MID-RANGE MONSTER
Guy Cocker
LAST MONTH, I went all-out on building a system with the latest and greatest (i.e. most expensive) components available. It was an exercise in seeing what was capable at the cutting edge with justreleased tech and a money-no-object attitude. And what a system it was, offering a 25 percent performance leap in CPU-bound tasks like Cinebench, and an astonishing 80 percent performance leap in 4K games.
This month’s build is more in line with what I’d go for, personally, if I were building a gaming PC right now. It still uses the RTX 4090 for those crazy 4K frame rates, but it’s paired with the brilliant Intel Core i5-13600K, which is $300 cheaper than the i9-13900K I used. Our builder Sam has also smartly gone for a Z690 board, still using faster DDR5 memory, but another $300 saving over the Z790 board I used. Does it still perform as well in games, however? Well, Sam has the full lowdown in his feature starting on page 16, where he shows you how to build this machine in detail, and how it compares to last month’s system. I think you’ll be interested in the results.