Greetings!
I hope you did not miss nVidia’s conference yesterday! Lots of tech/game demos were shown, and lots and LOTS of fancy words (two hours worth) were used to tell us that nVidia is launching the new RTX series of cards. 
AMD launched two CPUs today. The first is the 2990WX, a gargantuan 32-core/64-thread CPU $1800 ubermonster that will give every Intel board-member nightmares for the next ~2 years. Yes, you read that right: Thirty-two cores! Barely 2 years ago, a quad-core was the standard, recommended CPU for most people, and this 2990WX behemoth does not double or triple or even quadruple that: It octuples it! Maybe “octuples” is not a proper verb, but this is not a proper launch either.
The second CPU is the 2950X, a more modest 16-cores/32-threads $900 affair, but make no mistake: That makes it on par with Intel’s best consumer CPU, for half the price. In fact, if you took the time to read the reviews linked below, you will find that most reviewers enjoyed the 2950X more than the 2990WX.
I cannot claim that DDR3 was my first RAM-love; DDR2 has that honour. Or shame, if you prefer. But DDR3 has a special place in my heart, for it was the only RAM that was available when I built my PC. It was also the only RAM available when Orion and I built our office. For about a decade, it was the only RAM for normal users.
For some months now, there have been no new releases from any major company. As such, the only updates we have for now are price/availability related.
This quick post on changes to the main chart was started many moons ago (after the Ryzen+ release)—and the chips themselves were added to the US version of the chart back then, too.
But in the interest of getting this announcement out sooner rather than later, there will be no flavour text. If you like Magic The Gathering, you are out of luck!
Greetings!
After some very brief relief around the 2017 holidays, graphics card prices continue on the path of going absolutely insane.
We had a cryptocoin-induced inflation back in late 2013, but it was somewhat mild, and only lasted a couple of months. We had a second inflation in 2017, where the price hikes were higher, and lasted more than half a year. When this ended in December 2017, I thought: “Thank goodness that is over. Nothing could have been as bad as that!”
I was so naive, so wrong.
In short, there is not much we can do about graphics cards prices other than continue to recommend the best graphics cards at each price point. However, we want to be realistic about how bad the situation has gotten.
