Top 3 GPU's under $250 (REAL PRICE)

 3. EVGA GeForce GTX 1060

For just over $200 this is a very capable card. It can play 'all' games at 60fps on a 1080p mode (also great for 1440p). It comes from a reputable seller and Gigabyte are known for their supreme ultra durable build quality.

2.EVGA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti

No I'm not sponsored by EVGA but they do make good Graphics cards. This is the beast in the buget world. It has a sweet spot performance that seems to be perfect for most games. This is is cheapest on the list at under $150

1. MSI GeForce GTX 1060 6GB

 This card can often be picked up for $250 on a good deal. This is similar to the third ranked card but it has an extra 2 GB of VRAM. This GDDR5 memory is high speed and will lead to better performance in games where textures are important. This also makes the card a better option for 1440p and 4k gaming as more memory is required.

 AMD...

Yes. Sadly AMD do not feature on this countdown. I currently believe they do not offer a card in this price range that competes with any Nvidia option. Sorry fanboys!

Goal Line Technology

Football/Soccer is the most played sport in the world. People can be found playing it on every Continent. All you need is two temporary goals and a football. Or do you need a £200,000 system to determine whether a ball crosses a line?

Goal line technology is a cutting edge field where either cameras or magnetic sensors are used to determine when all of the football is over the 'line'. One of the systems uses Hawk Eye which is a network of cameras that can precisely determine the location of the ball using trigonometry. This is a very expensive system and requires fine tuning by highly trained engineers. The benefits of Hawk Eye are that it is highly accurate and it can work even if some players are blocking the goal. The other technology used magnetic sensors and a special ball to measure when the ball is a set distance away from the back of the goal. This is a system that is far cheaper and can be set up for roughly £40,000. This magnetic sensor technology also has to be set up by skilled professionals but it is slightly simpler as no calculations have to be done for the balls position to be located.

Some people believe all you need is a pair of officials that stand by the goal to see if the ball fully crosses the line. Other people realise that the tiny margin a ball can cross or not cross by is so small that a pair of humans probably won't see it. this leads me to believe that as the years go on more and more goals and tournaments will be using goal line technology to make sure all goals are awarded correctly.

Threadripper

AMD has released specification for their new Ryzen based "Threadripper" monsters. These are huge CPU's and are equal to two Ryzen 5/7 chips. The manufacturing process allegedly just 'glues' two other zen silicone cores together (visible in the image below) and then 'bins' the lowest performing cores. Binning is when a manufacturer turns off cores on a CPU that are not up to standard. This leads to a range of core count models but it means they are all high-performance cores.

Threadripper is a CPU line that has a very high core count. Their top end 1950x model will have 16 cores and 32 threads meaning a huge number of tasks can be executed at once. You can even run multiple sets of multithreaded workloads. For example, you can render, stream and encode at the same time. No blue team CPU currently offers this many threads. Due to such high core counts, Threadripper CPU's have a very high TDP (Thermal Design Power) going all the way up to 180W. This means an extremely beefy air cooler or a water cooling loop will definitely be required to run the CPUs without any thermal throttling. This is definitely the biggest downside to any high core count CPUs. Another negative of high core count models is that they generally have lower operating frequencies. The models discussed here have a base frequency of 3.4gHz. This offers a plenty high enough per core performance but adding some RGB LED strips to your case should help by tripling all computing performance 😀.


If I was a high-end content creator planning on building a new system in the next year I would definitely choose AMD over any core i9 processors. (If real world performance is equal to what AMD claims).