Behold, friends-with-big-wallets: the biggest, heaviest, most expensive, most power-consuming, and *drumroll* best-performing card ever made!
Let us take a closer look.
With Intel releasing their new 12th-generation chips into a market still saturated with scalpers peddling $2000 GPUs, it’s fair to say that most people interested in this new hardware are looking to upgrade just their CPU (and motherboard) rather than putting together an entirely new build.
But it’s a lot easier to conceptualize what to upgrade when you see how the part fits into an entire build. And maybe some wild people out there are looking to build an entirely new PC regardless of the difficulties. For those reason, the ongoing graphics card woes won’t stop us from having a little fun and planning a handful of creative builds with Intel’s Alder Lake series of CPUs! For this specific build, we’ll be looking to make a quiet PC capable of letting you game in peace (without it sounding like a passenger jet is preparing for takeoff right on your desk).
First, let’s take a close look at the star of the PC: the i7-12700K!
After the past year, it really is a different world out there. So it should come as no surprise that the old, time-tested PC Shopping Wisdom doesn’t really apply today like it did even a few years ago. Gaming laptops? A good deal? Arguably, yes, they are now. Lack of component availability due to chip shortages, scalping, cryptocurrency mining, and more has made building a capable desktop PC for a reasonable price (or at all) close-to-impossible.
There are also, however, the inherent benefits of laptops: portability, peripherals being included with the part purchase, smaller form factor, and the device coming fully pre-assembled. These are just a handful of the most prominent areas where laptops have always come out on top.
AMD makes both CPUs and GPUs. We have followed AMD’s CPU journey, from competitive, to underdog, and back to competitive. Now, with the launch of the RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT, it looks like AMD wants to get back to being competitive with GPUs as well.
Over the years, nVidia has gotten better and better at GPU launches. Each new card performs well, runs cool and quiet, and is better than what it replaces… and no exceptions to this come readily to mind.
nVidia’s sole (and rare) issue with modern launches is the pricing, which can sometimes feel like highway robbery: $1800 for a graphics card? Want my firstborn with that, too, nVidia? Or just an arm and a leg?
This year, though, it is a bit different.