building tomorrow today
SO MUCH MONEY
CPU
INTEL CORE I9-13900K
It might be a slightly older processor compared to Intel’s current ranks, but the 13900K represents phenomenally good value right now. You can actually pick one of these up for just $400. That’s an incredible price, particularly as it delivers performance close to, if not on par, with the 14900K.
At its heart, you get eight performance cores, 16 efficient cores, and a total of 32 threads, with a maximum turbo frequency of 5.8GHz at full tilt. All of that is backed up by 36MB of smart cache, and a 253W TDP.
The 14900K does have a slight edge in clock speeds, topping out at 6GHz, but otherwise, it pretty much operates in the same manner, albeit the 14th gen does have access to Intel’s (as of now, still underwhelming) APO, and some AI overclocking tweaks in XTU, but that’s about it. Oh, and it comes in at over $147 more at time of writing. $400,www.intel.com
Motherboard
ASUS ROG MAXIMUS Z790 HERO BTF ATX
The first piece of our puzzle, Asus’s ROG Maximus Z790 Hero BTF, is very much like its non-BTF counterpart. In fact, the only major difference here is that the connectors are almost all exclusively on the rear of the board itself.
That said, it’s still an impressive Z790 board. It can support up to five M.2 slots: four at PCIe 4.0 and one at 5.0. There’s support for PCIe 5.0 GPUs, a 20+1+2 VRM solution, DDR5 support up to 192GB at horrendously high speeds, and it’s got a stellar IO, with two thunderbolt ports, 2.5Gb Ethernet, no less than 10 USB Type A ports—six of which are capable of 10 Gbps—and WiFi 7 as well. Seriously, this might be one of the most expansive motherboard I/O setups we’ve seen to date.