Digital Discoveries
Senior editor, Jarred Walton, and staff writer, Christian Guyton, are excited about very different hardware
AMD Ryzen 5 3600
I love how competitive AMD’s Ryzen CPUs are, and the 12-core/24thread Ryzen 9 3900X gives Intel some much needed competition. It’s forcing Intel to cut HEDT prices in half for the upcoming 10th-gen Cascade Lake-X parts. But as awesome as the 3900X is, for less than half the price, I think the Ryzen 5 3600 is the CPU most people should be looking at.
On paper, it doesn’t look too impressive. A six-core/12-thread CPU with a base clock of 3.6GHz and a 4.2GHz boost? It’s theoretically only 200MHz slower than the 3600X, but in testing it looks like it runs at about 3.95GHz—only 100MHz slower than the 3600X. And you can overclock it if you want to make up the difference.
For heavy multithreaded CPU workloads, the 3900X is about 70 percent faster. But for general PC use and games? The gap there is far less damaging, with the 3900X only leading by around 10 percent—and that’s with an RTX 2080 Ti.
Basically, less than $200 gets you a CPU that comes very close to matching Intel’s i7-8700K. If you’re trying to put together a nicely balanced mid-range PC for around $1,250, I’m not sure there’s a better CPU you can buy right now.
$195, www.amd.com
Nitro Concepts S300
I recently bowed to societal pressure and got myself a gaming chair. OK, I lied; my rubbish old desk chair snapped, sending me sprawling to the floor. My new gaming throne is Nitro Concepts’ S300, in “Inferno Red,” which makes it sound like it should get me fired up for some edge-of-my-seat action. It doesn’t—it’s a red chair—but I admit I should have done this years ago.
Sitting in this chair is like being gently lowered into the cockpit of a fighter jet. It almost wraps around you, holding and supporting you through gaming binges. Everything is adjustable, from the angle of the armrests to the lumbar support. In my old chair, attempting to stand up after a few hours was a guaranteed pathway to backache. Now, I can slap this bad boy into recline and chill out, safe in the knowledge that I’m in no danger of toppling backward.
Buying a gaming chair is a commitment; if you buy me, it says, you have to play games. No other furniture commands such influence, except a footstool, possibly, which insists you put your feet up. Maybe that’s what the S300 is missing….
$280, www.nitro-concepts.com