Approximate Price:

$3,201

WE ALWAYS ALLOCATE a much larger word count to our turbo build than the others, but the reality is that it’s usually the system that changes the least. The thing is, the value of the dollar, when building a system, varies. Simply put, the bigger the budget, how you allocate each buck holds far less weight than, say, at $700. A $40 difference with a $3,200 budget, for instance, is only around 1 percent of your spending limit, whilst back at that $720 mark, it’s nearly six times that.

The biggest changes we’ve seen this month, across the board, stem from the ongoing memory price hikes. Whether it’s GPUs or DDR4 DIMMs, you simply can’t win right now. It’s a very clear way of seeing how limiting the supply of one crucial component in an ecosystem can spill over and affect everything else. Hell, we’re even hearing rumors that Samsung’s next flagship phone will only sport 4GB of memory and use fewer chips, just to save on cost. Pure madness.

Our turbo build has stuck firm this time around, with only a couple of minor changes. We’ve gone for the absolute cheapest 32GB 3,200MT/s quad-channel memory kit we could get our hands on, to maintain performance across four sticks, and we’ve also dropped the additional fan off the Noctua CPU heatsink that we included last issue, to try to compensate for that $150 price increase for the Threadripper 1920X. Aside from that, little else has changed. AMD’s Threadripper platform is still, by far, one of the best price-to-performance setups you’ll find for rendering and workstation tasks, and well worth the cash if you’re likely to profit from it.

For more of our component recommendations, visit www.maximumpc.com/best-of-the-best