MID-RANGE

Approximate Price: $1,495

WE’LL PROBABLY SWAP OVER to the eighth-gen Intel Core i5 for our midrange build next issue, but we haven’t seen enough new motherboards to make the call yet, so we’ll stick with our Ryzen 5 1600 build for now. In fact, there’s nothing different about this build from last issue, bar a few price shifts (in the usual places). If there’s nothing wrong with a build, though, there’s no need to change it. It looks as though the Etherium effect is definitely behind us now, as we saw the GeForce GTX 1070 drop again, down to $400, which is only $20 more than it was before this mining nonsense started. The big price hit this month was on the memory—the G.Skill TridentZ saw a $25 price increase, and once again there were no alternatives to reach for instead. Finally, we saw the M.2 drive increase by $7. So, despite the saving on the graphics card, overall the system rolls in $17 more than last issue.