The Falcon, Author at Logical Increments Blog

The Slightly Better APU Mini-Update

Some of the low-tier AMD CPUs released last year are now in a position to be added to our main build chart.

The Dramatic RX 5600 XT (and Minor GPU Updates)

After many rumours and much debate, the RX 5600 XT has been released. Originally slated to be a GTX 1660 “killer”, AMD re-positioned this card to compete with the RTX 2060.

From the reviews, you can see that it competes well with the 2060, beating it by a tiny margin. The 5600 XT is a $280 card, and the 2060 was a $350 card, so a victory is neat! More than just having high performance and a good price, though—this new card also uses little power, runs cool, and runs quiet. When you check all the main boxes, you have a winner!

But is it all sunshine and rainbows?

B450 MAX and X470 MAX Motherboards Update

MSI has a lineup of MAX (yes, allcaps) motherboards. These differ from the non-MAX editions in that they have a more MAXIMIZED bios, and thus can support a wider range of CPUs. Some have a slightly better heatsink.

The RX 5500 XT Launch

The RX 5500 XT by AMD is their latest and smallest graphics card in the RX 5xxx series. The launch is mediocre, so this post is going to be small to match.

Batch of Countries Added to the New Site, Part 1

This is just a quick update to let you all know that four more of our previously-supported countries are now fully migrated onto the new redesigned main chart.

Newly Added:

Germany
India
Italy
Netherlands

Extremist and Monstrous Tiers Get More Extremist and More Monstrous

The Ryzen 9 3950X was released about 2 weeks ago, but only hit the marketplace yesterday. Do not worry about buying one: These new chips are so good that they went out of stock instantly. But why is the R9 3950X good, and what does it replace? And what other changes are coming to the top tiers of the chart?

The GTX 1650 Super Launch

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.