DETECTING A THEME?

It feels like RAM upgrade month here. We’ve gone for a pretty straight upgrade to the Pro version of Corsair’s Vengeance RGB memory, a set of two 16GB sticks that deliver solid performance at a better price per gigabyte. Threadripper CPUs have leapt up in price—the 2950X is a relatively inexpensive one, but still dropped an extra $40 on the price of this build this month. A quick switch of the GPU saved us 10 dollars, moving away from Asus and over to MSI’s bulkier RTX 2080, which rocks an extra DisplayPort and two fans, as opposed to one, albeit with an ever-soslightly lower boost clock. The biggest saving, though, was made on the SSD. Samsung’s 970 Pro is a lightning-fast drive, but it comes with a price tag that leaves us feeling like we’ve been lightningstruck; we saved nearly 50 dollars by moving to the 512GB Gigabyte Aorus RGB M.2 SSD, released earlier this year. RGB on an M.2 drive might seem a little over the top, but this SSD is a nifty piece of gear with a sensible price. The RGB tech gave Gigabyte room to include a heatsink on the top of the SSD, meaning there’s no need to shell out for motherboards that come with removable M.2 heat shields. No fiddling around with sticky pads, either. Seagate’s BarraCuda HDDs mercifully didn’t rise in price, so our 2TB of reserve storage remained safe. Overall, this build came out $43 cheaper than last month—and probably about 10 percent more colorful. For more of our component recommendations, visit www.maximumpc.com/best-of-the-best