Best CPUs of 2020 So Far (Gaming, Workstation, Overclocking Round-Up)
Thursday, 28 May 2020With the new influx of CPUs from AMD and Intel, and more rumored on the horizon, we wanted to round-up all of our recent testing into one concise piece for people looking for recommendations on the best CPU for different tasks. We’ve published several hours’ worth of content in the form of reviews, tuning, and follow-up coverage, so if you want the full details and depth for anything check those pieces. We’ll be focusing more on firm recommendations for each category in this video and less on the deeper details, with our categories including: Best gaming CPU, best budget gaming CPU, best small business or hobbyist production CPU, best workstation CPU, best overall, most fun to overclock, and most disappointing.
Best Motherboard Sales for Black Friday & Cyber Monday (AMD AM4 Ryzen, Intel Z390)
We’ve covered a variety of sales this Black Friday, including a wide range of components like best monitor sales, best GPU and CPU sales, and an overall deal roundup. We’ve also written some guides that build upon a year of testing data, including our best CPUs of 2019, best cases of 2019, and best GPUs of 2019 round-ups.
Today, we’ll be focusing on the best motherboard discounts presently available on both Newegg and Amazon for both AMD and Intel. Remember, this isn’t a “best motherboard roundup,” but rather a best motherboard sales listing. You can reference our best Z390 boards video for Intel’s top-performing boards or our best motherboards for Ryzen 3000, and we have another of those on the way tonight. Every sale we list here is a motherboard that’s at least decent or recommended and that actually has a real discount, not just the fake markdowns that we see all the time. Some of these have individual reviews/analysis videos we’ve done that will be linked with them.
Best CPU & GPU Black Friday Sales: R7 2700X, R7 3800X, RTX 2080 Ti
PC hardware sales for Black Friday are typically good. The consumer space always gets good prices cuts, but some industries just don’t offer much in the way of sales or margin during peak buying season. Computer hardware, though, is fortunate enough to be a fiercely competitive space, and so we’ve found plenty of worthwhile discounts for consideration. AMD’s Ryzen lineup -- including the brand new Ryzen 3000 series -- has big sales across the board. The R5 3600X, a CPU we previously recommended against as it was economically wasteful as compared to the R5 3600, is marked down to the same price as the R5 3600. That makes it actually worthwhile. The Sapphire RX 5700 XT Nitro+ is also marked down, surprisingly, and previous-gen AMD Ryzen CPUs are down to new prices or discounted prices.
We return again to our annual Awards Show series, where we recap a year’s worth of content to distill-down our opinions on the best-of-the-best hardware that we’ve tested. We also like to talk about some of the worst trends and biggest disappointments in these pieces, hopefully shaming some of the industry into doing better things next year. This episode focuses on the Best Gaming GPUs of 2019, with categories like Best Overall, Most Well-Rounded, Best Modding Support, Best Budget, and more. NVIDIA and AMD have flooded warehouse shelves with cards over the past 11 months, but it’s finally calming down and coming to a close. Time to recap the Best GPUs of 2019, with all links in the description below for each card.
We’ve already posted two of our end-of-year recaps, one for Best Cases of 2019, the other for Best CPUs of 2019, and now we’re back with Best GPUs. As a reminder for this content type, our focus is to help people building systems with a quick-reference recap for a year’s worth of testing. We’re not going to deep-dive with a data-centric approach, but rather quickly cover the stack in a quicker fashion. If you want deep-dive analytics or test data for any one of these devices, check our reviews throughout the year. Note also that, although we will talk about partner models a bit, the “Best X” coverage will focus on the GPU itself (made by AMD or NVIDIA). For our most recent partner recap, check out our “Best RX 5700 XT” coverage.
Best Gaming Monitor Sales for Black Friday (So Far): 240Hz, UltraWide, 1440p, & 4K Displays
Black Friday and Cyber Monday are two of the best times to buy a new monitor, mainly because it’s one of the only times they see the big discounts of the year as companies try to dump stock for new products. Similar to our overall Black Friday Sales Roundup we also published, today we’ll take the same format and focus in on just monitors. If you’re interested in some Best Of round-ups with recaps of our testing for the year, check our Best Cases of 2019 and Best CPUs of 2019 content.
We’ve researched the best overall displays for various categories, ranging from best budget 1080p panels to the best overall ultrawide monitors, and rounded-up everything in between to help those looking for a new display find their best match. We haven’t tested each of these in-house, but have researched each one on a sale-by-sale basis to try and determine which Black Friday monitor sales are actually worthwhile.
This will be a list of the best sales for each category. While there are better monitors for each category, the real question is whether or not they’re on sale this weekend.
GN Awards Show: Best & Worst PC Cases of 2019 (Thermals, Quality, Noise)
Thursday, 28 November 2019It’s that time of year again where we decide which case manufacturers deserve our praise and a GN Teardown Crystal, and which deserve eternal shame and have to pay $19.99 for their own Teardown Crystal from store.gamersnexus.net. Last year, the Lian Li O11 Dynamic took the prize for Best All-Around, and the Silverstone PM02 and Fractal Define S2 took home the “Best Worst” Trend award for the unforgivable sin of being pointless refreshes. Also, the PM02 is just a bad case. This year’s award nominees pick up from where we left off, starting with the lackluster Thermaltake Level 20 MT in December of 2018. Spoilers: it didn’t win anything.
With over 220 rows of case data now -- or maybe more, we haven’t really checked too recently -- there’s a lot to consider in our round-up of the best cases for 2019. Fortunately, that list instantly gets whittled-down to, well, just 2019’s data, which is still populous. With the prevalence of several bad cases this year, we can narrow the list further to focus on only the most deserving of recognition. This article will continue after the embedded video.
Awards: Best CPUs of 2019 for Gaming, Video Editing, 3D Modeling, Overclocking, & More
Wednesday, 27 November 2019Having reviewed over a dozen CPUs this year, it’s time to round-up the Best of 2019 with the first instalment of our annual GN Awards show. In this series, we’ll pick the best products for categories like performance, overall quality, gaming, overclocking, and more. Our goal today is to help you parse the best CPUs in each category so that you can pick the right parts for PC build purchases during Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and other holiday sales.
At the end of this content, one of the two companies will walk away with a GN Award Crystal for its efforts this year. Our award crystals are 3D laser-engraved glass cubes that feature a GN tear-down logo, replete with easter eggs like MOSFETs, inductors, VRMs, PCIe slots, fans, and even screws, all in 3D.
The Best SSDs of 2018 for Gaming PCs, Workstations, & Budget Builds | Black Friday Sales
Thursday, 22 November 2018As we get into the holiday spirit here at GN, it’s time for our year-end round-ups and best of series—probably some of our favorite content. These guides provide a snapshot of what the year had to offer in certain spaces, like SSDs, for instance. You can check our most recent guides for the Best Cases of 2018 and Best CPUs of 2018.
These guides will also help users navigate the overwhelming amount of Black Friday and Cyber Monday marketing ahead of us all. SSD prices have been especially good lately, and the holidays should certainly net opportunities for even better deals.
That said, buying something just because it’s cheap isn’t ever a good idea, really; better to know what’s best first, then buy cheap—or cheaper than usual, anyway. This guide will take the legwork out of distinguishing what the year’s best SSDs are based on use case and price. Today, we're looking at the best SSDs for gaming PCs, workstations, budget PC builds, and for cheap, high-capacity storage. 1TB SSDs are more affordable than ever now, and we'll explore some of those listings.
Awards: Best CPUs of 2018 (Gaming, Production, & Disappointment)
Wednesday, 21 November 2018As we continue our awards shows for end of year (see also: Best Cases of 2018), we’re now recapping some of the best and worst CPU launches of the year. The categories include best overall value, most well-rounded, best hobbyist production, best budget gaming, most fun to overclock, and biggest disappointment. We’ll be walking through a year of testing data as we recap the most memorable products leading into Black Friday and holiday sales. As always, links to the products are provided below, alongside our article for a written recap. The video is embedded for the more visual audience.
We’ll be mailing out GN Award Crystals to the companies for their most important products for the year. The award crystal is a 3D laser-engraved GN tear-down logo with extreme attention to detail and, although the products have to earn the award, you can buy one for yourself at store.gamersnexus.net.
As a reminder here, data isn’t the focus today. We’re recapping coverage, so we’re pulling charts sparingly and as needed from a year’s worth of CPU reviews. For those older pieces, keep in mind that some of the tests are using older data. For full detail on any CPU in this video, you’ll want to check our original reviews. Keep in mind that the most recent review – that’ll be the 9600K or 9980XE review – will contain the most up-to-date test data with the most up-to-date Windows and game versions.
It’s time for the annual GN Awards series, starting off with the best – and worst – cases of 2018. Using our database of over 160 test results for cases, we crawled through our reviews for the year to pull cases that had the best out of the box thermals, the best noise levels, best quality at a budget, best design, best all-around, the most overhyped case, and the most disappointing cases. We hit every price category in this round-up and cover cases that are both subjective and objectively good. Links will be provided for anyone shopping this season.
Leading into Black Friday and Cyber Monday, let's walk through the best and worst PC cases of 2018.
Every manufacturer featured in this content will receive one of our Large GN Awards for the Best Of categories – no award for the worst categories, sadly. The GN Award Crystal is only given out for prestige, featuring a detailed 3D laser-engraved GN tear-down logo with fine detail, like VRM components, fans, and electrical circuitry in the design. Although manufacturers have to earn their award, you can buy one for yourself on store.gamersnexus.net in large and medium sizes.
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