There have not been that many major releases recently, so this will be a small update that mostly includes items we are not adding to our chart.
And before we get to those items: All three non-added items are due to bad pricing. They are great items if they were cheaper, but we at Logical Increments would probably not recommend $100 cups of coffee either.
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.
The majority of PC part launches from established companies are successes, as professionals usually try to design good products for the purpose of attracting customers.
From time to time, however, the human beings at such companies make mistakes, or go overboard on the alcohol, or let the engineers dream a little too much. The past week gave us a rare and beautiful opportunity to see not one but two hugely entertaining slipping-on-banana-peel-tier product launch failures, with a pratfall each from nVidia and AMD.
This is a double update: one CPU, one GPU.
Let us begin with the section that contains (on balance) good news for PC builders!
In the midst of a festive season, we bring tidings of good graphical cheer to some of the highest tiers of our main PC building chart!
New GPUs from both AMD and Nvidia are now making an appearance, and causing some accompanying changes for older graphics cards.
Behold, friends-with-big-wallets: the biggest, heaviest, most expensive, most power-consuming, and *drumroll* best-performing card ever made!
Let us take a closer look.
(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:
Did you feel that? Was it an earthquake? An avalanche? No, nVidia just decided to throw all caution to the wind and create the world’s most powerful consumer GPU, and that GPU is stomping!
The new RTX 3090 Ti is an absolute monster that smashes all the metrics and establishes itself as the new king of consumer GPUs.
Let us take a look at some of its stats:
Intel recently launched a new lineup of chips, and one of them was the i7-11700K, an 8 core/16 threaded powerhouse with a boost clock of 5 GHz. With such specifications, this processor runs any game smoothly. As a result of the high core count, it would also be fit for workstation purposes such as video rendering.
It does have a noticeably high TDP: 125 Watts! This already tells us the processor might get a little hot under high loads. Nevertheless, the performance is astounding and makes up (slightly) for the high TDP.
In this article, we’ll be building using the new i7 to build a PC for high-tier gaming. Let’s dig in:
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?