Over the years, Black Friday and Cyber Monday have made this the best time of year to be a PC builder.
And while some might find excitement in the classic Black Friday imagery of shoppers camping out and then making a mad scramble for the electronics department, we at Logical Increments prefer to stay at home and capitalize on mega discounts the more civilized way: Glued to the internet, mashing F5 on our browsers and searching of the best deals.
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.)
We get questions like this a lot:
When’s the best time of the year to buy computer components for a build? Black Friday? Christmas? May?
The best time to buy PC parts depends a lot on where you live.
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.
Last week we revealed the winners to our first ever Show Us Your PC contest. Our top 3 picks won Amazon gift cards and the honorable mentions got some sweet, sweet Steam games. And we got to ogle some awesome custom PCs, which happens to be our favorite thing to do.
Did you miss it? Do you want to relive the excitement in a more digestible format? This contest recap is for you!
Here’s a breakdown of the winners. Click on any winner to see more!
First Place: A FANtastic Build
We loved Skye’s superpowered PC and the way he tastefully added Noctua fans everywhere. Seriously, go look at all those fans.
And finally, the grand winner of our Show Us Your PC contest. (If you’re catching up, yesterday we revealed our Second Place winner, Wednesday featured our Third Place winner, and on Tuesday we showed off our two Honorable Mentions.)
Ladyfolk and mentlegen, our first place winner: A FANtastic Build
Skye recently built this beauty after 6 years with an Intel Core 2 Duo running Windows XP. We’d say it’s a heck of a successor!
We’d like to introduce the second of three winners in Logical Increments’ Show Us Your PC Contest! (If you’re catching up, yesterday we revealed our Third Place winner, and on Tuesday we showed off our two Honorable Mentions.)
Gentlemen and ladies, our second place winner: The Desk Monster
We’d like to introduce the first of three winners in Logical Increments’ Show Us Your PC Contest! (If you missed it, yesterday we revealed our two Honorable Mentions.)
Ladies and gentlemen, our third place winner: The Onyx III Mini
Two weeks ago, we announced a contest in which readers could submit photos of their PCs and the stories behind building them, the Show Us Your PC contest. We offered Amazon gift cards to the top 3.
But now the contest entry period is over! And we have winners! 3 of them!
But we’ll get to those winners later. First, we have some Honorable Mentions.
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.