The time has come for Intel’s Skylake CPUs to (almost completely) replace Haswell on the Logical Increments parts list. As a result, we have upgraded many of our motherboard recommendations to socket 1151, and our RAM recommendations to DDR4.
SSD prices have steadily been falling.
Aside from Black Friday, Christmas and the holiday season is typically the next best time of year to buy PC hardware. Between Christmas sales and retailers selling off end-of-year loss leaders, there are ample opportunities to score on upgrades or new builds.
With that in mind, we want to provide some insight on what’s a good purchase for Christmas 2015, and what you should hold off on purchasing.
As we approach the Q1 2016 release dates for the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, many PC gamers are wondering how to best prepare their computer for VR gaming, while others are planning new builds from the ground up. We would know: Every year, more than a million visitors come to our website looking to build the best PC for their budget, and an increasing number of them ask us about VR headsets.
We just published a Guide to Building a PC for Virtual Reality. (Click the link to see the real guide.)
ASUS R7 370 STRIX
Newegg’s Cyber Monday deals are here! If you missed Black Friday, well, Newegg has you covered with some excellent choices!
Good news! The site should load much faster now. It was getting quite slow, and desperately needed an upgrade.
Average load time on the old site was almost 30 seconds. Now it’s down to about 5 seconds.
Another handy feature: The parts list for your country should be automatically selected now when you load the page.
Our impressions in one phrase: Ho-Hum.
AMD has just released the R9 380X, a mid-tier graphics card priced at $229.
The short story is as follows: We have read the reviews (linked below), and the 380X is identical in price and in performance to last generation’s R9 280X.
The long story is a bit more interesting. The R9 280X was released in October 2013. The R9 280X was a rebadge of the 7970GE, which was released in June… 2012. Yes, there are people who bought a graphics card in June 2012 who are seeing an identically performing card launched in November 2015.
MSI has white GTX 980s?!
Newegg is at it again with another week of sales leading up to Black Friday — all part of their “Black November” promotion to take advantage of the prime hardware-shopping season.
Once again, we’re rounding up our favorite deals from the sale, which lasts from now until Nov. 23rd at 4 PM EST / 1 PM PST.
For more advice on getting good deals on Black Friday, read our article on Black Friday 2015: How to Get the Best PC Parts Deals.
Time for a very small GTX 960?
Right on the heels of our post that lists the Best Deals from Newegg’s Pre-Black Friday ‘Deal Leak’ Sale (ending Nov. 16th), Newegg has snuck in another sale, this one only lasting a little over 24 hours.
Introducing the 11/11 sale, going on until 11:59 PM Pacific Time on Nov. 12th. In other words, you have roughly 24 hours from this posting to snag any deals in this sale.
We see two deals in this sale worth noting:
Graphics Card
Screen
Keep following our blog or sign up for our email list on the sidebar for updates on the best PC hardware deals throughout the holidays.
The post-apocalyptic future is bigger and prettier than ever. Fallout 4 is out, and we have a brand new game build guide to help you build the best PC for Fallout 4.
Here it is: Building the Best PC for Fallout 4
If you want some spoilers, here are the graphics cards we recommend for running the game at 50-60 frames per second on Ultra at various resolutions:
1920×1080 (1080p): GTX 960 or R9 380
2560×1440 (1440p): GTX 970 or R9 390X
3840×2160 (4K): 2x GTX 980s
Read our full guide for all the gory details.
Is today the day you get a GTX 980? How about a rice cooker?
Good news for those living in the U.S.: Newegg is having a pre-Black Friday sale with some nice deals, including an incredibly powerful rice cooker!
OK, maybe it’s just a normal rice cooker.
But if you’re looking for a graphics cards, cases, or a good power supply, there are quite a few good deals in the mix. This might be a chance to skip out early on the Black Friday madness, particularly since graphics cards do not usually go on sale during Black Friday.