A gaming PC powered by top-end Intel and Nvidia processors? Af ter two years of inflated prices, chip shor tages, and slow progress, next-gen is here, as Guy Cocker discovers

THIS IS THE PC we’ve been waiting all year to build. After months of leaks and rumors about Intel’s 13th-generation Raptor Lake CPUs and Nvidia’s 40-series Ada Lovelace GPUs, they have both arrived at once. Things were looking good when the RTX 4090 just made it in time for us to review in the last issue of Maximum PC, landing a much coveted ‘Kick Ass’ award in the process. This issue, we have the Intel Core i9-13900K (reviewed in full on page 74), which—spoiler alert—is also pretty impressive.

There will no doubt be faster CPUs coming soon, and the 4090Ti in a year or so but, right now, these are the best raw materials we have. As such, our build errs towards the premium and the luxurious, using a brand new, high-end Z790 motherboard. That, in turn, necessitates the use of DDR5 RAM. We’ve also gone with an MSI GPU that boasts slightly higher clock speeds than the Founders Edition of the RTX 4090, and chosen NZXT’s premium case and cooler. The only thing we didn’t max out on is storage—we’d loved to have used one of the first PCIe 5.0 SSD drives but, alas, they weren’t available at the time of building. The good news is this system will be ready for the upgrade as soon as they do become available.