THE BUILDS
Approximate Price: $605
DARN PRICE HIKES ruining our day, and our builds. This system represents what we think qualifies as a semi-decent base and upgrade path for anyone looking to join the PC enthusiast community. With flash SSD, 8GB of memory, and a relatively substantial CPU and GPU combo, it’s designed to hit that price-to-performance mark on the head, for around $600. It’s not perfect, but for the price, it’s hard to beat. This month saw some serious price hikes regarding last issue’s CPU, the Pentium G4560, placing it higher than the more powerful G4600. So, we decided to ditch the now $110 G4560 in favor of the G4600, which comes in well below that price, with a substantial increase to core clocks. The one thing we would change here is the GPU, but graphics cards are in an odd place right now. Thanks to the Ethereum boom, the price of most mid-range cards is skyrocketing, because dedicated ASIC cards can’t mine the stuff just yet.
Approximate Price: $1,470
NOW IS NOT A GOOD TIME to buy a graphics card. Two types of people are controlling the market: Ethereum miners, scooping up every card possible to cash in on the new cryptocurrency, and price scalpers, trying to cash in on the aforementioned miners. This means that the price of a GTX 1070 has gone from $350 last month to $460 this issue. We’ve also seen an increase in the price of memory yet again, going up by another $10. That’s the last of the bad news, however, as everything else has stayed the same—except the 250GB Samsung 960 Evo, which has fallen by $30, making it one of the best-value M.2 PCIe SSDs out there. In fact, if you’re in the market for an SSD, scrap any thoughts of grabbing a standard 2.5-inch, and invest in this instead. It feels odd to say, but right now, we wouldn’t recommend you build this rig, or if you do, forsake the graphics card, until this new wave of cryptocurrency dies down, and the manufacturers pick up the slack in availability.
THANK THE DEAR AND FLUFFY LORD
(Serenity reference) for PNY. Without it, that $10 price hike on the GTX 1080 Ti could be far worse. Three AIB designs are available for around $700, and although that still sounds terrible, it’s a far cry from the $100 price hike seen across the GTX 1070 series. That said, we took the opportunity to tweak a few things, in an attempt to reduce our overall costs.
We opted for the Ryzen 7 1700 this issue, for its super-low TDP. Coming in at 65W versus the 1800X’s 95W, the power savings are substantial. Couple that with the fact that you can throw a quick and easy overclock at it, and achieve the same if not better performance across the board, and it quickly becomes the best processor to buy out of the series for anyone looking to build a professional grade workstation.
That aside, everything else has stayed relatively unchanged. 32GB of DDR4 2666 is a solid choice for this system. And although Ryzen’s memory niggles are slowly edging their way out of the platform, we wouldn’t recommend anything above 3,000MT/s, unless you’re happy to tinker away with settings to get it performing just right.
Storage also remains the same, with a slight $13 increase to the 1TB 960 Pro, pushing it back up to $630. However, the 4TB WD Black HDD has stayed at the same price—a comfortable $200.