Posts Tagged Under: PC build

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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Budget Showdown: R3 3200G & GTX 1650 Self-built PC vs. Upgraded Prebuilt PC from eBay

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?

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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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