Welcome to another addition of our Weekly Hardware Sales round-up. This weekend, we found some sales on a trio of video cards (GTX 770, 750 Ti, and R9 270), a hard drive, and a motherboard.
ASRock FM2A88M Extreme4+ Motherboard ($60): If you're looking to build a PC using an FM2 or FM2+ CPU or if you're looking to upgrade your motherboard, this is a great budget board to pick up. For a micro-ATX board, ASRock's Extreme 4 is back with features you normally only find in a full-sized motherboards. You get four slots for DDR3 RAM up to 64GB, the option to SLI or CrossfireX with PCIe 3.0 x 16 and PCIe 2.0 x 4, one PCIe x1 and one PCI slot, and up to eight SATA 6Gbps slots. The Exteme 4 is based on the Bolton D4 chipset, which is the most modern that AMD has to offer right now.
Western Digital RE3 1TB Hard Drive ($42): If there is anything I can't ever have enough of, it's storage space. Here, Western Digital is selling one Terabyte of storage space for $42. At 7200RPM and with a 32MB cache, this would make a solid storage drive for just about any system. This drive should last you a while because—as seen in our Hard Drive Reliability Update article—Western Digital provides better drives than some other brands.
Triple Play Pick of the Week
MSI is currently offering some timely pre-Black Friday deals on their line of video cards. I could probably list most of them here, but I decided to pick out the three deals I feel are best for different budgets.
MSI Gaming GTX 770 ($255): For those of you that can't afford a newer GTX 970 or 980 like we reviewed earlier, MSI has a great deal on this MSI GTX 770. The GPU has 1536 CUDA Cores and an 1137MHz Core clock boosted to 1198MHz, backed up by 2GB of GDDR5 memory on a 256-bit interface. This video card should have no problems playing just about every game out on highest settings. The dual-fan cooling solution should do a great job keeping this GPU cool in those intense gaming sessions as well. For only $255, you get a solid GPU that should last for years to come.
MSI Gaming GTX 750Ti ($137): For those of you who prefer nVidia and are on a tight budget, this is the best video card they've got to offer. With 640 CUDA cores and a 1085MHz Core Clock that will boost to 1163MHz (and a 2GB framebuffer on a 128-bit interface), the GTX 750 Ti plays all games we've tested admirably. This card will struggle with some of the higher-end games like Crysis on High settings, but it'll still play those at a solid medium and stand as a perfect solution for less GPU-intensive titles. For $137, you get a good mainstream-level GPU.
MSI Gaming R9 270 ($140): This is the best deal right now on any GPU, in terms of raw gaming power. For $140, you get 1280 Stream processors with a 900MHz Core clock that will get to 975MHz boosted. 2GB of GDDR5 memory on a 256-bit interface mean you'll be able to play just about every game out with high resolution textures. The rest of the specs ensure medium to high settings, with the vast majority of games like LoL and Counter-Strike on max settings.
That's all for this week. Check out our new game sales feature that we published earlier this week, if you're interested in software titles. There are many more deals out there to find, so until next time.
- Michael "Mikagmann2" Mann.