Greetings!
We’ve just published the Keyboard Guide on our Peripherals page.
Are you looking for recommendations on a new keyboard? Perhaps it’s time to upgrade to one of the mechanical variety? You’ll find great recommendations at all price points and much more information in the guide to help you choose the right keyboard for you and your PC.
Thank you for following Logical Increments. We appreciate your trust in us to recommend the best PC hardware for anyone’s budget.
Logical Increments is looking for volunteer writers to share their knowledge of computers and PC-building with our audience via short posts on our blog.
Are you the person your friends come to with computer questions? Do you love talking about hardware and how to compile the right build? Maybe you have valuable experience or stories to share from building your own PC.
After months away, some old friends have returned to the US parts guide.
Prices of AMD graphics cards have been on a rollercoaster ride in recent months. The cryptocurrency craze in the US had caused a spike in demand for high-end video cards used to mine Bitcoins, Dogecoins, and the like, especially among AMD cards.
Prices on solid state drives have dropped significantly in recent months, with some brands seeing extremely deep price reductions. Over on Reddit’s r/buildapcsales community, members have been capitalizing on several deals around the $60 range for 120GB drives and $90-100 for 240GB models of some lower-end brands.
The consumption of digital media is the hallmark of the 21st century. Computers have continuously evolved to allow users to consume media with greater ease, transitioning from bulking room-sized machines in the 1960s, to sleek, mobile laptops in the 2000s.
In the logicalincrements guide, if you were to hover over the name of any tier, you will get a small description, along with a sample performance in some popular games.
It was only on October 24 that AMD released the R9 290X, which delivered Titan-like performance for $500.
Today, AMD is releasing the R9 290, which delivers about 95% of the performance of the 290X, for only $400:
Image from VR-Zone’s review of the cards
AMD has released its latest cards, the R9 280X, R9 270X, and R7 260X. While the names are new and complicated, the chips inside are the same chips we have been seeing for the last two years.
The cards that have launched so far: R9 280X == 7970GE at $300 R9 270X == 7870 OC at $200 R7 260X == 7790 OC at $140.
The Nvidia GTX 760 was released yesterday. It has slightly-below 670/7970 performance, but the price is $250 – $260, making it a steal. It makes the 7870 XT/Myst ($250), 660Ti/7950 (~$280) obsolete at their current prices. The available-for-purchase models of the 760 are only about ~4%-5% behind the 670/7970, while costing $100-$130 less. Logically, that means that above the ~$200 price point, only the 760 and 770 are worthy purchases.
Haswell’s launch is a little disappointing, even though it does bring a small improvement to performance. When it comes to CPUs, we are a greedy lot, but Intel made us that way. When Intel launched Nehalem (the first gen i7), the performance improvement over its predecessor was roughly 20%-30%.
This was repeated with Sandy Bridge (second gen), which brought an improvement of roughly 25%. Ivy Bridge (third gen) did not maintain the pace, offering only a small ~5% improvement, but we forgave that, since it was just a die-shrink. Haswell was supposed to bring back the excellent OC-ability of SB, and also bring excellent improvements to performance as well as power consumption.