Posts Tagged Under: RAM

The Pre-Black Friday Update

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Yes! Yes! Black Friday is almost here, the day every PC builder waits for all year round.

This year’s Black Friday should bring us some relief from the very topsy-turvy prices we have been seeing, since Black Friday (and Cyber Monday) sales are typically the best prices you see all year round.

We have not had many serious updates to the chart this year. The hardware releases have been slow, the international scene has been volatile enough to ensure most of the PC hardware conversations centred on tariffs/prices and not releases, and some of us on the Logical Increments team have been going through some unforeseen consequences circumstances that an apple-a-day could not cure.

I am very grateful to still have you, dear reader, even though it has been a quiet year update-wise. Now then:
 

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Building a PC for Adobe Photoshop

Between the addition of cameras to smartphones and the rise of image-centric social media sites like Instagram, photography has only become more and more popular over the past couple decades. This has also meant a lot more interest in image editing and adjusting. When it comes to software for image editing, it’s Adobe Photoshop that dominates both professional and enthusiast work.

However, serious users may find that Photoshop can sometimes be a demanding program. In this article, I’ll briefly discuss the importance of each PC component when it comes to having a good experience with Photoshop.

This post will not be an example build, but rather advice on what to prioritize and what to be aware of. (If you’re looking for something more specific, with recommendations of exact parts to get for different budgets—you should check out the first section our primary guide on building a PC for image editing and graphic design.)

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Intel’s Alder Lake: The Phoenix Emerges

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Ever since Intel won every race in the universe with the launch of Sandy Bridge back in 2011, they have been slacking. AMD’s tortoise needed six long years, but it overtook the sleeping Intel hare in 2017, leaving behind a lot of room for jokes at Intel’s expense.

But Intel, like all other large tech corporations, does have a solid engineering team tucked away. And the only thing that engineers need is time. Intel has been trailing AMD for four years, but that changed with the Alder Lake CPU launch a few nights ago.

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Newegg’s Black Friday Week Deals 2020

Newegg’s 2020 Black Friday Week sales! These are Logical Increments’ picks for the best Black Friday Week 2020 deals from Newegg.

The year 2020 has been very turbulent, and many people are working from home these days. For those of us wanting to upgrade our PCs (or buy completely new ones), Black Friday and Cyber Monday represent the best times to get the best deals on PC hardware. What does 2020 bring? Let’s take a look!

Please note: Some of the best deals are dependent on rebates. Such rebates are reliable, but only if you follow the instructions exactly and submit everything on time, so better be careful!

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Table of Contents for Newegg’s Week-long Black Friday Deals:

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The November 2020 Memory and Storage Update

Prices for various PC parts often have a huge range, depending on items quality, performance, and availability. Some CPUs are $100, some are $1000, and some cannot be bought for love or money. Some other items have a much smaller range of prices, and this can be seen when we look at PC memory and storage (including RAM and hard drives). Memory and storage are offered by a large number of sellers, and thus the options are competitively priced. Most options that are similar in speed and capacity tend to be close to each other in price, making it easy to track and compare.

With time, long-term and short-term computer memory always sees a downward trend in price, with the only exception being when a factory is burned or flooded or something. Once certain items (or capacities) can be reliably found for a particular price, we overhaul our memory recommendations to recommend better/larger components, for the same price.

Along those lines, let us take a look at some recently changed recommendations:

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The Logical Increments September 2020 Update

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If you missed the nVidia Ampere reveal, you can read a recap here. Ampere, like nVidia’s previous ~2-3 generations of chips, should be really good. Just… be sure to stay realistic and not to get your hopes up too high, or believe too deeply in marketing material. Every modern product launch promises to dramatically alter your life, but few genuinely deliver.

While we wait for the new cards to launch and undergo benchmark testing, we have some other updates:

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Lopsided Memory Channels: Uneven RAM Set-ups Explained

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Recently, we talked about memory channels: What they are, what they do, and why modern computers have multiple. But what happens when you aren’t using the common one or two identical sticks in each channel? What if you have one channel with one stick, and another with two? What if you aren’t using RAM from just one RAM kit, so you have one 4GB stick and one 8GB stick? Some claim that all your RAM works in single-channel mode under such circumstances, but how is that possible when you are physically using more than just one channel on the motherboard?

In this article, I will explain what happens when a different amount of RAM is installed into each of multiple memory channels on a motherboard (when memory channels are populated unevenly).

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RAM Channels Guide: The What, and The How

If you’ve ever taken a look at a product page for sticks of RAM, or at the specifications for a CPU or motherboard, you’ve probably seen “memory channels” mentioned.

For many beginners, this sparks questions like, “What’s the deal? Does dual-channel mean I can only use two sticks? What do multiple channels do that one channel doesn’t? Can I use quad-channel RAM on a dual-channel motherboard?”

The answers to those questions and more can be found below, so read on!

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