Since Logical Increments’ humble beginnings as a little list of computer parts, we have been keeping readers updated through our Tumblr blog. But we’re getting bigger, and we’ve moved the blog over to a system with a few more features and a new look.
Our Tumblr followers are the one thing we love about Tumblr and wish we could take with us. So, if you’re reading this, please check out the new blog at:
blog.logicalincrements.com
If you want to stay updated on our latest hardware recommendations, sign up for our email list on the right sidebar of the new blog!
Update: Since some people are already asking, yes, we would be happy to cross-post important updates for our Tumblr followers. We probably won’t post everything, but we can keep you updated on major updates, like new hardware releases and recommendations. We don’t want to lose touch with our 2,000+ followers on here.
NVIDIA has launched its latest monstrosity of a top-tier graphics card, the GTX Titan X.
Review links:
AnandTech
TechPowerUp
Tom’s Hardware
r/buildapc’s review roundup
The Titan X is the new single-GPU king, beating the GTX 980′s performance by a good 25%-33%. Unfortunately, the price is not “25%-33%” higher, but instead nearly doubled. At $550, the 980 is already very expensive, and the asking price of $1,000 for the Titan X is ridiculous.
Of course, when you have the best card around, you can ask for any price you want, and Titan X is the best card around. However, just because it is the best card does not mean it’s a logical purchase at $1,000 -- unless you have a lot of money to spend.
For a more logical choice, you could get more performance from dual GTX 970s or dual R9 290Xs, and both of those solutions are much cheaper. So, even if you have $1,000 available to spend on graphics, the Titan X is not the way to do it.
But what if you have $2,000 for graphics? Since doing 3-way or 4-way SLIs typically causes more problems than is worthwhile, we would recommend 2 Titan X cards over a more affordable triple-GPU setup.
As a result, we have added the Titan X x2 as an alternative option to the 980 x2 in the Monstrous tier. Thankfully, NVIDIA allows for up to 2 cards per order!
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:
TechPowerUp
Tom's Hardware
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.
nVidia is not looking to upset the GPU market with this card, either in price or performance. The 960 is here to fill the huge price and performance gap between the 750 Ti and the 970, since nVidia retired everything above the 750 Ti in the 700-series. (And for those of you just tuning in, they skipped over an 800-series.)
The card has a good power draw, with low temperatures and low noise as a result. For the price, performance is just OK. Inside a mid-tier system, the 960 should be able to run most games on high settings at 1080p and around 60 frames per second, but it will have trouble with highly demanding games like Battlefield 4 or Crysis 3.
At $200, the card is still good enough for us to recommend as an alternative to the R9 280 in the Great tier on logicalincrements.com. However, if AMD drops the price of the R9 280X ($260) a little bit more, it might make the 960 an illogical choice.
If you're looking for a quiet, power-efficient mid-range GPU, the 960 is a good choice. You could build a nice mid-tier system for around $650 using the 960. We just might have to wait for a "960 Ti" to see a more exciting mid-tier offering from nVidia this generation.
The PC Builder's Guide to Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2014
Over the years, Black Friday and Cyber Monday have made this the best time of year to be a PC builder.
And while some might find excitement in the classic Black Friday imagery of shoppers camping out and then making a mad scramble for the electronics department, we at Logical Increments prefer to stay at home and capitalize on mega discounts the more civilized way: Glued to the internet, mashing F5 on our browsers and searching of the best deals.
Just like last year, we’ll keep a blog post updated on Black Friday and Cyber Monday to track the best deals online. In the meantime, we offer this guide with 5 tips for anyone planning to upgrade their PC or build a whole new one on Black Friday.
1. Decide what you want beforehand
Make a list of list or spreadsheet of components you plan to buy in the event that you find it on sale. We find it helpful to list both the normal price and the price you’re willing to pay on sale. Knowing your trigger point ensures purchase decisions only take an instant.
If you need any insight on what parts to upgrade, consider comparing your current components to the latest recommendations on the Logical Increments parts guide (wink wink).
2. Be flexible on brand and model
Notice that we didn’t list brands or models on our spreadsheet? Sometimes you can find an incredibly good deal on a component if you’re willing to compromise by not having the best warranty or the flashiest looks.
3. Find some reliable resources
Like we said, we’ll be tracking our favorite deals right here on this blog. For other resources, we also really like the Black Friday forums at Fatwallet and Slickdeals.
4. Follow Black Friday pages for your preferred retailer (and subscribe to emails)
Newegg and Amazon both have pages dedicate to PC components for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Newegg’s e-blast newsletter is probably the single best daily email for deals leading up to the big day. They’re already sending out emails with pre-Black Friday deals. You can always unsubscribe after Cyber Monday.
5. Stay vigilant
Quantities are often limited and the best deals sell out within hours — or even minutes — of being posted online. Stay on top of developments and try to be quick!
Hopefully these tips will help get you in the right mindset to optimize your PC-related Black Friday shopping. Good luck out there!
Today, nVidia has introduced the GeForce GTX 970 and the GTX 980, the flagship cards based on their Maxwell architecture.
The GTX 970 ($330) and 980 ($550) are now the best available graphics cards at their price points. Our GPU recommendations at Logical Increments have been updated to include these cards beginning at the Outstanding tier.
You can read the reviews here:
Anand's
Tom's Hardware
Techpowerup
Tweaktown
Guru3D
HardwareCanucks
Reddit's Collection of Sources
Here's a summary of the reviews:
The GTX 980 is currently the best-performing single-GPU card. It's ~10-15% better than AMD's R9 290X.
The GTX 970 is roughly on par with the R9 290X, with a difference of 1%-2% in performance.
Both cards are energy efficient, and thus runs cooler and quieter. This is quite important, given that they are flagship cards.
With the 980, you get the single best card. With the 970, you match the competition's flagship card for a lower price. Until AMD responds, nVidia has sealed the $330+ market segment in its favor.
There is even more news: nVidia is retiring the 780 Ti, 780, and 770. It will also reduce the price of the 760, since the 960 is expected to be released next month. You can read about that here.
We have removed the retired cards from our recommendations and we'll keep a lookout for the 960 when it's released. We'll also now be waiting for AMD's next generation of cards.
After a very long period of nothing but price cuts and rebadges, it is nice to see things being shaken up again on the GPU front. Let us hope that AMD has something to punch back with, preferably before the holiday season hits!
And finally, the grand winner of our Show Us Your PC contest. (If you’re catching up, yesterday we revealed our Second Place winner, Wednesday featured our Third Place winner, and on Tuesday we showed off our two Honorable Mentions.)
Ladyfolk and mentlegen, our first place winner: A FANtastic Build
Skye recently built this beauty after 6 years with an Intel Core 2 Duo running Windows XP. We'd say it's a heck of a successor!
Most strikingly, he replaced all the stock fans in his Corsair Vengeance C70 case with Noctua's NF-S12A FLX and NF-A14 FLX fans.
"The airflow path through the case is fairly typical, although I'm using a lot more fans than most people bother with," Skye said. "The four on the front bring air in through the drive cages, and the top and rear fans act as exhausts, pulling the fresh air through the hot components."
Oh, and if anyone was wondering about the AX1200i, he confirmed that Corsair packages it in a velvet bag.
Skye also wanted to make sure this beast could read every card format imaginable, so he threw in a NZXT Aperture M card reader on the front.
Note the nuclear launch button. What's up with that?
"That button with the adorable little plastic safety cover on it like it's going to launch a nuke if you're not careful is meant to be the reset, but I rewired it so that it goes to the DirectKey header, which makes it reboot directly into BIOS. Much easier than watching for that brief window of time when you can hit the delete key."
We'll let Skye explain his reasoning behind getting the ASUS Sabertooth Z87 motherboard:
"ASUS's Sabertooth series is all about ruggedness and resiliency. The plastic covering protects the entire board, and it comes with tabs that you can put in unused DIMM and PCIe slots to keep their connectors protected from dust. Underneath this shielding is a series of thermal sensors that let you monitor the board's status, and the top left VCORE area has a special ventilation assembly. A lot of people might think this is all a bit silly, and certainly you don't need it, but it's pretty cool — and it looks fantastic, too."
Skye also replaced the 40mm fan on his motherboard with another Noctua fan, and the mobo's I/O shield comes with an accessory that allows you to stick a dust filter over the gap.
He also replaced the fans on his Noctua NH-C14 cooler with two different Noctua fans: Noctua's NF-A14 PWM and NF-A15 PWM.
Skye also picked up an AVerMedia Live Gamer HD video card and an ASUS Xonar Essence STX sound card (with replacement Sennheiser HD650 op-amps) -- both dwarfed in size by his video card: the ASUS GeForce GTX 680 DirectCU II TOP.
"It's a monster; takes up three slots! ASUS's cooler design for the GTX 680 uses direct contact with nickel-plated copper heat pipes. This is a highest-binned, factory-overclocked model. Plus, it just looks awesome."
And here it is inside the mothership:
"In addition to the airflow path from front to rear/top, I'm using two more 140mm fans mounted onto the side window that will blow directly onto the video card and the CPU cooler. This creates a three-dimensional air path that I think will be a great utilization of the 'C-type' cooler design," Skye said.
And here's the rear, including DEMCiflex after-market magnetic dust filters:
Some more filters on the side:
And we have a successful boot, complete with champagne:
Skye's complete list of specs:
Corsair Vengeance C70 Military Green case
ASUS Sabertooth Z87 motherboard
Intel Core i7 4770K CPU
ASUS GeForce GTX 680 DirectCU II TOP video card
16GB Kingston HyperX DDR3 RAM at 1866MHz
Samsung 840 Pro 512GB SSD
Western Digital Black 4TB hard drive
Western Digital Black 2TB hard drive
Noctua NH-C14 CPU cooler (upgraded with NF-A14 PWM and NF-A15 PWM fans)
AVerMedia Live Gamer HD capture card
Xonar Essence STX headphones amplifier and sound card
Sennheiser HD 650 headphones
ASUS BW-12B1ST Blu-ray drive
NZXT Aperture M card reader
NZXT Sentry Mesh fan controller
5x Noctua NF-S12A FLX fans
4x Noctua NF-A14 FLX fans
Noctua NF-A4x10 FLX fan
Viewsonic VP2770-LED 1440p IPS monitor
BenQ XL2420T 1080p 120 Hz TN monitor
Filco Ninja Majestouch-2 keyboard
SteelSeries Sensei [RAW] mouse
Blue Yeti Pro microphone
DEMCiflex magnetic fan dust filter set
Congratulations, Skye! Of all the contest entries, you've managed to conjure the most envy from the Logical Increments team!
We’d like to introduce the first of three winners in Logical Increments’ Show Us Your PC Contest! (If you missed it, yesterday we revealed our two Honorable Mentions.)
Ladies and gentlemen, our third place winner: The Onyx III Mini
Gerson recently finished upgrading his build by downgrading its size into a beautiful small form factor system. Starting with a midrange build in 2011, he has slowly upgraded the components over the years.
The final upgrade came in the past month, when he completely reconfigured everything in a sexy Silverstone Sugo SG10 case.
Let’s peep the specs:
CPU: Intel i7-4790K @ 4.7 GHz
GPU: EVGA GeForce GTX 780
Mobo: MSI Z97M
RAM: 16GB Mushkin Blackline 1600MHz RAM (2x8GB)
PSU: Corsair AX750
Corsair Hydro H80i Cooler
Creative SoundBlaster Z Soundcard
Crucial M550 256GB M.2 SSD
2x Crucial M4 128GB SSD
Seagate Desktop 4TB HDD
WD Caviar Black 500GB HDD
Silverstone Sugo SG10 Case
“After I built another SFF machine for someone else, I wanted to do something similar for myself and will now always build SFF systems whenever I can,” Gerson said. “They're just so much fun and a much bigger challenge.”
We were very impressed with what Gerson managed to fit into that sweet little case. Now we want 4 or 5 of our own…
Thanks, Gerson!
Stay tuned for the next two winners coming tomorrow and Friday!
CONTEST: Show Us Your PC! Best Submissions Win Amazon Gift Cards.
Note: the contest period has ended. Thank you to everyone who entered! We'll be announcing the winners soon.
We want to see the glorious PCs you've built, so we're holding a contest and asking you to show us! Our favorite submissions will win prizes in the form of Amazon gift cards and be featured on this blog.
How to enter: Send us 3 or more photos of your build and/or battlestation with a list of hardware specs. We're giving priority to submissions with photos that are clear, impressive and high-quality for blogging purposes. Please feel free to include any other information you would like to share, such as your story of building the PC or why you built it.
Deadline: Monday, August 25 at 11:59 PM Pacific Standard Time.
Prizes: $100 Amazon gift card for 1st place, $50 for 2nd, $25 for 3rd.
How we pick the winners: We'll pick the winners based on the photos and anything you tell us in your submission. You don't necessarily need to have the most powerful, sexiest PC to win. We're choosing subjectively based on our favorite submissions, and we don't know what to expect. Maybe your submission will have the coolest photos, the neatest insides, or the most entertaining story behind building your rig. Or maybe you really do have the most beastly machine. We just want to honor your magnificent gaming altar with an Amazon gift card.
Whatever self-built PC you have, we want to see it!
Please share this with anyone who might want to enter, and good luck!
