The RTX 3080 is nVidia’s latest, and the first release in the 3xxx line. If you want the tl;dr straight away: It is good, and we recommend buying it if the price fits your budget.
If you want the slightly longer list of pros and cons, without reading reviews for hours (we do that for you), then you have come to the right place.
If you missed the nVidia Ampere reveal, you can read a recap here. Ampere, like nVidia’s previous ~2-3 generations of chips, should be really good. Just… be sure to stay realistic and not to get your hopes up too high, or believe too deeply in marketing material. Every modern product launch promises to dramatically alter your life, but few genuinely deliver.
While we wait for the new cards to launch and undergo benchmark testing, we have some other updates:
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears! Also: Greetings.
The topic of this month has been the Coronavirus epidemic, so you are probably expecting some sage advice in this update. We will not give you any medical advice, because… we are not qualified to give medical advice. We research computer parts, not medicine! So please visit the official website of the Ministry of Health (or Department of Medicine, or Center of Disease Control, or etc) of your country, and follow their advice. They are professionals, and they know the best ways to deal with this.
As for us: We are professionals too, we know the best ways to buy PC parts! And this update brings changes to our main chart, mostly in the CPU column.
A new decade means lots of exciting new technology to spend your hard-earned money on! If you’ve got the itch to upgrade your PC, it might be worth checking these things out. Then you can either wait to see what improvements are in store, or be confident that a purchase made right now won’t be obsolete in six month’s time.
Keep in mind that a lot of the following information is based on rumours, conjecture, and leaked information. Until it comes direct from the manufacturer in question, take this information with a grain of salt.
Being the latest in the ever-expanding line of GPUs from NVIDIA, here comes the GTX 1650 Super! The GTX 1650 Super sits in a very specific spot in an already stacked line-up. So, where does it fit into all of this? And what would it look like to build a balanced 1080p gaming system with it?
Is this another GPU just filling a little available space in the market, or have the chaps at NVIDIA weirdly given us a good product in the GTX 1660 Super? To answer this, and more importantly create a build around it, read on!
nVidia’s Turing architecture has been fantastic, with almost every card in the 16xx and 20xx range being recommended on our charts. The cards perform well and are power-efficient, so you typically get a card that hits all the main points: high performance, lower power draw, low temperatures, and low noise. Pricing is an issue for the flagship cards (2080 and 2080 Ti) where lack of competition lets nVidia showcase its pricing creativity with $1200 cards. Oil tycoons buy graphics cards too, you know! But for all the other Turing cards, the prices are fine at launch. Well, almost all.
The sole Turing card that was a thoroughly bad launch was the GTX 1650, which was weak and quite overpriced. Even today, half a year after its launch, it remains overpriced at $150, easily beaten by cheaper ~$120 cards. Today, nVidia is updating the lineup with the GTX 1650 Super, for $160.
It’s been over two decades since Intel released a discrete graphics card (the last was the disappointing Intel740, which hit the market back in 1998). That is set to change in 2020, when Intel intends to release its new discrete GPU, the Intel Xe.
Intel is being characteristically tight-lipped about what we can expect with their new cards, but if the Xe (pronounced “ex-ee”) proves to be a reliable alternative to Nvidia or AMD cards, PC builders might soon have more options at their disposal.
This article will tell you what we know about Intel Xe so far.
Up until a few years ago, the value king for gaming was the Intel i5 processor. More recently, AMD’s Ryzen APUs have stolen the show at the low tiers, and we all know that no integrated graphics from Intel can currently compete with AMD’s Vega 8 and Vega 11 iGPUs. So it’s a no-brainer for gaming builders at very low budgets (who are entirely skipping graphics cards) to go with Ryzen APUs.
But outside of such head-to-head CPU comparisons, a broader value question remains for upper-low-tier (and lower-mid-tier) builders: how would a self-built system balanced around AMD’s newest R3 (including a discrete graphics card) compare to a highly discounted prebuilt system with a few key upgrades?
nVidia’s new Super 1660 makes the 1660 non-Super obsolete, and gives the 1660 Ti (also non-Super) a pretty hard time. As such, it is now the new default card for both the Good and Very Good tiers, with the Ti being an alternative.