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.
AMD has stayed surprisingly silent over the months since Intel kicked off their 12th generation, letting loose a full series of beefy Intel consumer-grade CPUs. Little is known about the secretive Ryzen 7000 series of processors, AMD’s next CPU lineup, but a few morsels of information have been released so far that give us a general idea of what to expect from Zen 4, and boy are they juicy.
Let’s get right into them!
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.
With the release of the Ryzen 7 5700G and the Ryzen 5 5600G, AMD have once again spiced up the CPU market. They feature similar specifications compared to their 5600x and 5700x counterparts, but have iGPUs in them too, and at a lower MSRP! The rise in price for the 5600x and 5700x shocked some people, so it is nice to see that it is going back down again.
These chips might change the market and create new possibilities for PC builders. Thus, in this article, I will discuss potential uses for these new chips, and talk about their specifications.
Let’s be fair: it would be more than a little presumptuous if we expected or even demanded improvements to the current hardware shortages. Even after a monumental vaccine rollout procedure in many countries, the pandemic is still having a huge global effect, and we as builders need to have patience.
At this point, we are now deep into the knock-on impact of slowdowns at the lowest and earliest stages of manufacturing affecting every aspect of the assembly and distribution pipeline.
But even after all these caveats and disclaimers, people remain curious: which parts are being affected the most, what are the ongoing problems, and when might things get back to normal? Well, those are the exact topics we intend to cover in this post, part by part!
Ever wondered what the cryptocurrency fuss is all about? Why are some PC enthusiasts so upset about cryptocurrency? And why are some other PC enthusiasts so happy with cryptocurrency?
Let us take a thorough look at this tantalizing love/hate relationship, then consider what companies are doing to address the situation, and finally present a ‘new and improved’TM prediction about when the graphics card market will improve.
Time traveling is always a risk. When you go to the past, there’s the usual dangers like making sure you don’t talk to your past self, not stepping on any bugs so you don’t trigger the butterfly effect, etc… and when you go to the future, there is the danger that your expectations could be a million miles off of what actually happens.
Well, that second type of time travel is what we’re risking today: we’re gonna take a speculative leap forward in time, to discuss AMD and Intel’s CPUs of the future!
We’ll do our best to base our speculations on available evidence, in the hopes that they won’t be a million miles off of reality (maybe only a thousand miles). So, let’s take a look at some future manufacturing tech, and see who might come out on top in the next era of the ongoing battle between red and blue.
Imagine for a moment: High-speed, low-ping internet costing the same or less than the lowest-tier options provided by your current ISP, regardless of your location. Sounds like an impossible dream, doesn’t it? Must we forever be stuck with a ping of 400 ms? Must the frugal among us always face download speeds that require waiting days before being able to play a newly bought game?
Well, that dream may become a reality in the not-too-distant future, as high speeds, low ping, and reasonable costs are the attributes promised by the upcoming ‘alternative’ internet service Starlink. But what exactly is promised, and does it seem likely that it can live up to its own hype?
Intel recently launched its Rocket Lake CPUs, which include the i9-11900K, the i7-11700K, and the i5-11600K. There are a tonne of reviews out there, including some highly entertaining videos which should not be missed. What follows is our take on this launch, including the changes it will be bringing to the Logical Increments build chart on our homepage.
So, let us take a look at the good, the bad, and the ugly highlights of this launch.
As if a deadly pandemic, rising sea levels, AND a botched Cyberpunk 2077 launch are not enough, today’s gaming-PC buyers are faced with an additional unpleasant situation: Product unavailability! When will it end?!
Oh, and… Greetings.