Gpu articles

Heat is an inevitable byproduct of work. Heat is also prevalent in electronics, and when it comes to graphics cards you can manage it using passive cooling, fans and even water. But when these solutions aren't working, your GPU has one more way to beat the heat: thermal throttling.

Today we're checking out the state of the GPU market, what pricing and availability is like relative to various points in the past year, and what the trends in pricing are looking like. We'll also go through some performance figures to show which graphics cards make the most sense to purchase right now.

If you're looking to buy a new graphics card today, don't mind all the testing, marginal fps gains, power consumption figures, or overclocking potential. TechSpot's Best Graphics Cards is written to get a simple question answered: Given a certain budget, which is the graphics card you should buy?

To play Far Cry 5, Ubisoft recommends that you have a Core i7-4770 or Ryzen 5 1600 processor along with a GeForce GTX 970 or Radeon R9 290X -- fairly heavy recommendations. Benchmarking the game has been made easy by its built-in benchmark which appears to do a good job of replicating the kind of performance you can expect to see when playing the game.

Along with our recent editorials on why it's a bad time to build a gaming PC, we've been revisiting some older GPUs to see how they hold up in today's games. But how do you know how much you should be paying for a secondhand graphics card?

Continuing along with revisiting some of our favorite old graphics cards, today we'll be checking back in with the Radeon R9 280X, which is also to say that we're checking back in with the 7970 GHz Edition, both of which are essentially a factory overclocked Radeon HD 7970, so we'll technically be revisiting that, too, the very same card we first reviewed in December 2011!

After recently retesting the GeForce GTX 580 eight years after its release, we thought it would be interesting to check back in on the GTX 680, another old friend that was released about six years ago as Nvidia's latest and greatest graphics card and a successor to the aforementioned 580.

Last year, we briefly looked at external GPUs when we reviewed the Aorus GTX 1070 Gaming Box attached to a Kaby Lake-powered ultraportable. Now that Intel's 8th gen CPUs are widely available in a range of ultrabooks, with significant performance gains in hand, it's the perfect time to revisit eGPUs and determine whether the hard CPU bottleneck still exists in most games.

Today we are investigating two commonly asked questions about gaming laptops: what's the performance like on battery and how long do these laptops last in games? We'll also explore if battery life can be extended in any way; and do less powerful systems last longer?