Maximum PC January 2023

LAST MONTH, I went all-out on building a system with the latest and greatest (i.e. most expensive) components available. It was an exercise in seeing what was capable at the cutting edge with just-released tech and a money-no-object attitude. And what a system it was, offering a 25 percent performance leap in CPU-bound tasks like Cinebench, and an astonishing 80 percent performance leap in 4K games. This month’s build is more in line with what I’d go for, personally, if I were building a gaming PC right now. It still uses the RTX 4090 for those crazy 4K frame rates, but it’s paired with the brilliant Intel Core i5-13600K, which is $300 cheaper than the i9-13900K I used. Our builder Sam has also smartly gone for a Z690 board, still using…

AMD’S NEW GPU series, known as RDNA3, has landed in the form of the 24GB Radeon RX 7900 XTX and the 20GB 7900 XT. AMD claims the cards have the most advanced technology and ‘breakthrough’ levels of performance. Both cards use the 5nm Navi 31 die, the biggest the company has, with the 7900 XT being a slightly cut-down version with 84 compute units against its bigger sibling’s 96. It’s a chiplet design, with the main 5nm GPU surrounded by six 6nm memory chips with attendant controllers. The game clocks are 2.5GHz and 2.3GHz respectively. Much to everybody’s relief, they use two 8-pin power connectors. For a more in-depth look at the technology inside the new RDNA 3 cards, see page 32. First impressions are that it looks as if AMD…

SEAGATE’S SECOND GENERATION of Mach.2 drives, the Exos 2X18 and 2X16, can manage data transfer rates of 545MB/s over a SATA 3 interface, which is comparable to SATA SSD performance. They build on the slower 2X14 that began shipping in 2019 and, while they’re no match for an M.2 NVMe SSD, these mechanical drives come in larger capacities of 16TB and 18TB. The magic isn’t achieved by spin rates—those are a modest 7,200rpm—but using two actuators effectively means it can act as two drives simultaneously. One area where they won’t match solid state is in seek times, which at 4.16ms are nowhere near the microseconds of an SSD. These drives are aimed at server work and ‘hyperscale’ workloads, so are robustly built, with SAS and self-encrypting versions too. Prices have yet…

AMD’S SECRET weapon for the Zen 3 range was its V-cache version, the Ryzen 7 5800X3D. It stacked high-speed memory on top of eight cores and tripled the L3 cache, making for the world’s fastest gaming chip on launch. Although Intel responded with the Core i9-12900KS to steal some of that thunder, Intel’s chip was faster in some games, albeit more expensive. AMD had no trouble selling its V-cache chips, and even now they’re still hard to find. The same V-cache editions will be released for the Zen 4 Ryzens and should be due in the first half of 2023. The hope was that the cache trick would be applied to a higher-end version with more cores, but rumor has it that AMD will start small, with a six-core Ryzen 5…

TRIUMPHS SUPER-EFFICIENT The Flatiron Institute’s Herni system returns 65.091GFLOP/Watt, making it the world’s most power-efficient supercomputer. MUSHROOM ELECTRONICS The skin of the Ganoderma Lucidum fungus can be dried and used to make PCB boards. 8K GAMING MONITOR Samsung’s new Odyssey Neo G9 is a 49-inch, 7,680 by 2,160 pixel, curved monitor with a refresh rate of 165Hz. TRAGEDIES SLOW YEAR FOR WIN 11 Figures from Startcounter put Windows 11’s share of the PC market at just 15 percent, one year after its release. NO MORE HANGING OUT Launched in 2013, Hangouts, Google’s try at a messaging service, is now officially dead. GAME DISC WITH NO GAME Buy Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 on disc and you’ll find just 72MB of data—there’s a huge download instead.…

INTEL’S 13TH-GENERATION Raptor Lake processors are impressive beasts. After struggling against AMD’s Zen-based Ryzen chips in the past few years, the blue team now has a winner. We have solid proof of how robust the flagship i9-13900K model is, thanks to a world overclocking record of 8.81285GHz, achieved with the help of liquid nitrogen cooling, a core voltage of 1.325V, a multiplier of 88, and a tweaked bus of 100.15MHz. Raptor Lake was always going to be a contender—before it was released, engineering samples were reported to reach 8GHz. The eight-year-old record was held by AMD’s FX-8370, a 32nm eight-core chip based around the Piledriver architecture, which managed 8.72278GHz. So, Intel took the record with an improvement of 90MHz, just one percent. Meanwhile, there are rumors of a refresh for Raptor Lake…