Building a Compact Gaming PC with the i5-12600K

After spending the last several generations playing it safe and letting AMD enjoy the CPU spotlight, Intel finally decided to provide a more robust competition with their recent 12th-generation Alder Lake chips. New DDR5 RAM support, much smaller lithography, and lots more cores await to provide plenty of gaming and multitasking performance this holiday season.

Today, we’ll be looking at a build including the i5-12600K that focuses on being compact yet powerful—capable of fitting in a tight space, or moving with relative ease from house to office (or from home office to entertainment room). As we’ll see, the i5-12600K is a multitasking master for a great price, so this will be a gaming-workstation hybrid in a nice tight package.

Before we begin, let’s explore the 12600K in a bit more depth so we know what we’re working with!

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Building a Quiet Gaming PC with the Intel i7-12700K

 

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!

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Best Newegg Black Friday Week Deals 2021

Newegg Black Friday 2021 Week sales! These are Logical Increments’ picks for the best Newegg Black Friday Week 2021 deals.

Black Friday is the day where a large number of retailers all around the world have the biggest sales of the year. Some outlets (like Newegg) will also have pre-Black Friday sales, so we have taken a look at what is on sale so far this year.

Please note: Some of the best deals are dependent on rebates. Such rebates are reliable, but only if you follow the instructions exactly and submit everything on time, so better be careful!

BlackFridayNewegg2020

Newegg Black Friday deals are here!

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Intel’s Alder Lake: The Phoenix Emerges

i9-12900K

Ever since Intel won every race in the universe with the launch of Sandy Bridge back in 2011, they have been slacking. AMD’s tortoise needed six long years, but it overtook the sleeping Intel hare in 2017, leaving behind a lot of room for jokes at Intel’s expense.

But Intel, like all other large tech corporations, does have a solid engineering team tucked away. And the only thing that engineers need is time. Intel has been trailing AMD for four years, but that changed with the Alder Lake CPU launch a few nights ago.

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Living Room Gaming Comparison: Docked Handhelds vs. Standard Consoles vs. Desktop Gaming PCs

Switch, PC, PS5

In this comparison article, we’ll briefly examine three solutions that let you game from the comfort of your very own couch. We’ll be taking a look at dockable handhelds, including the Nintendo Switch and the Steam Deck; home consoles, including the Xbox Series S/X and the PlayStation 5; and a full-blown home theater and gaming PC right smack in your living room.

The pros and cons of each category of system will be weighed to help guide you to the best partner for your big living room television. Let’s begin!

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The “GPU Prices are Not Improving Fast Enough” Update

GPU prices image

GPU prices started going up (roughly) in March of 2020 when all hardware went up in price or went out-of-stock. It happened slowly at first, then faster and faster, until widespread unavailability became the norm!

During the worst of the worst, it was so bad that you could not buy most graphics cards, no matter what price you were willing to pay! I am very glad that the worst is over.

But we aren’t out of the woods just yet.

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Steam Deck Specifications – Comparing Valve’s Deck to PC Gaming Hardware

Steam Deck Performance

Valve has released the Steam Deck specifications, and they have spawned a storm of excitement. Essentially, the Steam Deck is a handheld gaming PC built around SteamOS. The Steam Deck is poised to be a fairly unique product, looking like a hybrid of a handheld console like the Switch and a conventional desktop PC (like the ones found in our main chart). Indeed, Valve’s Deck is being marketed as a “Gaming PC” with the intention of providing all the features that framing entails, for everyone from tech enthusiasts to gamers.

It’ll have a native SteamOS interface with (mostly) complete support for your pre-existing Steam library (limited to games that have either been ported to Linux or which can be run with Proton and Steam Play), and it’ll also have the ability to replace SteamOS with another option, such as Windows, in order to run just about any other title you can think of.

The Steam Deck specifications and features allow you to run anything and everything on it—and its the combination of that openness; controls including a touchscreen, capacitive pads, and back-grip buttons; the ability to ‘dock’ it to play on a TV or monitor; and a priority placed on ergonomics that (altogether) makes the device more interesting than something like a Nintendo Switch or a GPD Win3. There are just so many features all at once!

As for the hardware itself, Valve has released a very comprehensive spec sheet on the Steam Deck website. We’ll know exactly how this hardware will perform in games once the first units make it into the hands of reviewers, but until then we can take a close look at the provided specs and discuss how they stack up against current desktop hardware!

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The Steam Deck vs Valve’s Top 10 Games

 

How well does Valve’s new Steam Deck hold up against Steam’s own library?

The announcement of the Steam Deck in July 2021 introduced Valve’s latest excursion into the complex world of gaming hardware. No doubt inspired by Nintendo’s success with the Switch console, the Steam Deck aims to let you take your entire Steam library wherever you go. Well, most of your library, anyway (more on that soon enough). But how will the Steam Deck handle Steam’s current most popular games? Will they run like a well-oiled machine, or break down faster than a 3DS running Crysis?

Let’s look at Steam’s current top 10 games on Steam Charts, and do a little predicting! We’ll be looking at the 10 Steam games with the highest player counts in August 2021.

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