HOW WE TEST

Each issue of Maximum PC features a build, and each of them deserves to be benchmarked to the nth degree. It’s all well and good showing you how to build it, but what exactly do you get performancewise for your investment? We test each and every system across a whole armada of benchmarks, covering everything from 4K and 1080p gaming performance, to CPU tests, SSD sequential and random 4K speeds, power draw, and temperature measurements, and even AI testing, all in the name of science (and because we really love charts).

Every test is run three times, and we take an average from those three runs to calculate the result. In some cases, we may get outlier results, where one result is far outside of our expectations. In those scenarios, we re-test until the results are similar across all three recorded runs.

THIS ISSUE’S ZERO-POINT 

This month’s zero-point is from the October 2024 issue. This was the build we produced when first looking at our system benchmarks revamp, built inside the NZXT H7 Flow full-sized tower. It might sound like an odd pick, but we wanted to choose a build with a similarly priced GPU.

It features the AMD Ryzen 9 7900X, the B650E NZXT N7 motherboard, a 360mm Kraken Elite AIO, 32GB of Kingston Fury Beast DDR5 @ 6,000 C36, a 1TB Samsung 990 PRO M.2 PCIe 4.0 SSD, and a Sapphire Radeon RX 7800 XT graphics card, all housed in the H7 Flow, with a 1,000W C1000 PSU, and backed up with 2x NZXT F360 RGB Core Frame fan units. There’s also a secondary SSD in this system, the 4TB Western Digital SN5000. However, this month’s ITX build doesn’t feature a second SSD, so those results will be marked as N/A in the following tables.

Total price for the zero-point build at the time of writing is $2,291 (55 percent more than our console-killing PC), with a core price of $1,281 (20 percent more).