The AMD Ryzen 9 3900X is (at least for now) the flagship CPU from the new range from AMD. With its huge 12-cores and 24-threads, it has ‘productivity king’ written all over it. So let’s look at building a productivity powerhouse system with it!
Mini ITX PCs are famous among builders for being deceptively difficult and expensive to create. The unassuming, small stature of such builds may make them look like smaller projects than mid towers or full towers to newcomers—but the tight spaces in the cases, the higher temperatures of such close quarters, and the specialty parts they sometimes require can balloon the challenge and the cost.
In this article, we take a look at putting together a tiny build for a modest price: building a capable Mini ITX small form factor computer for about $390, similar in price and performance to a larger low-end PC.
One of the best parts of the indie gaming scene is that it’s full of great games that are often less demanding (performance-wise) than AAA titles. This allows gamers on a tight budget to still have an awesome experience without endless budgeting and saving up beforehand.
In this guide, we look at what it takes to build a PC for playing popular indie games!
Unlike some of the recent NVIDIA launches, the GTX 1650 arrived with… well, not a whole lot of fanfare. However, there’s still a few building benefits, so of course we’re going to look at the prospect of building a PC with one!
With Intel fleshing out their 9th-generation range, now comes the i5-9400. So we take a look at what it takes to build a balanced PC with this $185 CPU!
There is perhaps nothing more enjoyable to a hardcore PC gamer than an ego-stroking list highlighting the most demanding games that their system can run. This may be because it’s amazing to see a machine handle what used to be a major challenge for the high-end computers of yesteryear—or it may be because there’s nothing more satisfying than hearing 100% fan spin on your CPU, GPU, and case fans (and warming up your entire house on a cold winter’s day).
In all seriousness, we took a look at four games released over the past decade that had a bit of a reputation for rig-melting, and we’ve put together example builds using modern components to run those titles nice and smooth!
Just when you thought new releases from NVIDIA could not get any weirder, they go and announce the GTX 1660 to the world.
With their first push into mid-tier-priced cards in years, we take a look at creating a balanced PC with the GTX 1660!
NVIDIA’s newly-released GTX 1660 Ti behaves almost like a new and improved GTX 1070. It comes with the new Turing architecture found in the RTX series, but without the ray-tracing and Deep Learning Super Sampling technology; these premium features are still in the early stages of adoption, and aren’t useful or economical for a mid-tier GPU. The GTX 1660 Ti offers the advantages of new architecture without the expense and burden of superfluous features.
The GTX 1660 Ti achieves framerates at resolutions and settings roughly comparable to the GTX 1070. It doesn’t reach the level of a GTX 1080, but it’s an affordable upper-mid-range graphics card that will meet the needs of gamers and digital artists alike.
What would a versatile, powerful, balanced PC build look like with this GPU?
Last week I built myself a new PC and I put a lot of thought into it. I wanted to make it easily upgradeable with the main bulk of the system lasting me a good 4-5 years. In this blog post, I will show what I chose and then explain my reasoning.
PLEASE NOTE: We now have a thorough, regularly updated big guide article on building a PC for Apex Legends over on our main site. Check it out!
Now that you have read our warning, you may return to the content of this older blog post:
Apex Legends, the free-to-play battle royale title from the creators of Titanfall, launched on February 4 and quickly became a huge hit, gaining 25 million players in its first week. Built off the Titanfall universe, the game unites players in squads of three to battle it out against 20 other teams, all vying to be the last squad standing.
The game’s success is thanks in large part to how well the game runs on a variety of PC specs. But for this article, our purpose is simple: We’ll recommend PC builds for two different budgets, both intended to run the game smoothly—one for playing at 1080p with max settings, and one for playing at 4K with max settings.