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

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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.

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AMD Launches the R9 Fury X

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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.

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Dear Game Publishers: PC Gamers Will Wait for a Good Port

We just want to glide over Gotham at 60 FPS.

Once again, PC gamers have been reminded to never trust a console port on launch day.

Yesterday, Batman: Arkham Knight launched simultaneously on consoles and PC. It should have been a joyous occasion for PC-gaming Batman fans, but it wasn’t.

The problem? Arkham Knight’s PC port is apparently “disastrous,” “garbage,” and “suffering from major issues.” AMD and NVIDIA players are both reporting major framerate and audio problems, the game comes with a default 30 FPS cap, and the textures on PC are allegedly worse than the console versions.

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AMD Refreshes 200 Series of Graphics Cards as 300 Series

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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.

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Review: XCOM Enemy Unknown

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

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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!

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Does FPS Matter? Decide for Yourself.

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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.

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Why You Should Buy an SSD, and How to Find a Good One

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Not long ago, there weren’t many options for storing data on your computer. Standard mechanical hard drive disks (HDDs) have long been the de facto choice, but a different type of storage drive is becoming much more popular: the solid state drive (SSD). Solid state drives bring a wealth of improvements over standard HDDs, so let’s take a moment to understand why many PC builders are now choosing SSDs for their primary data storage solution. No wonder server companies similar to https://www.hostiserver.com/ decide to use SSDs for their VPS applications.

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NVIDIA or AMD Video Card? What’s the Difference?

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An important part of any performance PC is the Graphics Processing Unit (or GPU, the brain of the graphics card), but the GPU is especially important when it comes to gaming. The GPU is responsible for processing the visual data that is seen on the monitor. Many CPUs come with integrated GPUs, but these are much less powerful than the GPUs in dedicated video cards. For gaming, you want a video card.

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