Custom PC – June 2021
English | 115 pages | pdf | 82.89 MB
Form a circle ,folks,because we’re going to witness a clash of arms between two grizzled veterans. I’m not sure we’ve ever seen such a tight fight between Intel and AMD. When AMD64 ruled the CPU kingdom, Intel was flailing around with Net Burst. When Core later reclaimed Intel’s honour, AMD was floundering with Bulldozer.
Even the first Ryzen vs Core battles were fought on different terms, with Intel winning on gaming performance and AMD leading on multi-threaded performance. This time it’s different. Technically, AMD still wins on core counts, but that’s largely irrelevant when there aren’t any Zen 3 CPUs with more than eight cores available to actually buy.
It mainly comes down to choosing a Rocket Lake-S or Zen 3CPUwith six or eight cores, both with decent gaming performance and solid multi-threaded speed. Remarkably, Intel is the underdog in this fight, pricing its CPUs below AMD. Intel is also still stuck on a14nmprocess,meaning its chips have higher power draw. As you can see in our Labs test on p40, it’s tight, but it’s great to see fierce competition in the CPU market.
What’s not so great to see is GPU stock still being far from able to meet demand. We’ve reviewed Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3060 (see p16) and AMD’s RadeonRX6700XT(see p19) in this Custom PC Magazine issue, but both are already out of stock. Richard Swinburne explores some of the reasons on p8,andwe also have a full feature on the problems facing the UK tech market on p88. It looks as though we’re going to be mired in this miserable swamp for many more months, though, so we’re no longer putting scores in graphics card reviews until this is sorted –we’ll show you how new GPUs perform, but we simply can’t give them realistic scores when they’re not available at anywhere near the recommended retail price. Instead of listing non-existent recommended retail prices on the Elite list, we’re now listing the general Buy it Now price on eBay. We hate doing this, and we still don’t recommend handing money to eBay scalpers if you can wait, but with no end of this situation in sight, we wanted to at least represent the cost of building a new custom PC more honestly.
EDITOR
Ben Hardwidge
[email protected]
@custompcmag
Download from: