CORSAIR K70 RGB TKL

AGAIN, WE’RE RECOMMENDING the graphics card we believe is best suited to the build’s position in our charts (aka 1080p, 1440p, or 4K gaming at 60fps plus), and giving two prices: RRP and street price.

GPU situation aside, we’ve still not got that many positives to talk about this time around. Our trusty Ryzen 5 3600 has seen price increases, and now sits at $220. We’ve not heard anything official from AMD yet, but it’s telling that even these older 12nm parts are now suffering from the chip shortages, too, as folk work their way down the historic product stack in a desperate attempt to buy a “new” processor. We would recommend the Ryzen 5 5600 in its stead, but the newer chip, although available, currently comes in at $100 more than the 3600, and we just don’t think it’s quite worth spending the extra cash, especially when the 3600 comes with plenty of PCIe 4.0 lanes anyway. Performance is better, sure, but is it better value? Not really. We’ve also managed to grab a slightly more affordable motherboard ($5 cheaper, in fact), courtesy of an updated variant of ASRock’s Phantom Gaming 4. There’s not a huge difference between the two—in a board-to-board comparison, the PCB layout is almost identical—but the heatsinks have shrunk, and you lose the DisplayPort in the rear I/O. The cooler’s ever so slightly cheaper, too, so that’s in our favor.

On the Intel side of the table, things are a little more chipper. The Core i7-10700K has come down in price ever so slightly, and we’ve managed to shave some more cash off here and there, too, thanks to a Seasonic 80+ Gold modular power supply and, amazingly, a new, cheaper Z590 motherboard from ASRock. Same model name as the one from last issue, different chipset, and with it comes an expanded DMI bus, Wi-Fi 6E as standard, and better support, too. We’ve also plumped for some slightly spicier memory, at 3,600MHz, but if you’re not using this system for anything more than gaming, we recommend dropping to a 2,400-3,000MHz kit.