Posts Tagged Under: Budget

PC Parts are Headed in the Wrong Direction

RTX 6090 XTX Super

Fig. 1: Our prediction of the only graphics card nVidia will release in the year 2026 (projected MSRP: $20,000)

Greetings. This article was painful to write. Every section hurt, and every section gets progressively more painful. But the truth can hurt, so read on.

The consumer PC world is headed down a bad path:

There is a major focus by PC part manufacturers to produce extremely expensive and overpowered products, with the mid-tiers and the low-end being neglected. There might be no annihilation and havoc in the personal computer sector immediately, but most consumers are unhappy. If things continue as they are, normal PC buyers may choose to opt out, shrinking the market significantly. With fewer and fewer customers in the long-term, some component manufacturers may find themselves facing their own end-of-life.

Come walk with me, friendly reader, down memory lane, and I will show you how we ended up here… and where we might be going next.

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Budget Gaming Revisited: R3 3200G vs. Low-tier CPU and Graphics Card in 2021


Thanks to chip scarcities and high demand due to people working at home, computer part prices have skyrocketed. And that includes the price of the Ryzen 3 3200G. Once upon a time, the 3200G was a solid budget option for anybody looking to build a budget gaming PC to get started with PC gaming.

But it cost about 100 USD before the prices starting jumping, and it is now either out-of-stock or costs over 200 USD! Still, thanks to people still being stuck (or content) at home and prices on higher-tier components ballooning even higher, lots of people are planning to build a budget PC right now. So, should they overpay for the 3200G, or does it now make more sense to step back in popularity and/or age to buy an ultra-budget graphics card and CPU combo?

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A Comprehensive HDD Specification Guide

If you are looking to store your digital goodies with the most bang for the buck, then hard disk drives are undoubtedly the way to go. Whether it’s for a NAS, a secondary drive for some less-played games, or any other use where capacity is a priority over speed—there’s no beating the ‘price per gigabyte’ of HDDs. But how do you pick the perfect drive for your use case?

Although almost any modern drive should fit and work fine if there is a free compatible motherboard slot and power connection present (usually SATA, although older systems might have other connectors), there are a few different things to consider when looking to get the perfect drive. In this guide, I will be going over the what and the how of picking out your new drive (or drives!). But first, let’s take a closer look at what HDDs can offer us that an SSD or some other technology can’t, and what drawbacks there might be.

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