BUDGET

Approximate Price: $697

IT FEELS ODD to say that Intel is currently the best budget option you can invest in, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Intel’s aggressive single-core performance on the Pentium G4600 makes it a competitive gaming chip, capable of hanging with the best of them. And short of going with refurbed or second-hand parts, this system represents the best bang for buck for a casual desktop PC.

This issue has seen a few changes, though—amazingly, memory prices haven’t changed this month, but SSD prices have crept up, so we’ve dropped the Z400s Sandisk for an Ultra II; it has a touch less storage, but is no less of a performance king than the Z400s. On top of that, we swapped out the G.Skill memory for a kit of Patriot Viper Elites instead, because it saved us a grand total of $5. The biggest conundrum was the Hitachi Deskstar, eating up our budget by another $8 compared to last month.