IN OUR INTEL BUDGET MACHINE, we see a welcome price drop on both our SSD and GPU this month. This frees up some budget to play with, so we thought we’d switch things up and modernize this rig. The first thing we changed was the motherboard—we’ve stuck with ASRock but swapped from a B660 chipset to a more powerful Z690 Phantom Gaming 4/D5. Not only does this upgrade our chipset but we also now have DDR5 support. These DDR5 sticks have dipped in price since their release and are now more affordable, so it’s time to introduce them to our budget machine.
We swapped
