Mid-range
Packing some punch.
Another month, another price drop on the Ryzen 7 3700X. It’s one of the best-value processors right now, packing 16 threads, PCIe 4.0 support, and a pretty respectable Wraith Prism RGB cooler. We’re not using that cooler here, though: Instead, we’re sticking with the Corsair A500, which is $10 cheaper than last month. The MSI Radeon RX 5700 is the best-value 5700 model on the market, and it saves us another $50 from last month thanks to a price drop.
We’ve taken our savings and decided to upgrade the memory, opting for a twin-stick Corsair Vengeance LPX kit. This has the same memory capacity and frequency as the Vulcan Z RAM it replaces, but thanks to a lower CAS latency we should see an improvement in real-world memory speed. We’re sticking with the same drives though, as the Corsair Force MP600 remains the most affordable of the limited selection of PCIe 4.0 drives available. Hopefully we’ll see more super-speedy SSDs once Ryzen 4000 chips arrive, although rumors of delays are circulating.
We’re changing the PSU across both mid-range builds to the Corsair CX650, which should provide plenty of power for those power-hungry GPUs. On the Intel machine, we’re changing out a few more components. We’ve upgraded the motherboard to the Asus ROG Strix Z390-F Gaming, a more robust board that includes a solid integrated heat sink for our WD Black SN750 M.2 drive.
While we’ve hung onto the Corsair A500 in our AMD system, we’ve saved a lot on the Intel CPU cooler with the eminently affordable Phanteks PH-TC14PE. It’s pretty much the biggest saving we can make without sacrificing a CPU fan. The last change we’ve made is a GPU swap. We’re sticking with the RTX 2060 for now (with a possible upgrade to a 2060 Super, but we’ll look at upgrading the CPU first), switching to EVGA’s twin-fan KO Ultra Gaming model. This won’t provide much performance boost, but our previous GPU is no longer on sale, making this a better value proposition.
“We’re sticking with the RTX 2060 for now (with a possible upgrade to a 2060 Super, but we’ll look at upgrading the CPU first), switching to EVGA’s twin-fan KO Ultra Gaming model.”