LAB NOTES ZAK STOREY, CONTRIBUTOR
Maximum PC, Minimum BS
Intel & Z790 Is Too Damn Hot
LAST I CHECKED, those four words in bold up top there graced the front of each and every issue of Maximum PC. What they represent is this humble publication’s very ethos, its spirit, its soul. Maximum performance, with minimal… attached nonsense. It’s a mantra I’ve lived my tech journalism career by, and one that extends to the everyday too.
Why do I bring this up? Simply put, I’m tired of the ongoing nonsense with architectures and chipsets. At the moment, plying my trade as a freelancer, I’m fortunate enough to be doing a lot of work with graphics cards, testing them for all manner of publications. For my test bed, I’m using an Intel Core i9-14900K and a Z790 motherboard of similar ilk, mostly due to the heavy single-core performance and chunky smart-cache eliminating bottlenecks. Recently, however, after a huge amount of frustration dealing with continuous crashing while testing the RTX 4080 Super (Returnal being the game in question), I decided that the problem must be the motherboard, so I swapped it out for another $700 item from a competitor.