The Turbo Build

Oh, what joyous news. It’s finally happened. It only took eight months on from release to become a reality, but at long last it seems like graphics card prices for the RTX 50 series are finally coming down. Albeit slowly, very slowly, and that has had quite the knock-on effect on our Turbo build this month. More so than you might expect.

Like our midrange systems this month, the Turbo build is also benefitting from a swathe of price reductions across the board. For what reason I can’t speculate to, but CPUs, SSDs, and a few odds and ends here and there are really leading to some major wins for us on total cost. Ok, the builds are still well above the 4 grand mark in most places, but it’s a start, ok?

Kicking things off then, our AMD system still comes rip-roaring with that Ryzen 9 9950X3D at its heart. The 16-core desktop monster is just an absolute beast at gaming, and it’s honestly fairly handy on the old rendering front as well. If you’re a serious content creator dabbling with YouTube on the side, I can’t recommend this chip enough. Plus it’s come down in price fairly aggressively too, with a $26 / £11 saving this month alone. It’s still not quite as affordable as Intel’s far more well-balanced Core Ultra 9 285K (clocking in at $560 / £500), but for the money you’re still getting an incredibly impressive chip, and if I’m honest, Intel’s Core Ultra series kinda sucks at gaming, certainly compared to the 14th gen at least.

The big change for our AMD system, though, comes in the form of a motherboard swap. Although the NZXT X870E N9 is a pretty-looking thing, with a solid manufacturer behind it (ASRock), the cost is, well, difficult to justify, particularly given that it's on the X870E chipset and only comes with a single PCIe 5.0 SSD slot. So I’ve swapped it out for an Asus ROG Strix X870E-E Gaming WiFi instead. Not only is this board $22 cheaper than last month, but it also crams in a ton of I/O and features and actually constitutes part of my benchmark testbed too. 

Other price drops include $30 on the WD Black SN8100 in its 2TB form and $20 on the remarkably impressive H9 Flow chassis from NZXT. I was tempted to swap out the Kraken Elite 420 for the Tryx Panorama SE that I alluded to earlier in Labnotes, but sadly it doesn’t come in a 420mm configuration, and given the H9 Flow can leverage that, well, y’know, gotta stick by it. Not that the Kraken Elite’s bad by any means.

As for the Intel rig, I’ve shaved off a ton of cash with one major change, and that’s the GPU swap. Going from the Gigabyte Aero OC SFF to Gigabyte’s standard Gaming OC instead, and that dropped the price by. Oh wait, hang about, let me just dig out the numbers for you. Oh yes, $260… (and £33). That’s an insane amount. 

Yes, it’s on offer; yes, stocks are limited, but there are a ton of 5080 cards at this price point right now, and I couldn’t be happier. It’s not that $1,000 RRP, but we’re getting there. Otherwise, Team Blue didn’t really see any major changes, apart from a slight price shift on the UK side with that Z890 Apex board dropping by £54.

With that, we’ve seen a saving of $113/£54 for our AMD systems and a staggering $315/£98 for our Intel rig on from last month, with negligible impact on performance too. 4K gaming at 60 fps and above is an absolute guarantee at this level (and yes,, you can swap the Zotac card out for the Gigabyte Gaming one on the AMD rig to save an extra $150 too if you like, I just like offering alternatives).

AMD BUILD

Total: $4,566 (↓113) / £3,817 (↓54)
Power Draw: 742 W

INTEL BUILD

Total: $4,365 (↓315) / £4,055 (↓98)
Power Draw: 815 W

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