If you’ve ever taken a look at a solid state drive, you’ve probably seen a variety of performance figures. But what’s the meaning behind them? How important are they?
In How to Choose the Right Storage for Your Gaming PC, we covered the most common types of storage: Standard hard disk drives (HDDs) and common types of solid state drives (SSDs), reviewing how they best fit in a gaming PC. Today, we discuss where speed comes in.
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!
A single board computer (or SBC) is an entire PC in the form of a single (usually quite small) piece of hardware. Some prominent names in the SBC market may be familiar to you—such as Raspberry Pi, Odroid, and LattePanda. At the high end, there are other familiar names that you may not even associate with SBCs . . . like Nvidia and AMD!
Single board computers can be used for many purposes, such as: a tiny general-purpose desktop PC; a dedicated media PC for playing music, TV, and movies; an emulation machine; a server; a hobby electronics or programming project; and much, much more.
Even though many single board computers are similarly priced, there is a ton of competition in the single board market. Wonder why that is? Well wonder no more: it’s because different single board computers are often specialized for different groups and different purposes. Now, join us as we delve into the big wide world of single board computers!
Previously, we’ve discussed routers and gave recommendations for some of the best routers in our article on The Best Routers, and How to Choose a Router for You. Today, we go over what we use to connect to those routers wirelessly: The wireless adapter.
We cover the most important things to know in detail, then we offer recommendations for internal and external options at different budget levels. So if you’re already knowledgeable about wireless cards (or you’re in a hurry), go ahead and scroll down to the list of recommended options!
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?
With the release of the highly-anticipated i9-9900k, gamers running Intel systems may still be wondering whether it’s worth upgrading to this pricey CPU, even over less-expensive options like the i7-9700k and the year-old i7-8700k. It can be tempting to default to the latest flagship model, but that may not be the best option for every builder.
Often, motherboard product pages and online forum users mention a motherboard’s VRM and how many power phases it has. Being a somewhat technical topic, VRMs aren’t an easy topic to get into. So today, we will introduce the concept of the VRM and these so-called power phases as simple and straightforward as possible, so that you can easily discern what a motherboard product page is telling you (and when it matters).
When it comes to selecting a computer case, there are a number of considerations each buyer has to weigh. The placement of USB ports, LED control options, the number of drive bays, and whether the case comes with a glass side panel are just a few elements that can factor into a buyer’s decision.
But there is one part of the case that should be of universal concern: cooling.