Good things

Come in all shapes and sizes.

There’s so much going on in the world of the PC that it’s almost ridiculous. For yet another month the CPU takes centrestage – this time as AMD kicks down the door into the budget segment, while Intel has its long-standing relationship with Apple hitting the brakes. I’ll spare you my usual CPU rant this time and let Chris tell the Ryzen 3100 and 3300X story in his reviews, which is a good new tale, along with his round-up of B550 motherboards – which is less rosy as we see motherboard prices continue on their relentless upward trajectory.

A couple of reviews that really stand out are the Intel NUC 9 Extreme and Microsoft Surface Go 2. Both teeny little things – one immensely powerful, the other far less so, but wins in other ways. It’s always nice to see some activity in unconventional areas, I’m often told by industry insiders that the NUC scene is a roaring success, but that’s largely covering the low-power units. This beast from Intel is packing basically the best of the best in components – and is priced accordingly. It’s all very different and I can’t help love it for just existing.

Meanwhile the Surface Go 2 offers a very interesting alternative to Chromebooks – at least in terms of the hardware you get, and its pricing. We were big fans of the first Surface Go because it offered a genuinely useable Windows device for around $500. At least one of our local APC team bought one to use as a commuting machine, and he’s writing a book on it, too, which we’re pretty excited about. Have a look at our gaming editor Shaun Prescott’s book The Town to see why we’re so looking forward to seeing what’s next from Shaun, plugging away on that Go.

In APC news we’ve done some long overdue tweaking to our PC Builder Blueprint pages. Now, for each of our three hypothetical build categories (Budget, Mid-range and Turbo) we’ve created two builds – one Intel-based, the other AMD. Now, we hope, this section will be even more useful and relevant.

We all hope things are as well as can be with you, too.

BEN MANSILL

“This beast from Intel is packing basically the best of the best in components – and is priced accordingly. It’s all very different and I can’t help love it for just existing.”