Rumours of an Intel entry into the graphics card market have been circulating for years, and many people had eagerly anticipated the arrival of a third player to the discrete GPU space.
Well, it happened. A few days ago, Intel released the Arc A750 and Arc A770 cards. Let us take a look at the good and the bad of this launch.
We are going to skip the big long AMD history lesson for this one, but if you have hours to spare and want to read about that:
Today, we take a look at where AMD lands with its Zen 4 launch.
(Sailboat photo by Robbie Sproule)
Can you feel it? The change for PC builders, not very subtle, happening even as I type these words?
The clouds have lifted. The sun is shining. The news is good. It is as follows:
Today I bring you something small and wonderful: an update for some of our highest-tier CPU Coolers!
The update is somewhat minor, as it involves only the HSFs in the top three tiers of our main chart. But the CPUs in those tiers will appreciate their ‘cool’ new allies…
At last! All modern GPUs are available for purchase, new, for MSRP. No more crying as you pay 2x or 3x the recommended price for a card. No more heartbreak as you buy a used card that has been sitting in a crypto farm for 2 years. No more sad checking on crypto prices, hoping and praying for a crash. No, friends, that time is over!
Oh, how sweet it is, to have everything in-stock and for a normal price. With that, a large number of changes have hit the charts, so let us take a look.
After a full eternity of waiting (two years), GPU prices have returned to something that closely resembles sanity.
In-stock, decently priced, current-generation graphics cards are once again linked in almost every tier of our PC building chart!
Did you feel that? Was it an earthquake? An avalanche? No, nVidia just decided to throw all caution to the wind and create the world’s most powerful consumer GPU, and that GPU is stomping!
The new RTX 3090 Ti is an absolute monster that smashes all the metrics and establishes itself as the new king of consumer GPUs.
Let us take a look at some of its stats:
Ever since Intel won every race in the universe with the launch of Sandy Bridge back in 2011, they have been slacking. AMD’s tortoise needed six long years, but it overtook the sleeping Intel hare in 2017, leaving behind a lot of room for jokes at Intel’s expense.
But Intel, like all other large tech corporations, does have a solid engineering team tucked away. And the only thing that engineers need is time. Intel has been trailing AMD for four years, but that changed with the Alder Lake CPU launch a few nights ago.
GPU prices started going up (roughly) in March of 2020 when all hardware went up in price or went out-of-stock. It happened slowly at first, then faster and faster, until widespread unavailability became the norm!
During the worst of the worst, it was so bad that you could not buy most graphics cards, no matter what price you were willing to pay! I am very glad that the worst is over.
But we aren’t out of the woods just yet.
How have you been? Better, I hope. Things have not been well for the last 1.5 years, due to… the circumstances being what they are.
But at long last, we can see a ray of hope!