Five Great Deals on Gaming PC Components Right Now

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The market for PC components has been a wild ride in recent years. With the cryptocurrency craze driving component prices through the roof throughout most of 2017 and 2018, PC building took a hit and left enthusiasts seriously considering prebuilts (shudder).

But the crypto bubble has popped and other market influences are pushing prices down – for now. Prices for GPUs, the core components gobbled up by cryptocurrency miners, have generally come back down to MSRP, and after a supply shortage that drove up prices, RAM is finally sinking to around 2016 levels. Add to that a diverse market of storage options (HDD, SSD and the newer M.2 drives), as well as other supply improvements that are driving down prices, and you have significantly reduced costs for building a PC.

How long will it last? The latest generation of high-end Nvidia GPUs might be experiencing a string of card failures and low supply is nudging prices up. Meanwhile, US tariffs are pushing some manufacturers to raise prices. The time might be right to start building a PC—or begin looking for an upgrade.   

We’ve put together a list of some PC components that provide great value going into the holiday season:

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5 Tips for Building a Quiet PC

be quiet! Dark Base Pro 900 quiet/silent airflow cover image

Whether you sleep near your PC, do something with your PC where it helps to keep noise to a minimum, or just like some peace and quiet, having a PC that isn’t audibly distracting can be important.

This list provides five important things to remember when you want to choose parts for a quiet, unobtrusive PC.

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New GPU Descriptions for November 2018

TechPowerUp The Witcher 3 1080p 4k benchmarks

The Witcher 3 1080p and 4K Benchmarks from TechPowerUp (source article linked below)

November 2017 was the last time we updated the GPU descriptions. We compared cards to the Titan XP, and had benchmarks for WoW and Witcher 3.

Now that it is November 2018, I have updated the base comparison GPU and the reference games.

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How to Diagnose and Improve In-game Lag, Latency, and Access Issues

How to Diagnose and Improve In-game Lag and Latency Issues

It is safe to say that PC gaming is vastly different to console gaming. Players on PC have a much greater ability to customize and refine their experience, and the most powerful PCs put consoles to shame in terms of the quality of the experience that they offer.

However, with the almost infinite number of potential hardware and software combinations for PC gamers, there are pitfalls to be avoided.

Developers can’t account for every possibility when they are testing their games for bugs. Developers also can’t optimize their brand new games to run on computer parts from many years ago. Similarly, internet connections sometimes don’t live up to the standards promised. This is why you should be prepared to research around to find the best internet plan. This means scouring locally to find the right one for you. And finally, certain games may end up being restricted to certain areas of the world for various reasons.

Whether your problem is related to your graphics processing power, the quality of your internet connection, or something else entirely—there are a number of ways you can try to fix these issues. We’re going to go through some of the most important ways in this article.

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