HOW WE TEST Each month at Maximum PC, after our builds are completed, they go through a massive, rigorous testing suite of benchmarks and workloads designed to push them to the absolute limit of what they can possibly achieve. It’s imperative that we do this, as it gives us an insight into just how well these systems hold up in specific tasks, and hopefully indicates how they’ll perform, not only in day-to-day operation, but also in more specialized workloads.

We cover everything from 1080p and 4K gaming to CPU benchmarking performance, along with SSD tests, and also run each system through an arsenal of synthetic and AI performance benchmarks. This gives us a huge amount of data to look at, and provides us with an archive of snapshot data from when those systems were tested. Each and every test we perform here at Maximum PC is run three times to calculate the average results. In scenarios where one result looks wildly out, we’ll repeat the test as many times as necessary to get consistent results, or try to identify what might be causing the issue, and remedy it accordingly.

THIS ISSUE’S ZERO POINT

This issue’s Zero Point is a bit of a special one, as it’s a direct apples-forapples comparison. As this is Intel’s latest-generation flagship, we wanted to challenge it directly against the 14900K from the last gen. However, we’ve actually got two sets of results for that system: one based on the BIOS microcode prior to the stability fixes, and one after. For all of our graphs, we’ll be utilizing the more modern micro-code variant, as this is the one that consumers can expect to find in today’s world (and systems we’d highly recommend updating the BIOS to, if you haven’t already). It’s also worth mentioning that the GPU is different between these two rigs as well; the 14900K machine is taking advantage of Gigabyte’s RTX 4080 Aero OC, and our Core Ultra 9 285K build has the RTX 4080 Super from Nvidia. In our testing, both of these graphics cards score around the same: within 1-2% of each other in benchmark results.