cover build

Core i9 vs Core i5

THE CORE I5 HAS BEEN THE GO-TO FOR GAMERS FOR YEARS, BUT DOES THAT STILL HOLD TRUE?

INTEL’S 14TH GENERATION CPU launch has been, from a purely performancejumping perspective, a bit of a boring one. Whether that’s the lack of any actual hardware changes on the core of its lineup, or an underwhelming debut of its APO tech, it’s a launch that’s got a lot of us tech journalists really questioning why the company decided to launch the refresh when it did, particularly given the already potent CPUs it had in its arsenal.

That got us thinking.

Last issue, we built a gorgeous toptier gaming PC inside of the prestigious NZXT H9 Flow chassis, complete with all the best components we could find. The Core i9-14900K, the RTX 4090, a 1200W PSU, 32GB of DDR5, and a staggering $700 motherboard. It was, without a doubt, a bit of a monster. In 4K gaming it demolished everything we could throw at it, and when it came to benchmarking and real-world performance, there were simply no better alternatives out there at the time from AMD or Intel. If you wanted a versatile PC that could do everything from gaming to rendering, streaming and more, this was the machine.

The thing is, this was the very best hardware you could get, and frankly, if it couldn’t do that, and cost you a clean $3,800 in the process, you’d probably be fairly frustrated, for lack of a better word. What we mean by that is that this hardware is expected to perform at this level. It’s a given. If it didn’t, we’d be crying into our thermal paste. But what about the lower-end skus, the ones that the vast majority of us will buy? What if we wanted to save a bit of cash, and drop down a few skus? How much would that affect performance?

For a while now, the Core i5 has been seen as the workhorse of PC gaming. If all you wanted to do was frag scrubs in Battlefield or defeat the Deathwing in World of Warcraft with 20 of your best buds, the i5 was the way to go. Elevate yourself to 4K gaming? Well, GPUs couldn’t keep up with the frame rates, so CPU bottlenecks weren’t a thing.

We’ve come a long way since then. GPUs have improved leaps and bounds from generation to generation, certainly compared to their CPU siblings. So does the old adage still hold true? Is the Intel Core i5 ‘enough’?

-ZAK STOREY

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Hardware Picks

CPU $320

Intel Core i5-14600K

The Intel Core i5-14600K is the little brother in Team Blue’s 14th gen product stack (we’re yet to see a Core i3 make it to market just yet). That said, it still packs some serious punch on the performance side of things. By default, it comes with a total of 14 cores. Six of those are Intel’s Performance-cores, complete with hyper-threading, the remaining eight are the ‘Efficient-cores’ designed for desktop applications. It clocks in at a max turbo frequency of 5.3 GHz, but other than the 200 MHz bump to clock speed, is identical to the Core i5-13600K. It doesn’t even get access to APO.

That said, it’s still a potent chip, and comes with all the other bells and whistles you’d expect from a 13th gen product. It’s just a shame that it’s half the chip at more than half the price of its 14900K counterpart at the top. www.intel.com

Motherboard $700

MSI MEG Z790 Ace Max E-ATX

Another top-tier $700 flagship motherboard has landed with us, and this time it’s MSI’s premium ACE option. We wanted to keep the motherboards fairly similar to ensure a fair testing platform for the CPU and GPU swaps here, but this is still a potent board that shouldn’t provide any bottlenecks. In fact, compared to the Core i9 build from last issue, this board does have slightly more power phases (24+1+2 vs 20+1+2), but given the Core i5’s significantly lower stats, this is highly unlikely to give it an edge competitively.

Otherwise, you get some incredible I/O: dual 2.5G ports, some impressive cooling, WiFi 7, plenty of PCIe 5.0 SSD slots, and some really unique quality of life improvements for system building, too, although more on that later.

One more interesting thing to note is that this isn’t even MSI’s most expensive build. That honor is reserved for the GODLIKE and GODLIKE MAX, both clocking in at $1,200 a piece. www.msi.com

RAM $220

32GB (2x16GB) Corsair Dominator Titanium @ 7200

Another Corsair part added to our arsenal this issue, and one held up in shipping hell for the last build is this 32GB kit of Dominator Titanium memory. It’s a bit on the pricey side, but at 7200 MT/s, it represents one of the best memory kits you can buy, complete with tight timings, and some impressive aesthetic design, too.

You can also pick up a kit with copper heatspreaders, or 3D print your own toppers, which is particularly useful if RGB isn’t your thing.

Just be warned: if you’re looking to build an AMD system, and want a kit, make sure you buy one of the AMD EXPO approved kits, as it’s unlikely to be stable when XMP is activated on an AMD board, and you’ll have effectively spent all that money on a 4800 MT/s kit. www.corsair.com

GPU $1,300

Gigabyte GeForce RTX 4080 Aero OC Edition

Say hello to the Gigabyte Aero OC Edition RTX 4080, arguably the biggest card we’ve ever seen. This thing is an absolute monster, complete with a twin cooler design, airflow passthrough, and a ‘support bracket’ that requires you to attach the entire rear of the graphics card on the motherboard standoffs as well. We won’t be using that in this build, as that’s not something the case supports, but even so, given how big these things are getting, and the more outlandish the support solutions are becoming, we have to question where it’s all going to end.

We stepped down from the RTX 4090 to the RTX 4080 for two reasons. Firstly, to see if that old adage was true—that 4K gaming is too intense and a CPU doesn’t matter for lower-end cards, and two, to see how big the performance difference is between the RTX 4090 and a card that’s only $300 cheaper. In an ideal world, you’d ‘probably’ pair an Intel Core i5 with something like a 4070 or 4060 Ti, and that’s the second question we wanted to answer. Does that matter? www.gigabyte.com