Intel’s new Skylake-X CPUs have taken over our top two tiers, Extremist and Monstrous. They have effortlessly dethroned Intel’s previous line of high-end CPUs, Broadwell-E.
The new additions to our highest-end CPU recommendations are the i9-7900X (10 cores; $1,000) and i7-7820X (8 cores; $600). They replace last generation’s i7-6950X (10-cores; $1,700), i7-6900K (8 cores; $1,100), and i7-6850K (6 cores; $600).
In a recent Letter from the Producer LIVE from Square Enix’s Naoki Yoshida, we found out that graphics improvements are coming to Final Fantasy XIV. These will be a part of the new expansion Stormblood, releasing June 20, 2017.
With such a change in PC requirements, I wanted to design a PC build to handle it. So in this article I take a look at both the minimum and recommended system requirements and try to build the best PC for your money. So read on to find out more.
The GT 1030
Three lower-end graphics cards have released recently, but you may not have heard anything about them. AMD and NVIDIA generally do not throw major parties when they release ~$70 products, so do not worry about it if these launches slipped under your radar!
The three new-ish cards are:
The truth is out there: Earlier this month we learned the specifications for Project Scorpio, the new 4K Xbox from Microsoft. I couldn’t really just let such knowledge pass me by, so I sat down to see just what sort of PC would be needed to beat it!
This article will propose two sample builds capable of standing toe-to-toe with Project Scorpio for roughly the same price. Read on to see for yourself.
(Note: If you want to skip to our recommended 4K monitors below, scroll down to “Our favorite 4K monitors.”)
For desktop PC users, 1080p (1920×1080) monitors are ubiquitous today, but that was not always the case. A little more than ten years ago, they were just starting to hit the market. Monitors with an aspect ratio of 16:10 (for instance, 1920×1200) first started appearing back in 2004, with 16:9 (1080p) monitors coming a year or two after.
A few months ago, Logical Increments reader Nintenrax built an incredible water-cooled PC for himself, and shared with us a very detailed recap of the build. (See all pics on PCPartPicker.)
Here’s Nintenrax:
This month, AMD launched multiple Ryzen 5 processors. The 1600X and 1600 are sub-$300 6-core 12-thread CPUs that pose some healthy competition to Intel’s i5-7600K and i5-7500.
On the other hand, the sub-$200 Ryzen 5 1500X and 1400 have 4 cores and 8 threads. They compete more with Intel’s locked i5-7400 and the unlocked 2-core, 4-thread i3-7350K CPUs, neither of which we recommend at their current price points.
The Ryzen 5 1500X comes with a Wraith Spire cooler, the Ryzen 5 1400 with a Wraith Stealth. The Intel i5 7400 comes with a stock Intel cooler and the i3 7350K doesn’t include any cooler at all.
This week we saw the release of the new RX 580 and RX 570 from AMD. While these graphics cards are rehashes of the RX 480 and 470 (with a ~5% overclock), they are still great GPUs worthy of consideration for mid-range PC builders.
Today, I take a look at their performance and match each of them with suitable parts to get the best bang for your buck with these new cards.
After releasing the extensively reviewed 8-core 16-thread Ryzen 7 CPUs last month, AMD marked April as the month of the Ryzen 5 processors. This tier of the Zen microarchitecture-based CPUs includes 4-core and 6-core hyper threaded processors, in a price range of $169-$249.
Today, we will compare the Ryzen 5 1600X ($250) and 1600 ($220) to their price equivalents from Intel: the i5-7600K ($240) and i5-7500 ($200).
