(Sailboat photo by Robbie Sproule)
Can you feel it? The change for PC builders, not very subtle, happening even as I type these words?
The clouds have lifted. The sun is shining. The news is good. It is as follows:
After some very brief relief around the 2017 holidays, graphics card prices continue on the path of going absolutely insane.
We had a cryptocoin-induced inflation back in late 2013, but it was somewhat mild, and only lasted a couple of months. We had a second inflation in 2017, where the price hikes were higher, and lasted more than half a year. When this ended in December 2017, I thought: “Thank goodness that is over. Nothing could have been as bad as that!”
I was so naive, so wrong.
In short, there is not much we can do about graphics cards prices other than continue to recommend the best graphics cards at each price point. However, we want to be realistic about how bad the situation has gotten.
Goodbye, old friend.
Greetings! We have two updates we’d like to share.
First, we’ll start with the sad news…
ASUS R7 370 STRIX
Newegg’s Cyber Monday deals are here! If you missed Black Friday, well, Newegg has you covered with some excellent choices!
EVGA GTX 980 Ti
It’s finally Black Friday, and that means Newegg has rolled out even more deals to go along with their seemingly month-long Black Friday sale so whether you’re looking for a 13 inch gaming laptop or an SSD, now is the perfect time to buy. We’re continuing to round up the best deals we can find, and we’ve listed the newest ones at the top of this post.
MSI GTX 980
It’s Canada’s turn to get in on some of the crazy Newegg deals going on this week!
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?
This week, NVIDIA launched the smallest member of its Maxwell GPU family, the GTX 950. Launch prices range from $160 to $170, depending on manufacturer, landing the 950 firmly in the ‘mid-tier’ GPU category.
After examining early reviews, we have added the new card to the Very Good tier on the U.S. parts list. Looking at its competition, it beats the AMD’s $150 R7 370 and matches the performance of AMD’s slightly pricier R7 270X.
Finally, AMD has released its new 300 series of graphics cards, with 5 cards available as of June 18th: The Radeon R7 360, R7 370, R9 380, R9 390 and R9 390X.
If you take the time to view benchmarks and read through reviews (linked below), you will find that AMD did not really release any new cards in the 300 series, but has only refreshed the 200 series. They have taken the same GPUs from the 200 series, slightly raised the clock speeds (by ~5%), and added slightly faster RAM. The result is very similar performance to the 200 series.
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.
