Maximum PC July 2022

NOW THAT I’VE BEEN at the helm of this fine publication for five months, I thought it was time for us to try something we’ve never done before: a three-build special. Sure, we’ve done two-build head-to-heads before, like our popular Intel vs AMD challenges, but they’re usually taken on by two writers who split the workload between them. In this issue, it’s three machines covering the 1080p/1440p/4K sweet spots, by just one writer. Like most editors, I’m cheekily taking credit for someone else’s brilliant idea here—it was Christian who dreamt up this insane challenge a couple of months ago and, like some mad genius, he’s been masterminding it ever since. Christian is a master builder with many years of experience crafting PCs for Maximum PC, but I cannot overstate the challenge…

WE NOW HAVE a new best ever Radeon graphics card, the RX 6950 XT. This three-fan monster has, AMD says, “been engineered to deliver the ultimate 4K gaming experience”. Basically a refreshed 6900 XT, it is built around the same 7nm Navi21 GPU with 5,120 Stream Processors and 80 Compute Units. It is clocked faster though, with the game clock jumping from 2,015MHz to 2,100MHz, a four percent bump. The maximum boost speed gains 60Hz to 2,310MHz and although memory is the same, 16GB of GDDR6, it’s now 18Gbps rather than 16Gbps, while memory bandwidth rises from 512GB/s to 576GB/s. AMD quotes the ‘effective’ memory bandwidth using the Infinity cache, now 1,793.5GB/s, up from 1,664.2GB/s. That’s some useful extra bandwidth. All of these changes have pushed the power consumption to 335W,…

NOW THAT I’VE BEEN at the helm of this fine publication for five months, I thought it was time for us to try something we’ve never done before: a three-build special. Sure, we’ve done two-build head-to-heads before, like our popular Intel vs AMD challenges, but they’re usually taken on by two writers who split the workload between them. In this issue, it’s three machines covering the 1080p/1440p/4K sweet spots, by just one writer. Like most editors, I’m cheekily taking credit for someone else’s brilliant idea here—it was Christian who dreamt up this insane challenge a couple of months ago and, like some mad genius, he’s been masterminding it ever since. Christian is a master builder with many years of experience crafting PCs for Maximum PC, but I cannot overstate the…

THIS SUMMER, we’ll see Nvidia’s next-gen RTX 40-series, armed with the first Ada Lovelace GPUs. The earlier than expected date means it won’t launch at the same time as AMD’s RDNA 3 cards, which no doubt suits both companies. The new GPUs range from the 18,432 core AD102 to the more modest 3,072 core AD107. Details are sketchy, but the first three cards will be top-tier ones, including the RTX 4090 with the AD102 and 24GB of GDD6X: the same memory configuration as the current RTX 3090 Ti (above). Power consumption could be 450W, not as insane as earlier rumors. We’re promised an epic performance, with up to twice the horsepower of the RTX 3090. The RTX 4080 and 4070 will use their own GPU dies, rather than cut-down ones,…

WE NOW HAVE a new best ever Radeon graphics card, the RX 6950 XT. This three-fan monster has, AMD says, “been engineered to deliver the ultimate 4K gaming experience”. Basically a refreshed 6900 XT, it is built around the same 7nm Navi21 GPU with 5,120 Stream Processors and 80 Compute Units. It is clocked faster though, with the game clock jumping from 2,015MHz to 2,100MHz, a four percent bump. The maximum boost speed gains 60Hz to 2,310MHz and although memory is the same, 16GB of GDDR6, it’s now 18Gbps rather than 16Gbps, while memory bandwidth rises from 512GB/s to 576GB/s. AMD quotes the ‘effective’ memory bandwidth using the Infinity cache, now 1,793.5GB/s, up from 1,664.2GB/s. That’s some useful extra bandwidth. All of these changes have pushed the power consumption to…

TRADITIONALLY WITH AMD processors, there’s been a gap between the desktop and mobile markets. That gap is starting to close and AMD is bringing the latest 5000-series Zen 3 processors to Chromebooks with four new 15W chips. This will be quite a jump in performance from the last Chromebook chips, the Zen+ 3000-series from 2020. The top chip is the Ryzen 7 5825C, with an eight-core heart, a world-first for the Chromebook. It has a base clock of 2GHz and a maximum boost to 4.5GHz. Below this are the Ryzen 5 5625C and two Ryzen 3s, the 5425C and 5125C, with six, four, and two cores respectively. You also get improved Vega graphics and double the L3 cache of the previous generation. AMD estimates they will be between 67 and…