GoKawiilIt's 2017, science and technology are having a great year: the Cassini probe plunges into Saturn , gravitational waves are detected by LIGO and Virgo , and Bitcoin surges from under $1,000 , and closer to home, the desktop computer market is having its own reckoning. AMD’s Zen architecture debuts, seeking to unseat Intel’s consumer desktop dominance, and Intel responds with a new flagship of its own!
AMD shoved aside the embarrassing fumble that was the Bulldozer architecture and dropped its new Zen architecture onto the scene in early 2017. The first generation of Zen came with a new socket (AM4), a new slew of chipsets, and a new flagship, the Ryzen 7 1800X .
The Ryzen 7 1800X forced Intel to respond with the legendary Core i7-8700K . It was the first Intel processor to break the company's self-imposed four-core barrier, though its six cores (twelve threads) still fell short of AMD's eight (sixteen threads).
Those who chose AM4 were given a platform that lives to this day ; you can drop a 5800X3D into the same motherboard as the 1800X (with a BIOS update)! Those who chose team blue ended up with a legendary processor that powered rigs beyond most people's usual upgrade cycle.
The graphics card market was also exciting; AMD released the RX 570 and RX 580, but they were overshadowed by NVIDIA’s Pascal family of graphics cards. The GTX 1060 earned a value-to-performance title, while the flagships, the GTX 1080 and GTX 1080 Ti, earned their spot as the most powerful gaming GPUs on the planet.
Don’t remember the GTX 1080 fondly? Jensen Huang sure does.
Source: https://videocardz.com/newz/jensen-huang-signs-geforce-gtx-1080-calls-it-one-of-his-favorites-and-says-it-changed-everything
The GTX 1080 Ti is considered the GOAT , but is it showing its age? It’s a ray-traced-large-language-model world out there in 2026, and it may be time for the 1080 Ti to hang up its jersey. We took the GTX 1080 and 1080 Ti out for a spin to find answers to these questions.
1 of 4
... continue reading