Logical Increments Blog

Intel Releases Skylake CPUs

Intel’s latest CPU family, Skylake, has just launched with two new CPUs (the i5-6600K and i7-6700K), a new socket (1151), and a new chipset family for motherboard (Z170). These CPUs are on the 14nm manufacturing process, which is not strictly new (their previous generation, Broadwell, was on 14nm dies), but new when it comes to mass-market availability.

How well do these new CPUs perform? After analyzing reviews (linked below), it looks as though, unfortunately, Intel has decided to forgo CPU improvements and focus on the integrated GPU.

Hiring: Part-Time Community Manager for Logical Increments

Greetings!

Logical Increments has grown quite a lot over the years, and our site is now viewed by more visitors than ever, with an expanding audience from all over the world. We are very proud to be considered a helpful source of information to all those who need to buy and assemble their own PC.

Helping people means responding to many varied requests, such as specific questions or comments and feedback. As our web presence expands to additional pages and social media channels, we have to field an increasing number of these requests for help.

We are currently looking to hire a part-time Community Manager to help with this task.

AMD Launches the R9 Fury (non-X) for $550

AMD has released its second graphics card to utilize it’s new high-bandwidth memory, the R9 Fury. This follows the release of the R9 Fury X just a few weeks ago.

After reading through reviews and benchmarks (linked below), we can confirm several expectations. The non-X Fury is definitely the “little brother” card to the $650 Fury X, being both slower and cheaper.

AMD Launches the R9 Fury X

Finally, AMD has released a truly new graphics card. But how does it fare against the competition?

Last week began the launch of AMD’s newest line of graphics cards, the Radeon 300 series. For the most part, those cards were a refresh of the 200 series that came before it, but with some added clock speeds and faster video RAM. While most of those cards are fine and make our list of recommended components, there was nothing particularly thrilling about them.

Today, however, AMD has released the R9 Fury X, a GPU made with technology we have not yet seen. It’s launching at $650 and taking aim at NVIDIA’s new $650 GTX 980 Ti. The first round of benchmark reviews are in (linked below), and we have taken a very close look at them.

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:

Review: XCOM Enemy Unknown

The Falcon
15th Apr 2015
PC Gaming

tl;dr If you want turn-based tactics, this is one of the best!

Intro
Now that the aliens have invaded the earth and started abducting and terrorizing its people, a task force has been set up to defend humanity, to study these aliens, and maybe even to fight back! XCOM: Enemy Unknown puts you in charge of an elite squad of soldiers, and expects you to lead them into battle against impossible odds. Good luck, Commander!

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.

Review: Ys Origin

The Falcon
19th Mar 2015
PC Gaming

tl;dr Good gameplay, bad graphics.

Intro:
If you have never heard of the Ys games, I do not blame you. The name is weird, the artistic style is “anime-like”, and the games are not (yet) mainstream. Wikipedia says that there are 7 or 8 Ys games, but only 3 of them are available on Steam. From those 3, we take a look at Ys Origin, the first game in the series (chronologically). In Ys Origin, you are part of a search party that is looking for a pair of goddesses who are missing/hiding in a tower.