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.
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.
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.
Let’s figure out which computer build is right for you.
Pull up the Logical Increments builds list in a second window or tab so that you can follow along.
In recent weeks, the most-discussed topic in the PC hardware world has been the memory allocation of nVidia’s GTX 970. AMD has taken advantage of the controversy by lowering the price of their R9 290X card. As a result, we have made some changes to our high-end GPU recommendations.
After a slight delay, we finally have the release of the GTX 960, NVIDIA’s $200 mid-tier GPU for the 900-series.
Some benchmarks:
Based on the numbers, the 960 is very power-efficient, but a little overpriced. The performance is on par with (or slightly lower than) AMD’s Radeon R9 280, which generally sells for a little bit less.
Over the years, Black Friday and Cyber Monday have made this the best time of year to be a PC builder.
And while some might find excitement in the classic Black Friday imagery of shoppers camping out and then making a mad scramble for the electronics department, we at Logical Increments prefer to stay at home and capitalize on mega discounts the more civilized way: Glued to the internet, mashing F5 on our browsers and searching of the best deals.
nVidia’s big Maxwell launch of the GeForce GTX 980 and 970 has gone very well for the company, giving gamers great performance at reasonable prices. The release of those two graphics cards made AMD’s flagship cards (290 and 290X) overpriced, and so we removed those two cards from the Logical Increments hardware guides. (We also removed the GTX 770 and 780, since those cards had been replaced at their price points.)
We get questions like this a lot:
When’s the best time of the year to buy computer components for a build? Black Friday? Christmas? May?
The best time to buy PC parts depends a lot on where you live.
