 Well, we promised it. It was sponsored by LG and CSonic and it was here at LTX. We're actually tearing down right now. But this is part two where we're going to be showing you guys 2015, the big upgrade. 2016, GPU die shrink. Finally. 2017, we skipped a generation. 2018, Intel gets scared. And 2019, of course, AMD strikes back. We'll be going through the gaming experience of all these rigs and how they changed over the years right after the intro. The first part of the series was basically a story of AMD struggling to keep up with a surging Intel and then, near the end, Intel kinda slowing down. And I think you're going to find that that slowdown is going to be a big pattern for part two. Let's start then with 2015. The year the Apple Watch was finally released after being announced eight months prior. The Paris Climate Accord was finally negotiated and Windows 10 was finally released with much acclaim from those who hated Windows 8. There's no start menu. There's no place to... It's a lot of finales, but there's more to come because we're finally getting some momentum back in the PC space thanks to two major CPU releases. The first, of course, is our Skylake processor. So we've got a 6700K processor cooled by an Octa-NHD 15, and what a freaking overclocking and performance combination those two. Skylake brought major improvements like their DMI 3.0 interface for much faster connectivity to things like NVMe storage as well as high-speed networking on the 100 series chipsets. And, as the talk counterpart to the seldom used Broadwell architecture, Skylake saw some relatively significant performance optimizations as well, and it also included, for the first time, DDR4 support. Yes, my friends, DDR4 made it to the consumer space. It also came with the release of the GeForce GTX 980 Ti, which gave us a very significant performance boost that would hold up for quite some time. At the time of release, it was the most powerful and the largest non-Titan GPU in the consumer space, and its much larger frame buffer, and comparable gaming performance to the Radeon Fury X made it the better choice in the long run. At just shy of $2,100, I think we'll see a significant improvement in raw performance, if not performance per dollar, over our 2014 year, to say nothing of the UI improvements of Windows 10. To sweeten the deal, this year also was the year that GTA V finally hit PCs, Fallout 4 launched, and of course, we can't forget Metal Gear Solid V, the Phantom Pain. Overall, it was a pretty amazing year for PC gamers. It's funny to me that our list of amazing games for that year was so full of amazing games, Witcher 3 didn't even make it in. It was a huge year. This thing, on hardware from that era, it looks freaking awesome. You've got like the cloth effects in Geralt's clothing there. It actually really looks like wet leather. Yeah, the reflections off the sword are actually somewhat believable if I had a camera behind it like that. Yep, it actually plays off the light like that. And the textures have aged really well as well. The road looks fantastic. The character modeling is great. Now, the facial animations, I don't think that stood the test of time quite as well. They weren't that great at the time either, to be honest. Can lightning strike again in 2016? Yes, and also no. On the other hand, there were a lot of high profile releases this year, like Battlefield 1, Titanfall 2, Dishonored 2, and Overwatch. But on the hardware side, not really. Here we see the elusive Skylake in its natural habitat wallowing in its own self-grandeer, not really caring about anything going on around it. In other words, we didn't get a new CPU this year. We do pick up a larger NVMe SSD this time around though, allowing us to do away with the hard drive for the last time in this series. The GTX 1080 turns out not to be a major performance improvement over last year, but Pascal's improved efficiency lets us get the same or better performance as last year at a lower price and thermal output, bringing us back down to just over $1,800. As I'm sure you've guessed by now, Windows 10 is here to stay, but there's a certain shadow rising over this build. These guys with the shields are kicking my ass. Doom was a beautiful game. Doom is a wholly awesome game. Like look at the reflections, the grit and dirt in the environment. Careful attention to the animations of all of this. Like you can tell it's the kind of game that they just gave so many cares about. This game has really aged well. Yeah, and it runs like a champ too on pretty much any hardware. Oh, come on. See, I can't even blame the computer for that. That was the problem. You were getting frames too quickly. Thanks. I appreciate the confidence. It's really a shame Shadow of the Tomb Raider didn't come out in 2017 because that would have made for a great segue, but there were quite a few good ones like Sonic Mania, Destiny 2, Cuphead, Shadow of War, and we can't of course forget PUBG and Fortnite. This was also the year of AMD's big comeback with Ryzen, though early teething issues did make for OS scheduler and memory compatibility problems that made Ryzen a little bit more difficult for us to recommend than the performance numbers might have at first suggested. Intel would remain on top for gaming performance with Kaby Lake as the final step in their process architecture optimization paradigm that killed TikTok, which they then also immediately killed by releasing Coffee Lake, which was characterized mostly by the extra cores that they stuffed into it, though core clocks and memory speeds did also increase. In practice, this meant that the Core i7-8700K was the winner, so our build for this year runs it, coupled with 16 gigs of DDR4 memory, the pricing of which ballooned this year. We also went with a tangibly faster GPU this time around. We got the GTX 1080 Ti, which at the time of release performed on par with the Titan X Pascal. Pricing didn't increase by more than we were accustomed to, though, bringing us just shy of $2,100. Now, it's funny that this is the one PC that has had update issues that have made it so that we actually can't run a game for this segment of the video, because with PUBG and Fortnite coming out this year, this was the year of the always online experience. And I'm not just talking like, you know, checking in with the server, you know, to make sure that you're authenticated or whatever else. I'm talking you absolutely need to be online to experience this game in any way, shape or form. So, uh, yeah. This was the experience. 2018 was an interesting year for PC gaming. First, because of the games like Shadow of Tomb Raider, Battlefield 5, Octopath Traveler and Far Cry 5. And second, because Ryzen 2nd Gen showed that not only did AMD mean business, Intel had to rush their timetables to counter them after unsuccessfully arguing that gamers didn't need eight cores. As a result, yet more cores were packed into the same package, substantially increasing thermal output or reducing core clocks in practice. Still, the Core i7-9700K remains the better choice for raw gaming performance. So we'll grab one of those and pair it with essentially the same platform as the previous year. Even the Z390 chipset isn't a big advancement over Z370. And our GPU is the same GTX 1080 Ti too. At least we get eight cores for our $2,100. This is such a leap forward in visuals compared to any of the highlight games we talked about for the previous year. Like, look at these soft shadows. Soft shadows became a thing starting in around 2015, but it really started to make its way into the mainstream around this time. Well, the thing was that with reasonably high-end or even mid-range hardware, which means that it's easier for game developers to target it, you could actually run it without giving up so much performance that the game was basically unplayable. Yeah, I remember trying the different soft shadow techniques that GTA V shipped with and never really settling on anything in particular because they all had their problems. Facial animations are amazing. Like, look at that. So much detail. You can really tell the way that the light is hitting the skin. Subsurface scattering, yeah. Beautiful. It's a thing that took a long time to actually get right. Which brings us to 2019, the current year where we've again got a lot of high-profile games hitting our SSDs. Apex Legends, Sekiro, Metro Exodus, with more to look forward to in the back half. But if 2018 gave us 8-core CPUs, how many will 2019 give us? It turns out the answer is up to 16, thanks, well, pretty much exclusively to AMD. And unlike previous years where AMD's Ryzen CPUs were pretty darn okay for gaming, AMD took a big step forward with Ryzen 3rd Gen coming up on par with Intel and even surpassing them in many cases at the top end of their 3rd Gen lineup. So welcome back to the high-end AMD. Your Ryzen 7 3700X is powering our final build here because your 16-core isn't out and also we were targeting the around $2,000 price point, which... Huh. Well, let's say a lot of our budget was taken up by our graphics card because over the last couple of years we have really seen a spike in how much of your budget the GPU makers, NVIDIA in particular, expect you to spend on your graphics card. So we did go with a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti for that ray tracing goodness in the handful of games that do support it, but it will probably be several years before we'll really be getting the most out of that feature. It's not like we have a choice because you can't run out and buy a 1000 series graphics card, so there you go, pretty much suck it up. Our price for this build is $2,600. Were you just waiting to load the whole time? Yeah, I've been trying. You can tell the animations are tied to the ping. Do you think it's fair to say that we've kind of come to a point where game developers are less concerned about making it look better for the sake of looking better and are really focused on gameplay right now and sucking in the player? Yeah, and you know what? That's a great thing. Because while great graphics are great, obviously, at a certain point, they're good enough. And at that point, you can sink so much more time and effort into actually developing the other aspects of your game. But this is the thing, like with engines like Unreal Engine, people can just plop in assets and focus on building the game. Some of the games that were supposed to have RTX support when the cards launched did finally get it, but it's only applicable to a certain type of game. Like I loved running RTX on in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, but it's not the kind of thing that I would actually ever turn on in a game like Battlefield V, where you're trying to kill other players and you really, really need those FPS. So really, the main story of the last five years from a hardware standpoint has been a return to competition. I mean, AMD and Intel have gone back and forth since the 386 days, but part one of our series here didn't involve a lot of back and forth, whereas part two really has seen AMD come back to competition and even to prominence. So let's take a look at how things changed starting with this half of the decade. And when we expand these charts to include the rest of the builds, going back to 2009, we can clearly see the leveling off of CPU performance gains from 2011 through 2015. This period of stagnation, particularly from 2012 to 2014, when GPUs were also stuck at 28 nanometer, is a stark reminder of the importance of competition in tech and the pattern of sudden loss and a surprise return to innovation is rare in any market, let alone one that impacts our everyday lives like this one. So even if you're not a gamer, I think the last couple of years are an indication that the future keeps getting brighter. So here's to another 10 years of PC gaming, minus tech tips and what the heck. Another 10 builds, Anthony, 10 years from now? You know what? 2029, 10 more builds? Why not? Why not? Builds are fun. I mean, especially if LG and Seasonic will show up to sponsor it again. So all of our builds were powered by Seasonic power supplies. If you want a trustworthy power supply, we can't say enough good things about them. And of course, all of our rigs, all of our gaming experiences are running on LG's ultra-wide gaming monitors, which provide an incredibly immersive gaming experience. But of course, I think I've said a lot about those over the years. So guys, just check out the link in the video description to check them out and to learn more. So thanks for watching, guys. If you disliked this video, you can hit that button. But if you like to hit like, get subscribed, or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured, especially the newest stuff, because that old stuff's kind of harder to find, at the link below. Also down there is our merch store, which has cool shirts, like, no, not that one, but definitely the stealth hoodie and our community forum, which you should totally join.