MSI has white GTX 980s?!
Newegg is at it again with another week of sales leading up to Black Friday — all part of their “Black November” promotion to take advantage of the prime hardware-shopping season.
Once again, we’re rounding up our favorite deals from the sale, which lasts from now until Nov. 23rd at 4 PM EST / 1 PM PST.
For more advice on getting good deals on Black Friday, read our article on Black Friday 2015: How to Get the Best PC Parts Deals.
If you’re anything like us, then the graphics card is your favorite part of a computer. Graphics cards let your computer do awesome things like super complex computations, physics processing, and most importantly, producing shiny graphics in games.
So, what is a graphics card, and how do you figure out which one you should buy?
AMD has launched its Radeon R9 Nano, a very tiny, yet very powerful graphics card. The Nano uses the same chip that is in the Fury X, but heavily binned and carefully power-controlled in order to bring down power consumption and thermals.
So, how is the card?
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.
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.
Last week, NVIDIA launched its GTX 980 Ti graphics card. If you haven’t yet heard about it, you can read the in-depth reviews for the card here:
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.
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.
Today, nVidia has introduced the GeForce GTX 970 and the GTX 980, the flagship cards based on their Maxwell architecture.
The GTX 970 ($330) and 980 ($550) are now the best available graphics cards at their price points. Our GPU recommendations at Logical Increments have been updated to include these cards beginning at the Outstanding tier.
Dark Souls 2 is finally out on PC, and this time with much better support for PC features compared to its predecessor. In the video above, we see what the game looks like on a range of graphical settings. This guide will also provide some recommendations for the computer hardware necessary to run at those settings, from the minimum requirements up to maximum settings at 4K resolution.
Before we get started, please note that there are not yet benchmarks for the game available from major English-speaking sites, but there are enough user-reported data for us to comfortably give hardware suggestions.