At CES 2017, everybody has been waiting for AMD to drop all the pricing and performance information on their next generation GPU architecture codenamed Vega, but AMD couldn’t do that simply due to the fact that Vega is still in active development. Engineering samples have been shown running both Star Wars: Battlefront and DOOM in 4K at max settings, but that is all.
By far the most overlooked component in new builds is the power supply unit, or PSU. Ironically, it’s one of the most important. Your power supply will be pumping the lifeblood of precious volts to each and every electronic part in your fancy new computer.
A catastrophic failure of a power supply can fry every other part in your PC, or in rare cases even start a life-threatening fire at 2:00 in the morning. Why risk a disaster like this to save the equivalent of four grande mochaccinos from that fancy coffee shop?
2017 is set to bring us some interesting new developments in PC hardware technology. Let’s talk about possibly the most interesting technologies on the horizon from AMD: The Ryzen CPUs and AM4 Motherboards.
Now this is how we do it…
Support for Ultrawide resolutions has grown immensely in the past few years, and is now to a point where it is generally a viable choice for a majority of users — both for work and play. For workstations, 21:9 is much like having dual monitors, but without the bezel. In this guide we’ll be targeting three different price points and recommending a different monitor for each — all Ultrawide. All prices include the price of the monitor. Commence the 21:9 build guide!
For those looking for a mid-range graphics card, this generation’s two leading choices are NVIDIA’s GTX 1060 and AMD’s RX 480. Both cards come with two models of varying video RAM capacities and price points:
Clearly, these cards are direct competitors in performance and price. Let’s take a look at each head-to-head matchup to figure out which is the better purchase.
Kaby Lake is the first CPU series under Intel’s new Tick-Tock-Tack strategy (a.k.a Process, Architecture, Optimization). Previously, Intel would shrink it’s last generation’s CPU (a Tick), and then introduce a new microarchitecture at that size in the next generation (a Tock). Now Intel shrinks a CPU (Tick), makes a new microarchitecture (Tock), then “optimizes” it. What does “optimize” mean? That is left up to the reader to decide, as “optimize” is not defined by Intel.
The MSI Gaming RX 470 ARMOR OC
You’re in the market for a new GPU and want to spend less than $200. In that case, the main choices would be the GTX 1050 Ti (~$140) from NVIDIA and the RX 470 (~$170) from AMD. Given the differences in price and performance, which of these mid-range graphics cards is the better deal?
We’ve made a minor update that disrupts our entire list of PC parts recommendations: The Monstrous tier (our most powerful, most expensive tier) is now more Monstrous.
Ever wanted to learn how to build a PC, but didn’t have 5 minutes to spare? We’ve made just the video for you.
We present, How to Build a PC (in 4 Minutes!)
The Red Ring of Death: We don’t want this console curse to happen to your PC.
Readers often ask us some variation of the following questions:
What PC would be equivalent to the PS4 / Xbox One? Can you really build an equivalent PC for the same price as a console?
This is a great question, and one that we are happy to answer.
