

My base starting point parts list (full build with 9800x3d, 64GB/4TB, 9700xt) was 2000usd about five months ago when it was last used to base a build on.
It’s currently ‘down’ to about 3400 after peaking last week at over 3500. The excess is nearly entirely from RAM and SSD prices.













Letterbox and pillars baked-in actually has very little, if any, impact on filesize or quality, when encoding from the same source and settings (other than the one dimension that was trimmed)