The time has come for Intel’s Skylake CPUs to (almost completely) replace Haswell on the Logical Increments parts list. As a result, we have upgraded many of our motherboard recommendations to socket 1151, and our RAM recommendations to DDR4.
We’re often asked this question: Between the AMD Radeon R9 390 and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970, which is the better card for gaming?
Thermaltake Core V1
When putting this build together, I wanted to build a Mini ITX PC that can play almost any game at 1440p at 60 FPS with Ultra settings. I allocated a budget of $1,200 and picked parts accordingly.
This is a Haswell build, but I’ve provided alternative options for Skylake, at a slightly higher price.
Gonzo65’s 901 Build
Inspired by the Holiday sales, I decided to put together a quiet, clean, small Mini ITX build to handle any current game at max settings at 2560×1440. Total build price: $1,750.
It’s a little more expensive and harder to put together than a comparable full-sized build, but it turns out gorgeous and powerful.
Updated December 27, 2015
The best sales until next Black Friday are here!
ASUS Z97A Motherboard
If there’s anything you want to upgrade or get for a friend, now is the time. We won’t see better deals on many of these until next November, especially the things that don’t see large incremental upgrades, like cases and power supplies. CPUs, graphics cards, and SSDs will likely slowly drop in price as newer better versions come out, but these prices will still be the best you are likely to see for months.
Every year, Steam has several sales, usually coinciding with the various holidays. Two days ago, Steam’s Winter sales started, bringing down the prices of over 10,000 different games.
Some people would say that 10,000 is a large number of games, and we would agree. We have combed through the sales, and picked out about 60 titles that we liked the most. We split the recommendations in bigger and smaller titles. Since there are so many games on sale, we only looked at games with discounts of 50% or more.
SSD prices have steadily been falling.
Aside from Black Friday, Christmas and the holiday season is typically the next best time of year to buy PC hardware. Between Christmas sales and retailers selling off end-of-year loss leaders, there are ample opportunities to score on upgrades or new builds.
With that in mind, we want to provide some insight on what’s a good purchase for Christmas 2015, and what you should hold off on purchasing.
Build complete, but can it handle the stress?
Very few things in life are more satisfying than assembling all the parts to a new PC, hitting the power button, and watching it boot up properly. That’s what we at Logical Increments are all about!
But even if your build starts up and seems to work without problems, you might want to make sure all the components are fully functional. Does your graphics card pump out pretty pictures at the level promised by the manufacturer? Does your RAM operate consistently for hours on end? Does your CPU process the desired number of ones and zeroes under intense loads without overheating?
To answer these questions, we turn to stress testing: Making sure that all of your parts can handle the work that they’re designed to do (or overclocked to do). They might be fine under normal use, but you want to know that they’ll be able to handle heavier tasks down the road, such as high-end gaming or media editing.
Still looking for the right gift for the PC gamer in your life? Not sure what to buy for them? Why not Check out Coolest-Gadgets for more information on gaming keypads? Take a look at the latest games and buy one for them!
Our good friend, the smooth-voiced YouTube gaming sensation RecklessYuki, just released a gamer gift guide for the 2015 holiday season. Watch it here:
If you haven’t checked out Yuki’s channel before, he makes great videos on custom PC builds and 4K gameplay footage. Really, check it out.
Here are the products mentioned in the video, in order of appearance:
The post-apocalyptic future is now bigger and prettier than ever. Fallout 4 is out, and millions of gamers are already pissing off giant mutants, modifying laser guns, and amassing a small fortune in bottlecaps.
If you’d like to escape from the vault that is your daily existence and begin exploring virtual wastelands, you might be wondering how powerful of a PC you need to play Fallout 4. Well, this video is going to cover everything you need to know to play Fallout 4 on PC on a variety of settings, from the bare minimum up to extremely demanding resolutions like 4K. Shall we get started?