Posts Tagged Under: CPU

4 Troubleshooting Tips for Overclocking Your PC

Often, PC enthusiasts will speak of overclocking the way car enthusiasts discuss high-performance engines, with megahertz and voltage taking the place of horsepower and torque. Overclocking is often a relatively simple way to squeeze out extra performance from computer components; however, problems sometimes do arise. Luckily, most problems faced with overclocking are easily fixed with some basic troubleshooting techniques.

For our purposes, we’ll look at issues affecting the components that are overclocked the most: the CPU and GPU.

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How to Upgrade an Older PC

upgrade-older-pc-cover-image

PC photo by Nikitarama

Your computer has faithfully been by your side for all these years. You can’t replace it (for whatever reason), but with Christmas coming up, you decide it’s time to give your little friend a much-deserved gift.

Or maybe it’s frustrating you with sluggishness. Either way, you’ve got a great excuse to give it a little performance boost. What I’m here to do is to help you figure out what you can do to upgrade your older system on a budget.

So, let’s discover how to upgrade an older PC.

This list is more suited to people who fit the following:

  • You focus on gaming or productivity tasks
  • You might use these components in another computer build

It is okay if the above doesn’t quite apply to you. This info can still be really helpful. Just keep in mind that you might have different upgrade options than listed.

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The Threadripper 2 Launch (a.k.a. AMD Flexes its Muscles)

TR 2990WX

AMD launched two CPUs today. The first is the 2990WX, a gargantuan 32-core/64-thread CPU $1800 ubermonster that will give every Intel board-member nightmares for the next ~2 years. Yes, you read that right: Thirty-two cores! Barely 2 years ago, a quad-core was the standard, recommended CPU for most people, and this 2990WX behemoth does not double or triple or even quadruple that: It octuples it! Maybe “octuples” is not a proper verb, but this is not a proper launch either.

The second CPU is the 2950X, a more modest 16-cores/32-threads $900 affair, but make no mistake: That makes it on par with Intel’s best consumer CPU, for half the price. In fact, if you took the time to read the reviews linked below, you will find that most reviewers enjoyed the 2950X more than the 2990WX.

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Logical Increments Intel Coffee Lake Update

In early October, Intel launched its new Coffee Lake lineup of CPUs. In many ways, it’s a very exciting launch, with the entire range of CPUs receiving a core count upgrade for the first time since 2009.

However, the launch has also been plagued with some issues. Namely, availability has been extremely limited, with the most desirable CPUs selling out faster than most people can snag them.

As a result, we have been intentionally slow to add the new CPUs to the main computer parts list on our homepage. We don’t like recommended hardware that people cannot reliably buy.

That said, we are past due for addressing Coffee Lake, so this post should fully inform you of our thinking. Read all the gory analysis below:

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Intel Core i3-8350K vs. i5-8400 vs. Ryzen 5 1500X

Intel’s Coffee Lake CPU stack

Intel’s new Coffee Lake processors have been very competitive with AMD’s Ryzen, as we previously pointed out in our i7-8700K and i5-8600K comparisons against the competition.

Finally, we turn our attention to the 4-core 4-thread i3 line. In this article, I’ll be comparing what we know about the i3-8350K against AMD’s price equivalent, the Ryzen 5 1500X. Intel’s segmentation has gone quite out of hand though, and the 6-core 6-thread i5-8400 falls into the same price category, costing only around $10 more than the 8350K and 1500X.

So, how do these sub-$200 processors compare in gaming and some light productivity work?

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