The launch of an all new CPU architecture is always an exciting time for PC enthusiasts. Intel’s 12th Generation CPU architecture, codenamed Alder Lake, is certainly the company’s most important CPU architecture in the last decade. It represents a fundamental shift for Intel, and it lays the foundation and roadmap that Intel’s desktop and mobile … Read more
Chris Szewczyk The 12600K offers a rather stunning level of performance for its price. It manages to beat out the 5800X in most cases, despite ostensibly being a six core CPU. www.intel.com The i9-12900K is the CPU that’s tending to grab the headlines, but the real hero of the 12th Gen range may well be … Read more
Gigabyte F2A68HM-HD2 Review – Gigabyte has quite an impressive range of micro-ATX boards on offer these days, each offering something different or adding to an existing feature from the last revision. Finding something that combines everything in a single, inexpensive and small package can be quite a chore at times, but thankfully such a thing does … Read more
I had mixed experiences with the MSI A88XM-E45. It’s a good looking Micro-ATX design that uses a classic MSI color scheme of blue and black with a chunky heat-sink on the power regulation hardware that is screwed in place. The smaller heat-sink on the chip-set is secured with a pair of plastic pop pins. There … Read more
As a spin-off for this month’s Labs test, we’ve also included MSI’s B450M Mortar micro-ATX motherboard in the roundup. It first appears to be a B450 Tomahawk with a few centimetres lopped off the bottom. Read our MSI B450M Mortar Review. You may also like: MSI Z370 SLI Plus review ASRock X399M Taichi Review The two boards … Read more
Asus TUF Z270 Mark 1 Review – With any new chip, comes a new chipset. And with each generation, that chipset improves in a variety of ways. The improvements usually revolve around connectivity and expansion support. But there are often other notable tweaks as well, such as aesthetic design, cooling support, and updates and enhancements to … Read more
What do you look for in a motherboard? Clean style? Endurance? Good power draw? Never-ending connectivity? There’s a lot to think about when choosing the perfect motherboard. Much like a processor, you need one that’s appropriate for your build; suitable for what you want to do. In a lot of ways, it’s a contradictory component; … Read more
ASUS ROG Maximus X Hero Review – WE’VE ALWAYS TENDED more towards Asus’s Prime series motherboards than its ROG Maximus range, largely because the latter are invariably far more expensive. With the release of Intel’s Coffee Lake CPUs and accompanying Z370 chipset, it seems that won’t be changing any time soon: the ROG Maximus X Hero, more … Read more
MSI X470 Gaming Plus Review: How low do you want to go? It’s obvious from the moment you first open the box of the MSI X470 Gaming Plus that keeping costs down was a priority for the company. It’s definitely not a looker, with rather sparse cosmetic additions and lots of visible PCB traces, but for … Read more
Asus ROG Crosshair VII Hero WiFi Review – A little over a year ago, we were battling with some gremlins with various X370 boards, one of which was the Asus Crosshair VI Hero, until Asus released a spate of EFIs (as did other manufacturers) to improve memory support and stability. Fast forward to 2018, though, … Read more
While most of the gaming motherboards for the Intel 6th generation Core processor, aka the Intel Skylake, out there on the market right now is equipped mostly with the high end Intel Z170 chipset, some people do not really want all the features that are present in the chip. Some just want a no nonsense, … Read more
HERE WE HAVE it, the premier consumer enthusiast chip from Intel’s seventh generation of processors: Kaby Lake. The Intel Core i7 7700k is the replacement for the Skylake family’s Core i7-6700K, and is a fully unlocked quad-core CPU with each core running at 4.2GHz with a 4.5GHz Turbo Boost clock. It’s important to appreciate the … Read more