If you have not been following the news, AMD announced new cards to be sold at $380 and $450. nVidia responded by releasing “Super” versions of its 2060 and 2070 cards, priced at $400 and $500. This prompted AMD to lower the release price of its cards, to $350 and $400.
Let us take a look at the competition at each price point:
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:
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!
nVidia’s recent run has been amazing! The four RTX 20xx cards, followed by the GTX 1660 Ti and 1660 non-Ti, have all been winners. These cards have had great power consumption, great temperatures, and low noise levels. More importantly, nVidia gave you the ultimate reason to buy them: They beat the competition in terms of power. If new cards came out and performed worse than old cards… who would buy them? Right?
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!
So, nVidia is launching its latest (and cheapest) card in the 12nm series of cards. The GTX 1660, like the GTX 1660 Ti before it, has no RTX. However, it does let you play Witcher 3 on 60FPS+ on 1080p for $220. This new card beats all other AMD 5xx cards in its price range, and that includes the RX 590. It consumes less power, produces less heat, and less noise too. Considering the good price and stellar 1080p performance, this card ought to be a winner.
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?
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.
On January 15th, nVidia released a driver update that made its proprietary adaptive sync technology called G-Sync compatible with FreeSync monitors. The announcement, which effectively removes the need to buy one of a select few (expensive) monitors to achieve the full benefits of the leading chipmaker’s GPUs, was expected never to come.
