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