Posts in Category: logical increments updates

New HSFs Replace the Legendary Noctua NH-D15

NH-D15 & Dark Rock Pro 5For 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…

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AMD’s Niche CPUs: Excellent Gaming and Productivity Performance, But at a Price

Ryzen 9 9950X3D and Ryzen 9 9900X3D

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?

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Re-basing Graphics Cards to Compare with the RTX 5080

3080 to 5080

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.

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Intel Fumbles the Arrow into the Lake

Ultra 9 Underwater

CPUs are a duopoly. While some alternatives to AMD and Intel technically exist, their market share is so tiny that they do not appear on some statistics tracking pages. It is for this reason that we rarely talk about only Intel or only AMD. We instead compare them to one another, as they are both the only true competition to each other.

So, in today’s update article, as we turn our attention to whether there’s a place in our PC build chart for Intel’s strange new CPU release, named ‘Arrow Lake’—we also consider how this release fits into the history of the battle between two impressive (sometimes clumsy) tech giants.

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AMD Conquers the High-end CPU Tiers

AMD Ryzen 9000 CPU lineup

It has been a while, but here we are with AMD’s Ryzen 9000 series launched and ready for purchase!

AMD’s new CPU series starts with a serious set of excellent high-end CPUs. We are not going to analyze all of them individually in this post, but as a quick summary:

    • Ryzen 5 9600X: 6 cores and 12 threads for $250.
    • Ryzen 7 9700X: 8 cores and 16 threads for $320.
    • Ryzen 7 9800X3D: Also 8 cores and 16 threads, but with extra cache for $480.
    • Ryzen 9 9900X: 12 cores and 24 threads for $380.
    • Ryzen 9 9950X: 16 cores (!) and 32 threads (!!) for $550.

So, how do these new CPUs measure up? Do they belong in our chart?

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Updating CPU Performance Comparisons Nov. 18-19

Greetings.

We are updating the CPU performance information shown. Our current CPU descriptions compare performance to the old Ryzen 9 3900X. We are updating the performance numbers to be compiled from newer benchmarks, and showing performance relative to the new Ryzen 9 9900X.

As we update the CPU descriptions, you may see errors in the performance numbers, where some of the CPUs are still being compared to the older 3900X, making them look out of place. We are working on making sure that all CPU description are updated and standardized within a day or two of this post.

showing the cpu performance numbers in the cpu description that will be updated

Thank you!

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