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:
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.
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:
So, how do these new CPUs measure up? Do they belong in our chart?
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.
Thank you!
A month ago, AMD launched its new Ryzen 9000 series CPUs. The R9 9900X and R9 9950X led the charge, with the R7 9700X and R5 9600X appearing as more budget-friendly options.
So, why aren’t they in our chart?
nVidia has recently released three refreshed cards, the RTX 4070 Super, RTX 4070 Ti Super, and the RTX 4080 Super.
That is a lot of Supers! Let us take a look at each, in brief.
I am always excited by hardware launches! The feeling of fresh, new, unexpected hardware! Progressing technology, things getting faster, or cooler, or cheaper, or all three at the same time. It is wonderful, and it is a feeling I look forward to with each launch…
Intel just launched its Raptor Lake refresh CPUs, adding a (hopefully) fresh coat of paint and renewing its Raptor Lake lineup from last year.
One year ago (almost to the day) Intel presented its A770 and A750 cards to the world. These were reasonably priced cards with reasonable performance, but were not added to our build chart then because—in addition to other minor issues with them—they suffered from two major flaws:
It has been a year, and you still need a system that has Resizable BAR, but that is available on all modern platforms launched in the last ~3 years, so it is less of an issue. More importantly, Intel’s latest drivers have dramatically improved performance in older games, between 20%-40%! That is a huge improvement.
Today, Intel launched the A580, prompting a second look into Intel’s previous cards. Since all three are based on the same silicon, we will look at them together.
We all know that HDDs are essentially obsolete as a technology, as SSDs now do everything better. But HDDs have continued to be manufactured and recommended, as they have one very desirable advantage: A lower price.
SSDs have been getting cheaper though, and have overtaken HDDs in some price segments…
