You want to know:
Short answer: Yes, Black Friday is still the best overall time of year to build or upgrade a PC. But what you buy matters more than ever.
That is a lot of new cards launched recently! The RTX 5050, the RTX 5060, two versions of the RTX 5060 Ti, and two versions of the RX 9060 XT!
Instead of checking each one out separately, let us take a look at them all in one fell swoop, with an eye toward deciding where/if they belong in our main build chart. I am somewhat unsure of what a swoop is, and why it needs to be of the fell variety, but here are the cards:
For the last 14 years, a high-end Noctua CPU cooler has always crowned the list of air coolers in our list. The NH-D14 and NH-D15 were both excellent, and each was the best air cooler when it was launched.
Yes, the unfathomable colour combination of chocolate and “beige” (closer to light pink-brown off-white) made them an interesting* and unique choice from an aesthetic perspective, but there was no denying that the performance was the best.
Noctua offered a serious package deal: Best-in-class performance, fantastic build quality, excellent noise levels, and great customer service. It was no wonder that Noctua products found a home in the PC case and in the heart of many, many gamers…
A few weeks ago, AMD launched two new processors, the Ryzen 9 9950X3D and Ryzen 9 9900X3D. How do they fare, and will we recommend them in our PC build chart? Let us find out.
The R9 9950X3D is a $700 16-core CPU, with the “3D” denoting extra cache. The R9 9900X3D is a $600 12-core, with the same “3D” extra cache.
AMD’s goal with these 3D CPUs is the same as it was for previous 3D CPUs: Provide best-in-class gaming performance, without compromising productivity. Did they succeed?
Ah, AMD! At long last, you have decided to do something about your subpar GPU market share. Better late than never!
AMD has recently launched the RX 9070 and the RX 9070 XT, for $550 and $600. So how do these two new cards compare when pitted against nVidia’s offerings?
Did you check out the new RTX 5080 launch? It is nVidia’s latest $1000 (or $1500) card, meant for those who have $1000-$1500 to spend on a GPU, and do not wish to splurge on the $2800 RTX 5090. It is a good time to be very wealthy!
Getting deeper into RTX 5080 specifics is not the goal for this post, though. That’s what we did last week! Instead, today’s post is about the fact that we will be using the RTX 5080 as the reference for our performance percentages in our main chart from now on, as opposed to the RTX 3080.
Tell me, how rich are you? If you are rich, then we can be friends. If you are very very rich, I would like to upgrade you to my best friend, and tell you about nVidia’s two newly released hyper-overpriced graphics cards, the RTX 5080 and RTX 5090.
…let us take a closer look:
nVidia has very recently launched 2 new cards, the RTX 5070 ($550) and the RTX 5070 Ti ($750). This is a standard nVidia launch, so if you want the tl;dr: Good cards, overpriced.