The Budget Build

Blimey, it feels mad that it’s only been a month since I last put pen to paper for these here blueprints. A whole four weeks of carnage has erupted in the tech industry. From the likes of the Online Safety Act blossoming to the insanity of new product launches, a pseudo GPU debuts from the likes of Nvidia (seriously, did anyone even notice the RTX 5050 launched?), it’s been a rollercoaster of change.

In the budget build world, prices have shifted dramatically on both sides of the pond. In fact, with only a few minor tweaks and little in the way of performance drops, we’ve managed to get savings of around $20 / £35 in our AMD rig (with the same products as last month bouncing up and down in price), and although we did manage a £43 drop in our Intel machine, the US price has shot up by $64, mostly in part to CPU and motherboard price ticks.

The good news is that across the board, the key components that stay the same between these two rigs are generally fairly consistent. The Hyte Y40 lost a nice comfortable $10 off its asking price (nothing in the UK, sorry lads), and the fans also lost $3 / £3 on their total price too, at least the stock standard 120mm ones did anyway.

For AMD the big wins came in the form of a massive price drop on that Arc B570 GPU, dropping from $280 all the way down to $240 in the US, and a subsequent £40 drop in the UK too. That was the biggest win by far. Sadly, the motherboard, the B850 Pro RS from ASrock, did see a price increase, and so I’ve swapped that out for a similarly performing MSI B850 Gaming Plus WiFi instead. Lastly, the Ryzen 5 9600X has climbed to a sweltering $196 in the US, an increase of around $21 or so on last month, kinda offsetting that nice $40 saving we had with the GPU. Still, we’re sitting pretty at $1,318 on the total USD cost, and £1,193 on the GBP total too, with power draw at 379 W under max hypothetical scenarios. Nice.

As for Intel, changes here have been a bit more dramatic. Sadly the Core i5-14600K has had a pretty severe price hike in the US, shooting up to above the $200 mark, so I’ve opted to swap that out for the 14600KF instead. We’re forgoing an iGPU here, but it does keep the price increase down to just $34 total. Similarly, the ASRock Z790 Pro RS WiFi I did have picked for last month’s build bounced up by a staggering amount, so out she goes, and in comes the Gigabyte Z790 Aorus Elite AX instead. That’s still a $35 bump on price, but sadly it’s the cheapest decent Z790 board you can buy right now. Not that Gigabyte’s bad by any measure (just don’t talk to me about RGB Fusion).

Lastly, the GPU, that Eagle OC Ice 8GB 5060, shot up again, so I’ve swapped it out for another Gigabyte model, with a little less white pizazz, the Windforce OC RTX 5060 8GB. Same specs, same GPU, probably the same performance, but it keeps the price stable. What we’re left with is a total cost of $1,397 for the Intel rig and around £1,306 in the UK, quite the shuffle over last month’s, at least for the US anyway...

AMD BUILD

Total: $1,318 (↓20) / £1,193 (↓35)
Power Draw: 379W

INTEL BUILD

Total: $1,395 (↑64) / £1,306 (↓43)
Power Draw: 486W

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