Gaming

One modern AAA game now eats 100-150GB, so a 1TB drive fills fast. Here is why 2TB NVMe is the 2026 baseline, when 1TB still works, and why Gen5 and big HDDs are the wrong place to spend.

For a pure gaming PC the Ryzen 7 7800X3D is the faster chip, costs about $200 less, and draws a fraction of the power. The Core i9-14900K only pulls ahead in heavy multi-core work. Here's how to choose.

For 1080p gaming the Ryzen 5 7600X is the faster chip and AM5 is the platform with a future, but the Core i5-14400F is a few dollars cheaper and ships with a cooler. Here's which budget CPU to actually buy.

8GB still holds up at 1080p, 12GB is the realistic floor for new AAA games, and 16GB is what you buy to keep a card for years. Here is how to tell which one you actually need.

Moving to 1440p sharpens the picture but costs 25-35% of your frame rate on the same GPU. Here is which resolution to buy and the GPU tier that makes 1440p worth it.

The RTX 5080 is about 10–15% faster in games, but in our catalog it costs roughly $990 more than the RTX 5070 Ti — for the same 16GB of VRAM. Here is when that premium is worth paying, and when it clearly isn't.

DDR5-6000 CL30 and DDR5-6400 CL32 have identical 10.0 ns true latency, so gaming lands within a couple percent. The real tiebreaker on AM5 is the 1:1 memory ratio — where a faster 6400 kit can end up slower than 6000.

The newer Core Ultra 7 265 wins on power and heat, but the older i7-14700K still holds its own in games. Here's which Intel chip to actually buy for gaming.

The 7900X has more cores and costs less, yet the 7800X3D wins gaming by 12-15% at 1080p. Game FPS scales with cache, not core count. Here is which AM5 chip to buy.

The Zen 5 9600X wins on paper, but the gaming gap over the 7600X is smaller than the spec sheet suggests. Here's what the extra $12 actually buys.

Same eight cores, same socket, same generation — the only real difference is 3D V-Cache. The 7800X3D leads gaming by about 16% at 1080p, but the 7700X is faster in apps and costs $130 less. Here is who should buy which.

The RTX 5060 Ti runs about 18% faster at 1080p and costs only around $89 more than the RTX 5060 in our catalog. But both cards share the same 8GB of VRAM, and that ceiling decides more than the compute gap does.