
With the new AMD Athlon 3000G, ‘team red’ are hoping to capture that entry-level budget gaming market.
Yet have AMD hit the mark with this, or fallen short? Let’s find out!

With the new AMD Athlon 3000G, ‘team red’ are hoping to capture that entry-level budget gaming market.
Yet have AMD hit the mark with this, or fallen short? Let’s find out!

Up until a few years ago, the value king for gaming was the Intel i5 processor. More recently, AMD’s Ryzen APUs have stolen the show at the low tiers, and we all know that no integrated graphics from Intel can currently compete with AMD’s Vega 8 and Vega 11 iGPUs. So it’s a no-brainer for gaming builders at very low budgets (who are entirely skipping graphics cards) to go with Ryzen APUs.
But outside of such head-to-head CPU comparisons, a broader value question remains for upper-low-tier (and lower-mid-tier) builders: how would a self-built system balanced around AMD’s newest R3 (including a discrete graphics card) compare to a highly discounted prebuilt system with a few key upgrades?

The AMD Ryzen 9 3900X is (at least for now) the flagship CPU from the new range from AMD. With its huge 12-cores and 24-threads, it has ‘productivity king’ written all over it. So let’s look at building a productivity powerhouse system with it!

With Intel fleshing out their 9th-generation range, now comes the i5-9400. So we take a look at what it takes to build a balanced PC with this $185 CPU!

A few months ago, Logical Increments reader Nintenrax built an incredible water-cooled PC for himself, and shared with us a very detailed recap of the build. (See all pics on PCPartPicker.)
Here’s Nintenrax:

Build a PC or buy a console? The debate rages on…
With the release of the PlayStation 4 Pro over the holidays, the debate over the performance needed for 4K gaming on PC has been fierce. With games like Last of Us Remastered running in the PlayStation 4 Pro’s 4K 60 FPS mode, it is a testament to the level of optimization that can be achieved when working to a single specification. Yet what sort of performance can a PC builder get for the same $400?

The Xbox One S is releasing on August 2, 2016, bringing the power of the original Xbox One into a tiny form factor. Releasing at $399 for the 2TB version, this brings the cost of console gaming back up to budget gaming PC range.
Today, we’d like to find out how powerful of a PC we can build for the same price of the Xbox One S. As it turns out, you can build something surprisingly powerful.

Updated January 2017, with new Intel CPUs, new SSDs, and better choices for RAM and HDDs.
At factory clock speeds, the GTX 1060 claims to be equal to last generation’s GTX 980 in performance, while only sipping 120W of power. All of this at a price of $249!

Get ready for the GTX 1080 era. The GIGABYTE GTX 1080 G1 is just one of many GTX 1080 models.
NVIDIA’s GTX 1080 is the most powerful graphics card currently on the market.
A single GTX 1080 is capable of achieving smooth game play on highest settings even at 4K resolution. When two cards are paired in SLI, even the most demanding games hit 60 frames at this resolution.