THE BUILDS
THIS MONTH’S STREET PRICES...
WOW! Our Intel system looks like a whole new PC. The only things staying the same are the SSD (the T-Force Cardea Graphene Z44L is still one of the best-value PCIe 4.0 drives) and the Corsair 4000D Airflow case, everything else is new. The budget Intel rig was lagging behind the AMD system with its i5-12400 chip ch and RTX 3050 GPU, so both have been upgraded. The CPU is now no the i5-12600, which is closer to the Ryzen 5 5600X in terms of performance with a similar price, beating it in multi-core workloads w and significantly in single-core performance.
The GPU has jumped up a rung in the Nvidia hierarchy with an R RTX 3060 from Gigabyte, which sits beneath the RX 6600 XT in th the AMD build in terms of performance. Despite the lower RRP of the 3060, the 6600 XT is currently the cheaper card to buy, with G GeForce GPU prices falling slower than Radeon ones.
The Intel system also benefits from a new B660 motherboard an and power supply, from Gigabyte and XPG respectively. These ch changes were made to mitigate the overall price hike created by up upgrading our GPU; LGA-1700 motherboards are still expensive, w with the new socket type not yet the norm amongst PC-builders. W We haven’t featured an XPG power supply in this section before, bu but these power bricks are as reliable as the best-known brands.
With the Kingston FURY memory back up to RRP, we’ve sw swapped out the Intel build’s memory to keep the price down. In its place is the faithful Ripjaws V 16GB kit from G.Skill. The AMD bu build’s only major change is a new motherboard, the MSI MAG B B550 Tomahawk, at $114. The final change in the Intel rig is the hard drive, a shift mimicked by the other budget build and both midrange machines. It’s a simple swap from Western Digital to Seagate, with the affordable Constellation ES HDD. It has a higher RPM but less cache memory than the WD Blue, but this isn’t our primary storage, so shouldn’t be an issue.
WE WERE PLEASED to see a solid discount on the Ryzen 7 5800X this month, a result of the new 5800X3D and associated chips launching. We looked at implementing one of these upgraded CPU variants to take advantage of the 3D processor’s tripled L3 cache, but they are expensive for a small performance boost.
No such reduction for the i7-12700F processor, but also on sale is the EVGA SuperNOVA GA power supply in the Intel build, currently at $75. The NZXT PSU in the AMD system has gone above $100, though, so we swapped it out for the SuperNOVA G5.
While it might not have a cheaper CPU, the Intel build does see some small discounts; the DDR4 version of the Asus Prime Z690-P dropped to $170 this month, which is an excellent deal. Both machines also get a minor saving by swapping over to the Seagate Constellation ES we brought back for the budget builds.
The Intel build gets a new cooler, the Aquafusion 240 ARGB from Enermax, a dual-fan AIO cooler with slick addressable RGB lighting on the fan casings and pump block. It replaces a Corsair liquid cooler, which was no longer on sale, while the price of the Raijintek Orcus cooler in the AMD system held steady.
The midrange AMD build joins its budget sibling with an XFX Speedster GPU, the SWFT319 RX 6800 XT. A base discount plus a $40 promo code through Newegg.com made this the cheapest 6800 XT we’ve seen for ages, although midrange and high-end GPU pricing remains high. That said, the RTX 3070 is closer to its original RRP than ever, with a Gigabyte Eagle OC model here to match the one in the budget Intel machine.
There wasn’t much else to change, as we’re leaving both SSDs in place. The AMD steals the RAM of the Intel build though, since Corsair’s Vengeance RGB RT is currently the best-value 32GB kit available at 3,600MHz with RGB lighting unless you want to brave lesser-known brands, such as v-Color or KLEVV.
WE’RE GOING FOR a small but important upgrade to both our turbo systems this issue, with a step up from 80+ Gold efficiency rating on both power supplies to 80+ Platinum since the midrange systems are already rocking Gold PSUs. That means a new EVGA SuperNova P6 for the AMD build, while we’re sticking with Corsair and upgrading to the HX850 in the Intel PC. Both are fully modular with an 850W power rating, which should only drop slightly below 90 percent efficiency at maximum load.
The Aorus Elite WiFi motherboard supporting our AMD system is still discounted, so we left it here. A sale of almost a third off the Asus Prime Z690-A DDR5 saw us swap out the other machine’s mobo, though, keeping DDR5 support for our 12th-gen Intel processor for just $210; a steal for a DDR5 board right now.
A price drop in the processor department saw us shave more than $50 off the AMD turbo build and $10 from the Intel machine. SenyTech currently has an offer for a $40 Newegg. com gift card with any Ryzen 9 5950X purchase. And what’s this we see in the AMD build? A high-end GPU for below RRP! Last month’s ASRock’s Phantom Gaming D edition of the RX 6900 XT is down to an incredible price of just $950. For the first time, we have a street price lower than our standard total price. No such reductions on the RTX 3090; last issue’s EVGA FTW3 card is up $100, so we swapped over to our third Gigabyte GPU of the month in the Intel system to keep the price level.
The hefty cost of the RTX 3090 has been offset by a downward trend in the price of DDR5 memory, as the new RAM standard slowly penetrates the market. The 2x 32GB Corsair Vengeance kit we added last month is $50 cheaper, a more significant drop than the $10 we saved on the AMD build’s memory. Lastly, the SSDs featured in last issue’s turbo builds have gone up, so we got two new ones; the Gigabyte Aorus Gen4 7000s and XPG Gammix S70. Both should be capable of that crisp 7000MB/s sequential read speed that we’ve come to expect from PCIe 4.0 drives.