Maximum PC – April 2023
English | 102 pages | pdf | 35.57 MB
TIME FOR TEAM RED at Maximum PC Magazine April 2023 issue
WE PROMISE it’s nothing personal, but we’ve been maligning AMD and its GPUs for the past six issues. True, it’s mainly because Nvidia has been drip-feeding its Lovelace-powered 4000-series cards to market, starting with the flagship 4090 and then running down to last issue’s 4070Ti build. Nvidia is also the undisputed king when it comes to discrete GPUs, claiming 88 percent of the market in Q3 2022.
But we don’t need to tell you that there’s been a collective sigh when it comes to Nvidia’s pricing this generation, with the RTX 4080 ($1,199) being a particular disappointment in the price-to-performance department. With AMD’s RX 7900 XT being cheaper than the RTX 4080, but promising similar performance, is it time for people to ditch Team Green and head over to the relative value offered by Team Red?
That’s the question we posed to our builder Sam Lewis this month, as he builds our first all-AMD system of the year. He’s gone big, pairing it with a kick-ass AMD Ryzen 9 7900X CPU, DDR5 RAM, and a brand new NZXT H9 Flow case, all for just over $2,900. OK, that’s not budget territory, but it’s pretty reasonable in these highlyinflated times. So how does it stack up to an equivalent Intel/Nvidia system? Is AMD the smart choice for both CPU and GPU price-to-performance in 2023? Sam breaks it down starting on page 16.
If you’ve been reading our letters pages of late, you’ll know we’ve had lots of comments about our Blueprints section, which we update every issue. We’d always modeled these spec sheets based on 1080p, 1440p, and 4K gaming, with Budget, Mid-Range, and Turbo monikers respectively. The feedback we got was that our budget builds weren’t actually very budget anymore, with prices that had crept up thanks to scalpers and manufacturers over the past couple of years. We’ve adjusted the specs to get them back under $1,000 but have decided to keep the GPUs in there, based on your feedback. Read more on page 94.
We’ve also got a couple of great features in this issue, each with a costsaving focus. The first is a feature from our resident Doctor, Nick Peers, on reusing and re-purposing old tech that might be gathering dust in your home.
Whether it’s an old computer you could convert into a server or a tablet you could turn into a digital photo frame, there are loads of great tips on page 32. And, on page 42, we show you how to erase all of your private data, whether that’s files that aren’t actually deleted from your PC, or the passwords and credit card info that gets stored across all your devices.
I mentioned that we were Team Red for this issue, but there’s still lots of Intel within these pages. We have a review of the 6GHz i9-13900KS, the powerhouse processor perfect for overclockers. We also have a review of the Intel Arc A770 8GB, while Jarred Walton has penned a feature on the improving driver situation for Intel’s graphics cards. After a rocky start and a generation of sub-par products, there’s a feeling that (whisper it!) Intel could slowly be turning itself into a contender in the GPU space. In fact, it might not be long before you see an all-Intel build adorning a Maximum PC magazine cover.
Enjoy the Magazine issue!
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