CPU

INTEL CORE I7-14700K

Intel’s Core i7-14700K is by far the more interesting of the CPUs launched with its 14th generation of products. Although it doesn’t have the APO clout of the Core i9, it makes up for that in its expanded Efficiency cores. In fact, out of all three processors, it’s the only one that’s had any internal hardware changes made at all from a generational standpoint.

Of course, you still get those eight performance cores driving the bulk of in-game rendering and professional prowess that you’d expect, complete with hyperthreading, but you also get an additional four efficient cores, bumping the total count from eight to 12 here.

On top of that, it also gets the slight clock-speed bump we’ve seen with this generation, and gives you a total of 28 theoretical threads to play with. This is along with all of that 13th/14th gen connectivity support we’ve come to expect, including support for DDR5, and PCIe 5.0, of course. $402,www.intel.com

Motherboard

MSI MPG Z790I EDGE WIFI ITX

As we’re running an ITX chassis, we’re going to need an ITX mobo, and there’s no better board at our disposal right now than MSI’s Z790i Edge. Its cleancut aluminum design and crisp feature set make it a surefire pick for an ITX board in 2024. In fact, sadly there are only five Z790 ITX boards out there right now, and second to ASRock’s Z790M-ITX WiFi, this is the cheapest board you can get (coming in tied with Gigabyte’s Z790i Aorus Ultra). Still, it’s a well-rounded board with a 10+1 power phase design, a solid M.2 heatsink, and PCIe 5.0 support for GPUs (sadly, there’s no M.2 PCIe 5.0 support here, just PCIe 4.0), and it even supports DDR5 all the way up to 8,000 MT/s with the right kit. Rear I/O’s no slouch either.