Maximum PC - USA (2022-04)

98  APR 2022

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Maximum PC (ISSN 1522-4279) is published 13 times a year,

monthly plus a Holiday issue following the December issue, by

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IT’S GOOD NEWS this time around for our AMD build, a $100 sale on

the powerful AMD Ryzen 9 5900X brings our CPU down to $450.

Unfortunately, the Ryzen 5950X hasn’t been struck with the same

luck, otherwise, we’d swap chips here. This processor is, of course,

no slouch and is still one of the best offerings from AMD right now.

To help costs and get some extra speed improvements, we opted

for the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 1TB SSD over the previous Samsung

980 Pro of the same capacity. Saving $10 doesn’t sound like much

but it’s a win-win scenario here, with increased read/write speeds

and more bucks to spend elsewhere. The rest of the build doesn’t

change, prices remain roughly the same with a few fluctuations on

the cooler and motherboard. The ASRock Radeon RX 6900 XT is still

available and prices haven’t altered, so that is one step in the right

direction. We are also keeping the MSI MAG CoreLiquid 360R ARGB

in both builds, although it rose by $10. This is a neat-looking cooler

that will do the trick in both high-end rigs.

On the Intel side, we see a sale on our i9-12900K CPU, not quite as

good on this side of the fence but any decrease in price is welcome.

We have a few more changes on this build though, kicking things

off with a price drop that has made us extremely happy. For a small

increase of $16, we swap out our Gigabyte RTX 3080 for the Ti

variant. This model brings us 12GB of GDDR6X, 2GB more than the

standard 3080 offering from Gigabyte, and was a no-brainer.

A compatibility issue meant that we had to swap out the newly

added MSI MAG CoreLiquid 360R ARGB cooler for the Corsair iCUE

H150i RGB PRO XT. With the same 360mm radiator size, it should

perform similarly, although it’s not as quiet as the MSI offering.

And that was it for the changes on the Intel Turbo build, albeit they

were some pretty exciting ones. The only other differences were

similar to those on the AMD machine, with a few price alterations

but nothing to worry about. The majority of them were positive, the

only negative being a $10 rise in our Gigabyte Aorus Gen4 SSD. Not

a bad compromise for an almost free upgrade to an RTX 3080 Ti.

Approximate Price: $2,556 or $3,056 Approximate Price: $3,146 or $3,527

AMD INGREDIENTS INTEL INGREDIENTS

PART PRICE

STREET

PRICE

Case Phanteks Enthoo Pro 2

Tempered Glass

$220

PSU 750W Be Quiet! Pure Power

11 FM 80+ Gold

$115

Mobo Gigabyte X570 Aorus Elite $180

CPU AMD Ryzen 9 5900X $450

Cooler MSI MAG CoreLiquid 360R ARGB $140

GPU ASRock Radeon RX 6900 XT

Phantom Gaming D 16GB

$999

$1,499

RAM 32GB (2x 16GB) G.Skill Ripjaws V

32GB @ 4000MHz

$140

SSD Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus M.2 PCIe 4.0 NEW $160

HDD 6TB WD Blue 5400 HDD $120

OS Windows 10 Home 64-bit OEM

(Windows 11 Compatible)

$32

PART PRICE

STREET

PRICE

Case Phanteks Enthoo Pro 2

Tempered Glass

$220

PSU 750W Be Quiet! Pure Power

11 FM 80+ Gold

$115

Mobo MSI PRO Z690-A WiFi LGA1700 $240

CPU Intel Core i9-12900K $600

Cooler Corsair iCUE H150i RGB PRO XT NEW $130

GPU Gigabyte Gaming OC GeForce

RTX 3080 Ti 12GB Gaming OC NEW

$1,199

$1,580

RAM 32GB (2x 16GB) Kingston FURY

Beast DDR5 @ 5200MHz

$350

SSD 1TB Gigabyte Aorus Gen4

M.2 PCIe 4.0 SSD

$140

HDD 6TB WD Blue 5400 HDD $120

OS Windows 10 Home 64-bit OEM

(Windows 11 Compatible)

$32

TURBO