Posts Tagged Under: gaming pc

What Logical Increments Tier is Required to Run the Most Popular Steam Games?

Top Games Header

(Information on Steam’s top games were gathered for this article from Steam Charts)

Back in January 2020, I crafted a neat little piece discussing the Logical Increments tier needed to enjoy each of the top games on Steam at the time. Fast forward to now, and oh, how the scene has shifted! Back around that period, we were seeing trade tariffs causing a good bump in prices for PC hardware​. As we ventured into late 2020, high demand meant the cost of PC parts kept climbing, and 2021 brought even higher prices—especially for graphics cards due to a cryptocurrency boom. Oh, and let’s not forget, the world was just getting acquainted with Covid-19, adding a whole new level of complexity to tech market dynamics through supply chain issues.

Now, at the tail end of 2023, with prices and availability having normalized in some (though not all) component categories, and just a week left until Black Friday and Cyber Monday, it’s about time we take a fresh look at what Logical Increments PC building tier you’d need to dive into the most popular Steam games today. Let’s see what changed in the last few years, and whether that ol’ system still has some life in it, or whether it might be worth a little upgrade. Stick around as we unpack the current gaming demands and discuss today’s tech landscape.

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Building a Compact Gaming PC with the i5-12600K

After spending the last several generations playing it safe and letting AMD enjoy the CPU spotlight, Intel finally decided to provide a more robust competition with their recent 12th-generation Alder Lake chips. New DDR5 RAM support, much smaller lithography, and lots more cores await to provide plenty of gaming and multitasking performance this holiday season.

Today, we’ll be looking at a build including the i5-12600K that focuses on being compact yet powerful—capable of fitting in a tight space, or moving with relative ease from house to office (or from home office to entertainment room). As we’ll see, the i5-12600K is a multitasking master for a great price, so this will be a gaming-workstation hybrid in a nice tight package.

Before we begin, let’s explore the 12600K in a bit more depth so we know what we’re working with!

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Building a Quiet Gaming PC with the Intel i7-12700K

 

With Intel releasing their new 12th-generation chips into a market still saturated with scalpers peddling $2000 GPUs, it’s fair to say that most people interested in this new hardware are looking to upgrade just their CPU (and motherboard) rather than putting together an entirely new build.

But it’s a lot easier to conceptualize what to upgrade when you see how the part fits into an entire build. And maybe some wild people out there are looking to build an entirely new PC regardless of the difficulties. For those reason, the ongoing graphics card woes won’t stop us from having a little fun and planning a handful of creative builds with Intel’s Alder Lake series of CPUs! For this specific build, we’ll be looking to make a quiet PC capable of letting you game in peace (without it sounding like a passenger jet is preparing for takeoff right on your desk).

First, let’s take a close look at the star of the PC: the i7-12700K!

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What Logical Increments Tier do you Need to run the Most Popular Games on Steam?

(Information on Steam’s most consistent top games were gathered for this article from Steam Charts)

Logical Increments has a continuously updated tier list, showing how much it will cost to build a system with a specific performance goal in mind. Ranging from the basic ‘Destitute’ system to the crazy ‘Monstrous’ system, it gives readers an idea of what they can achieve, what their upgrade paths are, and provides easy build lists to ensure a balanced system with high-quality parts.

Using that list, we can cross-reference with the most popular games currently being played on Steam (in terms of consistently high player counts), and fit each game with a Logical Increments tier. In fact, I’ve matched each of the 15 games in this article with 2 LI tiers each: one for 60+ FPS at 1080p, and one for 60+ FPS at 4K.

As I compiled this information, I had two basic criteria that a system had to fulfill to fit into a specific category:

  • Over 90% of the time, it had to run at 60 frames per second or above at each desired resolution.
  • It had to achieve at least very high graphical settings (not necessarily maximum for every setting).

Now, let’s see what kind of PC it takes to run Steam’s top games!

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Sample PC Builds for Final Fantasy XIV: Stormblood

In a recent Letter from the Producer LIVE from Square Enix’s Naoki Yoshida, we found out that graphics improvements are coming to Final Fantasy XIV. These will be a part of the new expansion Stormblood, releasing June 20, 2017.

With such a change in PC requirements, I wanted to design a PC build to handle it. So in this article I take a look at both the minimum and recommended system requirements and try to build the best PC for your money. So read on to find out more.

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$500 1440p Gaming Build with the Pentium G4560

Intel Pentium G4560

The Pentium is back, baby.

The Kaby Lake Pentium G4560 is the new king of budget gaming CPUs. The G4560, and big brothers G4600 and G4620, offer gaming performance similar to CPUs costing hundreds more. I put together a maximum performance for value $500 build, pairing the G4560 with the powerful RX 480. This build will handle even demanding modern games at 1440p.

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The Ultimate 21:9 Ultrawide PC Build Guide

Now this is how we do it…

Support for Ultrawide resolutions has grown immensely in the past few years, and is now to a point where it is generally a viable choice for a majority of users — both for work and play. For workstations, 21:9 is much like having dual monitors, but without the bezel. In this guide we’ll be targeting three different price points and recommending a different monitor for each — all Ultrawide. All prices include the price of the monitor. Commence the 21:9 build guide!

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PC Build Success Story: Eric’s 1080p Gaming PC

All the parts before they became Eric's new PC.

All the parts before they became Eric’s new PC.

About 2 months ago, Logical Increments reader Eric decided it was time to build his first PC. He had wanted to build his own gaming PC for years, but he didn’t have the funds until getting his first job out of college. With the job secured, he said he finally felt confident to build a PC for himself after researching online and talking with other Logical Increments readers in the Disqus comments section on our homepage.

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New Guide: Building the Best PC for Minecraft

minecraft1

Minecraft is one of the most popular games on the planet, and it has introduced a new generation of gamers to PC gaming. For many, Minecraft will be the game that inspires them to build their own computer. Playing Minecraft from the comfort of your own computer with your friends is really awesome. Although, the game is so much greater when you and your friends have your own server similar to those at https://ggservers.com.

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