What is new in this world of PC parts?

[bmanv13]

It has been a couple months since I have been on this forum. And I am glad to be back A few months back, I was really digging into building my own computer. I would to endless research on various monitors, GPUs, CPUs, cases, etc., and I was very well in-tune and up-to-date with what was available.

Now, can someone tell me, and help me catch up, what is new? I am a few months behind. The last I heard was in September there was supposedly going to be a new line of graphics cards?

 

[firo40]

Nvidia released the 700 series with the 760 770 780 and 780ti AMD released the r9 290x r9 290 r9 280 so forth all the cards below the r9 290 are rebranded 7000 series cards and all the 700 series nvidia below the 780 are rebranded 600 series cards

 

[Deus Gladiorum]

The new "Radeon Rx 2xx" series of GPUs from AMD is out. The mid range and high end ones are designated "R9 2xx" and the lower end cards are designated "R7 2xx". For the most part, they're rebrands of the HD 7000 series with minor tweaks so overall most are just a bit better than their HD 7000 counterparts. However, the top 2 flagships cards from AMD, the R9 290X and the R9 290, are some of the best GPUs available. The R9 290X for $580 outright beats a Titan and a GTX 780, but that's assuming it's properly cooled. There was a huge mess at first because the stock fans didn't cool the R9 290X well enough causing the core clock to drop dramatically, but AMD has since released a BIOS update which corrects this for the most part.

However, the R9 290X's true performance won't be unlocked until we get some adequate cooling solutions in the form of custom coolers which are due to arrive fairly soon within the next month. The R9 290 comes in at $400 and outright beats a GTX 770 and in some cases, even the GTX 780! It also didn't suffer nearly as much from this poor cooling issue, though still a preferred custom cooling option for it will be released soon. The rest of them, the R9 280X, R9 280, R9 270X, R9 270, R9 260X, and the R9 260 all fall somewhere in between what we already have.

Since the R9 290X and R9 290 beat their competitors for cheap, Nvidia made some price drops. The GTX 780 is now available for $500, down from $650, and the GTX 770 is now available for $330, down from $400. In addition, Nvidia has released their new flagship card, the GTX 780 Ti for $700. It beats the Titan (which is still $1,000) wholeheartedly in gaming, but the GTX Titan is still priced high due to it performing better than the 780 Ti in certain tasks outside of gaming.

Anyway, for gaming the GTX 780 Ti is the absolute best single-card performer on the market. It's one of the few GPUs out there that can hold its average above 60 fps on Crysis 3 at 1920x1080 on Very High (or whatever maximum is called) settings. There's also rumors going around of the GTX 790 (that may have been confirmed actually, but I can't recall) as well as an alleged "Super" Titan.

That's about it in the world of GPUs. In terms of CPUs, you probably already know of Haswell, so that's about it.

 

[bmanv13]

Wow thank you all for your amazing replies! You have each helped my catch up on what's new! Now I can finally build my first system Once again, thank you all!