AS PC ENTHUSIASTS, we’ve never had it so good. I know, that’s a bold statement for a new editor to make after two years of component shortages, inflated graphics card prices, and general stagnation in CPUs. “The new guy is crazy! Burn the heretic!” I hear you cry. But allow me to explain...
First of all, there’s finally some genuine competition in the CPU space. Intel’s 12th generation chips, particularly the i5-12400, offer incredible price-to-performance and bring real competition to AMD’s dominance in the low-to-mid-range. Look out for our next issue when we’ll be building an amazing system around this chip, redefining the mid-range gaming desktop in the process.
Not to be outdone, AMD looks set to build on its momentum in the laptop sector with new Zen 3+ chips featuring RDNA2 graphics. If successful, these chips promise to redefine what laptops can do without discrete graphics, delivering decent gaming performance at 1080p. We examine how the two major chip manufacturers compare with their 2022 portable efforts in our news section on page 8.