APC – Issue 518, April 2023
English | 117 pages | pdf | 64.23 MB
Welcome at APC Magazine Issue 518, April 2023
Welcome to an extra fabulous issue of APC. It’s a hot one because we’ve got some primo gear reviewed, and it’s extra hot because we have all of the winners revealed for the big annual Australian PC Awards. Woot.
Here at HQ, the whole team has been badgering Chris for the last couple of weeks about his reviews of the Intel 13900KS and AMD 7950X3D. “Have you benched them yet? Which is better? Is the new-gen X3D as amazing as we hoped?” Having these two chips pitched against each other is Ferrari vs Lamborghini stuff. They’re the big dogs, and it’s especially interesting because it’s basically a contest of brute force, with Intel hitting 6GHz for the first time in a consumer CPU, while AMD is playing trickery with its innovative V-Cache to get the results. And yes, Intel is more than just about brute force these days, but seeing how they stack up with two generally different approaches is fascinating.
Turn to page 36 to get the verdict. Both are immensely powerful, but as it turns out maybe AMD’s flagship 7950X3D isn’t the X3D chip to lust after. For the moment.
In this issue there’s also the M2-powered MacBook Pro, and once again Apple has absolutely decimated the Intel and AMD X86 competition, and it seems that we’re steadily marching towards an Arm/RISC world of personal computing dominance.
We enjoyed playing with the small but mighty Intel NUC 12 Pro. I don’t think we do enough NUC reviews in APC Magazine, so we’ll try and include more in the future. These small form factor PCs offer a lot and are the perfect solution for many users’ needs.
Plus, the Awards! 2022 certainly brought with it more challenges that a single year deserves, but it was also a year when we saw new products and tech come out that advanced the PC in significant ways, and the experts here have, after many long days of debate and consideration, come up with worthy finalists, stand-out Highly Commended gear, and the best of the best overall winners. Tune in on page 50 to see what we liked best. Maybe there’s gear you bought and are, we hope, are loving. Across 27 categories there’s a tonne of quality here that we feel needs acknowledgement, so a big congratulations to all the people behind the gear that won. Your hard work and clever design gets you the big gongs and shows that even in a difficult year there’s always quality to be found.
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