LENGTH OF TIME: 1-2 HOURS LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY: EASY
THE CONCEPT
LET’S FACE IT, Intel’s latest launch has been a little lackluster. At least at the top end. The Core i9-11900K is, technically, a fantastic piece of engineering (a compliment we keep having to throw Intel’s way these days), because it circumvents a lot of the limitations of 14nm and the previous architecture design. However, when it comes to outright performance and pricing, Rocket Lake sort of falls flat on its face rather swiftly—at that aforementioned top end, anyway. That’s not good. We really need Intel to break through that 10nm barrier, and deliver, en masse, newer chips for the health of the industry as a whole. Regardless of whether you’re a fan of Team Red or Team Blue, having two competitive chip makers means that we, the consumers, will see significant improvements, generation to generation. And that’s something that, apart from meaning faster, better-performing rigs for us, also extends to benefiting society. Heck, we don’t want to see this all boil down to ARM versus AMD, RISC versus x86, in 10 years’ time. That would be sad indeed.
So, was everything a dud in Intel’s latest launch? Well, no. Bizarrely, and in perhaps the biggest turnaround in history, Intel’s budget-oriented chips are actually far more interesting than those at the top of the stack, and even more so than AMD’s. The Core i5-11400 and Core i5-11600K in particular are quite interesting, especially for those who only have one ambition for their rigs: gaming. In fact, in many cases, they entirely outpace their red rivals at the lower end of the spectrum. Long gone are the days of “If you’re on a budget, go AMD.” Yet there’s a catch….
THE IMPOSSIBLE TASK
THERE’S JUST NO WAY of getting out there and buying modern components today. It’s almost impossible outside of a select few areas. Storage, power supplies, cases, cooling, peripherals, some motherboards, and Intel CPUs are in steady supply, no doubt the latter due to the 14nm process being fairly underutilized at this point by the majority of the industry. But trying to find a graphics card in this hellish mining boom ecosystem is nigh-on impossible.
We’re very fortunate, with the fact that there are indeed some press samples in circulation that we can take advantage of here at Maximum PC. Not least the card we’ve chosen for this issue: AMD’s latest Radeon RX 6700 XT. But even we’ve had to borrow this card specifically from our colleagues at PC Gamer for a week, purely to build, shoot, and test this system, because AMD had no spare samples available for us.
So, we’re pitching this build around the concept of an upgrade, effectively. You’ve had the majority of these parts for a while now. You managed to pick up a Core i5-10600K way back when it launched in 2020 (yikes), along with a Gigabyte Z490 motherboard, complete with PCIe 4.0 compatibility, and thanks to being extremely lucky with some pre-orders, got hold of a 6700 XT and an i5-11600K, although the chip wasn’t exactly too difficult to source.
The big question: Does the Z490 board do the job with the latest-gen chip? And if you were to build this rig from scratch, what would $2,741 get you in terms of gaming performance in this silicon drought-ridden world we live in? Let’s find out.