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Punching above its price.

We’ve seen major price drops on both our builds, and some significant part shuffles to prepare for our new cases dropping next issue. And it’s about time! For our AMD build we’ve opted to go for the Ryzen 3 3100 quad-core processor. It’s a favorite of ours at the moment for budget builds, complete with four cores and eight threads. OK, so it’s not about to win any rendering competitions, but only two years ago this was the high-end staple core count for all of us in the consumer market, and it’s more than enough for any budget escapades into gaming, or rendering. On the Blue side of the field, we’ve gone and grabbed one of those shiny new Intel Core i5-10400s. Ever so slightly stockier than our AMD competition, this six-core, 12-thread chip packs a punch, and best of all comes with a cooler as standard straight out of the box.

We’ve also swapped out the GPUs for something a little more 1080p-reasonable. Both cards, AMD and Nvidia, achieve on average 60fps across a myriad of titles at 1080p, making them perfect picks for our new parts list, and on top of that we’ve also added some shiny upgrades to storage, in the form of a 256GB Samsung 980 Pro PCIe 4.0 drive for the AMD rig and a 256GB XPG SX8100 PCIe 3.0 drive for Intel. AMD still has the upper hand here, and thanks to that Ryzen 3 3100, you can finally take advantage of the new connection standard, unlike with the 3200G and 3400G.

Lastly, we’ve also swapped out our Linux budget OS for an OEM Windows Home key. Although ideally you’ll want a permanent license attached to your Microsoft account so you can pull it across from one build to the next. We’d previously priced this at $140, but $60 is a more realistic price for this OEM OS key, and it’s available for much less, too, but we just have to be careful and suspicious of the really cheap offers.

“Both cards, AMD and Nvidia, achieve on average 60fps across a myriad of titles at 1080p, making them perfect picks for our new parts list.”