TURBO

OUR TURBO BUILD IS DESIGNED FOR those who need a seriously kick-ass system. It costs a fair chunk of cash, but you know you’ll be rocking a monumental machine if you put one together. And this certainly is a system to behold—your own dream machine for a lot less than we spend each year to push the limits of system building. We’re mindful of the final system price, in other words, and we always challenge any price increase in the same way that we do with the budget and midrange machines.

This goes some way to explaining why it was so frustrating this month to discover that the G.Skill TridentZ DDR4 3200 RAM we use has seen a hefty price increase. We’ve seen price bumps in every build this month, but the extra $60 is not easy to swallow. The problem is, as we’ve seen with the other machines, that there aren’t any serious alternatives worth considering. We could have saved a few dollars (we’re talking about $9) to go for a less common brand, but with no guarantees that it would work with Threadrippper, we decided to stay with the sticks that we do know work. There are alternative routes we could have gone down—dropping to 4x 4GB sticks or even 2x 8GB—but neither fulfilled the first part of the Turbo mantra about producing a kick-ass machine.

There’s little play in the pricing elsewhere, at least, and in fact we even saw a couple of small savings on the storage front: $4 on the 512GB Samsung 960 Pro, and a whole buck on the 4TB WD Black. The end result is still very much a kick-ass machine, it’s just one that will cost you $55 more than it would have done a month ago.