So-called “threads” have been a frequent source of confusion for those comparing or buying CPUs, even among people using our main build chart. What they are is never really explained, and most explanations that do exist only give a rough idea or mix it up with other things.
In the end, the basic explanation is surprisingly simple, so let’s clear this up once and for all.
Photo by Coaster J
SLI (Scalable Link Interface) is a marvelous technological innovation that allows two or more graphics cards to be simultaneously utilized to gain an overall boost in performance. It can handle 2 to 4 GPUs at once, and it is NVIDIA’s equivalent to AMD’s Crossfire technology. Technically, most of the information in this article will be applicable to both Crossfire and SLI, but the specific topic of this post will be SLI.
SLI gained popularity in recent years largely due to the bitcoin mining craze, but also because of a certain class of gamers who are determined to squeeze every drop of possible performance out of their rigs. But how useful is SLI—and, more importantly, is it worth going all-out and building a rig with four GPUs running in sync?
The short answer is no. It is not worth building a rig with 4-way SLI. And the answer for 3-way SLI is much the same. But depending on your needs and approach, it may sometimes be worth going for 2-way SLI. For more details and specific reasoning, read on:
AMD’s Radeon VII has arrived! All hail the Radeon VII! But does it belong in our build chart?
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).
MSI has white GTX 980s?!
Newegg is at it again with another week of sales leading up to Black Friday — all part of their “Black November” promotion to take advantage of the prime hardware-shopping season.
Once again, we’re rounding up our favorite deals from the sale, which lasts from now until Nov. 23rd at 4 PM EST / 1 PM PST.
For more advice on getting good deals on Black Friday, read our article on Black Friday 2015: How to Get the Best PC Parts Deals.
Time for a very small GTX 960?
Right on the heels of our post that lists the Best Deals from Newegg’s Pre-Black Friday ‘Deal Leak’ Sale (ending Nov. 16th), Newegg has snuck in another sale, this one only lasting a little over 24 hours.
Introducing the 11/11 sale, going on until 11:59 PM Pacific Time on Nov. 12th. In other words, you have roughly 24 hours from this posting to snag any deals in this sale.
We see two deals in this sale worth noting:
Graphics Card
Screen
Keep following our blog or sign up for our email list on the sidebar for updates on the best PC hardware deals throughout the holidays.
If you’re anything like us, then the graphics card is your favorite part of a computer. Graphics cards let your computer do awesome things like super complex computations, physics processing, and most importantly, producing shiny graphics in games.
So, what is a graphics card, and how do you figure out which one you should buy?
We get questions like this a lot:
When’s the best time of the year to buy computer components for a build? Black Friday? Christmas? May?
The best time to buy PC parts depends a lot on where you live.