory and all the usual Nvidia
features we love, such as ray tracing and H265 encoding.
We also upgraded the motherboard to an LGA1700 model and
chose the cheapest ATX model we could find with the ASRock
B660 Pro RS. You could get that down to $100 with the Asus PRIME
H610M-E D4, but it’s a Micro ATX so has fewer PCI and RAM slots.
Finally, taking advantage of the ASRock motherboard’s PCIe Gen4
port, we pinched the XPG GAMMIX S50 Lite SSD from the AMD build
and put it into the Intel one. This will offer speed benefits over the
previous 500GB Samsung 980 NVME but costs only $10 more.BUDGET