WE FINALLY DROPPED

the Intel 1.2TB PCIe SSD. It wasn’t quite quick enough for what we wanted to do anymore, and the form factor and additional PCIe slot were enough to put us off and head over to the Samsung side of flash memory. Samsung’s 1TB 960 Pro is around $200 cheaper, allowing us to drop a bit of cash elsewhere, and deal with the price hikes we’re seeing across the board. We also changed out the Asus X99-A II for MSI’s X99A SLI Plus. Although slightly more expensive, the A II has been bumped back up to $250, making the SLI Plus the better value option. MSI’s UEFI BIOS does need a bit of tweaking, but it’s a solid performer, and comes with plenty of expandability, including SLI support, alongside M.2, and a strong rear I/O solution. We swapped out the single 4TB Western Digital Black drive for two 2TB variants, too. Although not as cost-effective as the single 4TB, we can set these up as a mirrored RAID array, ensuring we’ve got extra redundancy for our work and missioncritical files. Memory prices are continuing to creep up, so we’ve dropped the 32GB Corsair Vengeance LPX 2666 quad-channel kit for its slightly slower little brother, and even that is pricier than the $168 we reported last issue. Other changes remain subtle. We saw the price of the case and the graphics card increase, and have done our best to balance those, swapping out the EVGA GPU for an MSI iteration instead, yet we’ve still managed an overall saving of $140. For more of our component recommendations, visit www.maximumpc.com/best-of-the-best