Blueprints

Competent.

APC’s best-value builds, updated monthly

This has been one of the most difficult times to talk about hardware, especially when it comes to pricing up builds. Shortages, scalpers, and miners have put a strain on this industry, and many of our parts saw price rises. So, we’ve made several changes to the Budget builds this month to keep prices reasonable, and with these extensive changes to that build, we’ve managed to come up with a saving of $125 compared to last month. Not bad! But for that we’ve lost access to eight PCIe graphics lanes (so we’d be running 8x PCIe 3.0 instead of 16x PCIe 4.0 for the GPU), two cores, four threads, and we have 25 percent of the L3 cache we did have, and no access to PCIe 4.0 either.

However, we’ve kept the motherboard’s chipset the same, so if stock does come back we should be able to upgrade that processor to a Ryzen 3 3100 at a later date, but it’s actually really difficult for us to recommend buying this build right now. If you need a PC, and we mean desperately need a budget PC, then this is a good recommendation. But honestly, hang tight and hopefully by winter things will have worked themselves out.

Sadly it’s a similar affair for Intel too, although we’ve managed to dodge some of the more radical hardware changes that our AMD build has suffered. We’ve had to swap the Core i3-10100 to the F variant, so we lose integrated graphics, and we’ve managed to grab a 1660 GPU. A lot of the components are identical between these two rigs this issue, mostly because they’re just the cheapest we could get our hands on in a vain attempt to mitigate price increases.