Computer of the Month – March 2022

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In this difficult and incomprehensible time, Computer of the Month, unlike many IT companies, does not suspend its activities. In the next issue, we talk about the state of the Russian computer equipment market, and also discuss the current situation. Components, desktop PCs and laptops are still on sale. Till…

Let me guess: there will definitely be something along the lines of “Your Computer of the Month is no longer needed” in the comments for this issue. I personally am no stranger to such rhetoric, and calls not to write about the assembly of system units have haunted Computer of the Month for all 7 years of the rubric’s existence. Indeed.

we have had enough difficulties over the past few years. During this time, we survived the collapse of the local currency in 2014, several waves of the crypto boom (even now – for a year and a half – the video card market cannot get rid of the deficit), the coronavirus pandemic, which led to a shortage of semiconductors.

Now Russia is facing new difficulties: at the time of writing, AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, and a number of other American companies have officially suspended the supply of equipment to our country. For example, deliveries of AMD products, which were represented primarily by central processors – consumer Ryzen and server EPYC.

have been stopped in Russia. From the statement of the “reds” it follows that the restrictions will also affect such electronics as ready-made computers. However, AMD is unlikely to ban manufacturers of laptops, video cards, motherboards and other equipment from supplying their products to Russia. From the largest Taiwanese firms such as Airlock, ASUS, GIGABYTE and MSI, no official statements have been received – at least not yet.

And since most of the equipment is purchased abroad, the price of many components has skyrocketed to inadequately high values. Some computer stores have even stopped sales, waiting for prices to stabilize. Other companies have simply jacked up prices – sometimes the markup reaches 4- or even 5-fold level. Under such conditions, the old Computer of the Month format, in which I offered several different options for system units, turns out to be completely unviable. Today, a good modern gaming computer is an unaffordable luxury even for many well-to-do Russians.

However, the year is 2022, and now it is hard to imagine the life of a simple Russian family without household appliances and electronics – it can be a system unit, laptop, tablet or smartphone. The equipment becomes obsolete (this is not so critical today) and fails (but this is already worse), which means that users will continue to buy electronics to the best of their ability. So, “Computer of the Month” will still be needed by our readers.

This issue, like many others, is supported by the X-Com Shop online store, which has branches in Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Component market

From the very first issue to this day, “Computer of the Month” focuses only on new components available in Russian retail. Since in the current situation it is impossible to assess the availability and cost of electronics by the assortment of only one store, in March, unlike previous releases, to determine the price of a particular device, I consider offers from several large trading floors in Moscow at once.

In this section, I will examine the cost of computer hardware available at the time of writing. Prices for some items are indicated with the prefix “from” and taking into account rounding up to a value that is a multiple of 500 rubles.

Please note that the tables in this paragraph do not list all items available for sale in Russia. I mainly studied products related to the mainstream platforms AM4, LGA1151-v2, LGA1200 and LGA1700. So, the cheapest processor on the market turned out to be the 2-core AMD A6-8580 – you can take it on average for 6,500 rubles.

The chip is worthless by today’s standards, but due to the integrated graphics, it will fully play the role of a “plug” in the system unit – if you desperately need at least some kind of PC at home. The cost of a dual-core Celeron G5905 (in BOX configuration) starts from 10,000 rubles – until recently, for this price you could find a 4-core Core i3-12100F (now its price starts from 33,000 rubles) based on the progressive and very fast Golden Cove microarchitecture . The Celeron G6900 costs the same.

The cost of normal AMD and Intel “stones” starts from 14,500 rubles – that’s how much Ryzen 3 1200 costs, although the average price of this 4-core is 18 thousand rubles. For the Core i3-10100F, you will have to pay at least 18,500 rubles (27,500 rubles on average).

Interestingly, one of the most popular processors over the past few days has become the Core i5-9400F – this six-core compatible with the LGA1151-v2 platform can be bought for 23,000 rubles. A popular, quite modern and tolerable 6-core Core i5-10400F costs 24,000 rubles in DNS, and an average of 50,000 rubles in other stores.

We can only state the fact that there are very few of the same 12th generation Core left on sale – apparently, it was not possible to form stocks of new models in the country initially.