Budget

Spending wisely.

SATA SSD storage has never been cheaper. TeamGroup has further reduced the price of its GX1 2.5-inch drive, and we couldn’t be happier about it: 120GB of SSD storage for under 35 dollars? A few years ago, that would’ve been impossible to find. Both budget builds have stuck with their drives this month, as the HDD kept its price and the SSD was cheaper. We’ve made changes elsewhere, though: A good deal on MSI’s RX 5600 XT GPU saw us making the switch from Asrock’s Challenger D model for our AMD machine. Overall, we’ve made a modest saving on the AMD system.

The Intel build is a slightly different story. Our CPU fell in price by almost $70. The EVGA GPU we used last month is no longer on sale, so we’ve gone back to a twin-fan model – Asus’s TUF Gaming factory-overclocked version – at the baseline 1660 Super price of $339. While the single-fan EVGA Super Black model was adequate, there’s no reason to go down to a single fan unless it’s significantly better value or you’re building inside a supercompact case.

Thankfully, a fresh new motherboard and RAM for the Intel system, saved us enough money to keep the price at exactly $1,300. The AMD system is now slightly cheaper, but allowing for general component price deviation, these two systems may as well share a price tag right now. Performance-wise, we won’t see a huge amount of difference either. The RX 5600 XT slightly outperforms the GTX 1660 Super, but only by a small margin: Both excel at 1080p and are moderately capable at higher resolutions. On the other hand, the Ryzen chip falls just short of the i5-9600K in performance terms, but is cheaper and draws less power.

“A fresh new motherboard and RAM for the Intel system, saved us enough money to keep the price at exactly $1,300. The AMD system is now slightly cheaper, but allowing for general component price deviation, these two systems may as well share a price tag right now.”