Gigabyte’s Z270X-Ultra offers
3 Gigabyte’s Z270X-Ultra offers
extra spacing between front panel headers, making it easy to identify where to install your power cables. Additionally, we never install the HD audio pass- through, because quality generally tends to be far worse than via the rear I/O.
THE END OF THE ROAD FOR THE CORE i5?
WELL, THERE YOU HAVE IT FOLKS:
would change? Well, if this were genuinely whammy mini feature buried within Build It.
a double
it was certainly impressive to witness, it was
a build for purchase, not designed for that So, is this the end of the road for Intel’s Core i5
also excruciatingly frustrating.
wide range of processor testing, we would series processor? Probably not. Legacies are
Cooler problems aside, it turned out to be
probably drop the 1TB SSD in favor of an HDD, always difficult to quash, and just as AMD’s
a pretty clean-looking build. Keeping all the
potentially go down to a B250 motherboard to Ryzen has one hell of a stigma to overcome
storage around the back of the motherboard
save a bit of cash, use a lower specced PSU, in the mind of the average PC enthusiast, so
tray actually makes a world of difference. And,
and potentially even 8GB of DDR4, depending does the concept of the Core i5 not being the
although the PSU cover is only a 75 percent
on budget constraints. That would bring king of gaming.
case fit, it does leave plenty of room for
this particular build down to around $630, Take a glance at the Internet, and you’ll see
radiators and cooling up front, and it grows
including shipping. dozens of commentators purporting that the Core i5 is the way to go, and that even going up
on you after a while. Is there anything we
BENCHMARKS
to the Core i7 isn’t worth the cash, because you only gain 10 percent performance in games.
INTEL CORE INTEL CORE The reality, on the other hand, is very different.
INTEL PENTIUM
INTEL CORE
i5-7600K i7-7700K Across the board, from one of Intel’s lowest
G4600
i3-7300
182/699 191/960 rendering powerhouse at $350, there’s
$80 chips all the way up to its mainstream Cinebench R15 Single/Multi
absolutely no difference in game. It seems
541/516 537/515 those IPC improvements have been making a difference to the ecosystem after all—just not
CrystalDisk QD32 Sequential Read/Write (MB/s)
10,606 11,184 in the way we might think. Building this particular system was actually
3DMark Fire Strike (Index)
25 25 25 25 considerably frustrating—mostly due to the
Deus Ex Mankind Divided
(Avg fps)
39 39 38 The backplate, coupled with the fans scraping 39 the front of the chassis, and the pipes being
cooler being so incredibly annoying to install.
Rise of the Tomb Raider (Avg fps)
far too resistant to movement, really gave us
66 67 67 67 pause for thought as to whether this was the
Far Cry Primal (Avg fps)
right cooler for us. We even had to unplug and
37 38 39 39 reinstall the PWM pump fan header at first,
Attila: Total War (Avg fps)
because it refused to pump water around Steam VR Performance Test
8.2 8.2 8.3 8.0 the system, forcing our Intel Core i7, that we
(Index 0–10)
tested first, to install Windows 10 on to the Best scores are in bold. All games were tested at the highest possible 1080p settings, bar Deus Ex (tested at Very SSD at 99–100 C, at a paltry 200MHz. Although
High graphical profile).
maximumpc.com
SPRING 2017
MAXIMUM PC