little_pob
Moderator

Another month gone, and little has changed. No major tech releases, and prices continue in the same directions; up for RAM, down for storage.

May's builds remain what I'd be looking at if building today.

However, stay tuned! I hope to be mixing it up a little for July's blog, with the intention to get a better representation of hardware.

Later than I'd have liked this month, but other than prices little has changed. SSDs prices are continuing to drop, with more hitting the £0.80/GB mark, some of the 120/128GB are drives are close to breaching the £0.50/GB.

£250 (ideal for a media server or HTPC)
Intel Pentium G620 2.6GHz 3MB cache
Asus P8H61-M LE/USB3 motherboard
G-Skill 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 1600MHz RipsawX (9-9-9-24) 1.5v RAM
Western Digital 500GB 6Gb/s Caviar Blue 7200RPM 16MB cache
Samsung

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This month sees further drops in the prices of both mechanical hard drives and SSDs. Nvidia has soft launched a further 600 series graphics card, the GTX 690 - a dual GPU card 4GB of GDDR5 that offers nearly double the performance of the GTX 680. General release is the 7th of May, but selected retailers will have a limited number for sale from the 3rd.

However, the main story is the release of Intel's latest CPU range; Ivy Bridge. For some the launch was disappointing, whilst it outperforms

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Apologies for the lateness.

This month has seen DDR prices go up but mechanical hard drive prices are slowly coming down. More and more SSDs are dropping below the £1 per GB price bracket. The only significant release was NVIDIA's newest flagship graphics card, the GTX 680, but this will only affect the top two builds (£750 and £1k+).

£250 (ideal for a media server or HTPC)
Intel Pentium G620 2.6GHz 3MB cache
Asus P8H61-M LE/USB3 motherboard
G-Skill

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I've been deliberately leaving off links on these monthly builds as the component prices can vary on a daily basis. However, with the third of these due sometime this week, I felt it was best to list some of the retailers I've come across over the past few years*.

• Amazon: http://www.amazon.co.uk/b/ref=sa_men...node=428655031
• Aria: http://www.aria.co.uk
• BT Shop: http://www.shop.bt.com
• CCL Computers: http://www.cclonline.com
• Crucial: http://www.crucial.com
• Dabs.com:

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