PC Hardware Archives - Page 21 of 23 - Logical Increments Blog

AMD Refreshes 200 Series of Graphics Cards as 300 Series

Finally, AMD has released its new 300 series of graphics cards, with 5 cards available as of June 18th: The Radeon R7 360, R7 370, R9 380, R9 390 and R9 390X.

If you take the time to view benchmarks and read through reviews (linked below), you will find that AMD did not really release any new cards in the 300 series, but has only refreshed the 200 series. They have taken the same GPUs from the 200 series, slightly raised the clock speeds (by ~5%), and added slightly faster RAM. The result is very similar performance to the 200 series.

GTX 980 Ti Released, Added to Logical Increments

Last week, NVIDIA launched its GTX 980 Ti graphics card. If you haven’t yet heard about it, you can read the in-depth reviews for the card here:

Does FPS Matter? Decide for Yourself.

James
13th Apr 2015
PC Gaming

Some of the silliest myths in gaming are related to framerate, or frames per second (FPS). Some people will tell you that the human eye can only detect a certain number of frames per second, or that an FPS of 24-30 will produce a more “cinematic” gaming experience, as the standard framerate for movies has been set at 24 FPS for nearly 100 years, and television often displays at 30 FPS.

On the other end of the spectrum, some gamers will claim that you need a certain FPS to truly enjoy your gaming experience. They’ll say that running below a certain FPS is like a “slideshow” because of how few images are being rendered each second.

In reality, the only framerate that really matters is the one that is acceptable to you. Generally speaking, however, a higher framerate is better for gaming. And as PC gamers, we have the power to adjust our game settings or build our computers to achieve a desired framerate.

GTX Titan X Launched, Added to Monstrous Tier

NVIDIA has launched its latest monstrosity of a top-tier graphics card, the GTX Titan X.

Review links:

The Titan X is the new single-GPU king, beating the GTX 980′s performance by a good 25%-33%. Unfortunately, the price is not “25%-33%” higher, but instead nearly doubled. At $550, the 980 is already very expensive, and the asking price of $1,000 for the Titan X is ridiculous.

High-End GPU Drama Affects Logical Increments Recommendations

In recent weeks, the most-discussed topic in the PC hardware world has been the memory allocation of nVidia’s GTX 970. AMD has taken advantage of the controversy by lowering the price of their R9 290X card. As a result, we have made some changes to our high-end GPU recommendations.

GTX 960 Launched, Added to Great Tier

After a slight delay, we finally have the release of the GTX 960, NVIDIA’s $200 mid-tier GPU for the 900-series.

Some benchmarks:

Based on the numbers, the 960 is very power-efficient, but a little overpriced. The performance is on par with (or slightly lower than) AMD’s Radeon R9 280, which generally sells for a little bit less.

GPU Price Wars: AMD Strikes Back!

nVidia’s big Maxwell launch of the GeForce GTX 980 and 970 has gone very well for the company, giving gamers great performance at reasonable prices. The release of those two graphics cards made AMD’s flagship cards (290 and 290X) overpriced, and so we removed those two cards from the Logical Increments hardware guides. (We also removed the GTX 770 and 780, since those cards had been replaced at their price points.)

GTX 980 and 970 Added to Logical Increments

Today, nVidia has introduced the GeForce GTX 970 and the GTX 980, the flagship cards based on their Maxwell architecture.

The GTX 970 ($330) and 980 ($550) are now the best available graphics cards at their price points. Our GPU recommendations at Logical Increments have been updated to include these cards beginning at the Outstanding tier.

Haswell-E CPUs Added to the Guide

Greetings!

Intel’s latest enthusiast platform, the Haswell-E CPU family, has just been launched. There are three CPUs available: two 6-cores and one 8-core. We will not be getting into the details, as you can read more about Haswell-E over at Anand’s or Tom’s. One thing that you do need to note is that you will need to buy an X99 motherboard and DDR4 ram if you want to use the Haswell-E platform.

Introducing the Logical Increments Keyboard Guide

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.

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