THE BUILDS

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WE’D LIKE TO SAY it’s time to upgrade our AMD budget build’s processor, but stock availability is still hamstringing our efforts. Since we don’t need the integrated graphics offered by the Athlon 3000G, we contemplated upgrading to a Ryzen 3 3100, doubling our core and thread counts. But this chip is still largely out of stock, and with no 5000-series budget Ryzen 3 CPU on the horizon, we’re left with the dual-core 3000G. It’s a bit cheaper this month, at least.

The AMD machine does get a few fun new additions, though. We’ve got a new motherboard, the MSI Pro B450M Pro-M2 (we don’t know why it has “Pro” in the name twice either), and a new SSD, the Falcon NVMe drive from Adata.