Turbo

This one goes to 11.

We still couldn’t really justify an upgrade to a 3rd-generation Threadripper chip in our AMD build. We know this is a “Turbo” system, but the 16-core Ryzen 9 3950X is still a beast, and far cheaper. It also meant we could stick with the excellent X570 chipset for our motherboard, and this month we’re rocking the Prime X570-Pro from Asus. We toyed with swapping out the RAM and SSD in our AMD build, but both components have seen small price drops since last issue, so we decided to leave them be.

High-end graphics cards are nose-diving in price since Nvidia announced its surprisingly cheap 3070, 3080 and somewhat affordable 3090. RTX 2080 Super cards are bargain buys right now, so if you see one up for a good price, snap it up fast – if you don’t have your eye on a 30-series card, that is... EVGA’s KO Gaming model was the only one still available at a reasonable price point when we wrote this, so we’ve unified these two machines and given the Intel system that GPU as well. It’s $200 cheaper than this time last month, too, reflecting the massive discounting happening in that segment right now following the 30-series pricing.

The Intel build also received a boost in the form of a bigger AIO cooler, the Cooler Master MasterLiquid ML360R ARGB, exchanging two 140mm fans for three 120mm ones instead. We’re duplicating the Patriot Viper SSD in the AMD build here because it’s great value and a good performer. Both of these PCs dropped in price this issue, but the Intel Turbo build has increased its lead over the AMD system in terms of value. The AMD system does benefit from PCIe 4.0 and more cores, though, so we’d say it’s a fair fight.

Overall the savings this month were turbo-charged by the fall in Nvidia 20-series prices, yielding us unusually hefty savings of $283 for the AMD PC, and a huge $393 for the Intel build. Not bad!

“High-end graphics cards are nose-diving in price since Nvidia announced its surprisingly cheap 3070, 3080 and somewhat affordable 3090. RTX 2080 Super cards are bargain buys right now, so if you see one up for a good price, snap it up fast.”