Black Friday and Cyber Monday might be over, but the good deals on components keep coming—if you know where to look. We’ve scoured sales from several retailers to find two builds that provide great price-to-performance ratios.
PC photo by Nikitarama
Your computer has faithfully been by your side for all these years. You can’t replace it (for whatever reason), but with Christmas coming up, you decide it’s time to give your little friend a much-deserved gift.
Or maybe it’s frustrating you with sluggishness. Either way, you’ve got a great excuse to give it a little performance boost. What I’m here to do is to help you figure out what you can do to upgrade your older system on a budget.
This list is more suited to people who fit the following:
It is okay if the above doesn’t quite apply to you. This info can still be really helpful. Just keep in mind that you might have different upgrade options than listed.
Whether you sleep near your PC, do something with your PC where it helps to keep noise to a minimum, or just like some peace and quiet, having a PC that isn’t audibly distracting can be important.
This list provides five important things to remember when you want to choose parts for a quiet, unobtrusive PC.
With the launch of the 2nd-generation Threadripper 2950X, we of course had to look at what would make a balanced PC with this 16-core beast!
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 are coming out swinging, and they’re out for Intel’s blood with the flagship Threadripper 2990WX! With a bonkers 32 cores and 64 threads, this is not a CPU for the casual gamer; it’s a workstation powerhouse, designed for when multi-core performance is king.
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!