AMD has stayed surprisingly silent over the months since Intel kicked off their 12th generation, letting loose a full series of beefy Intel consumer-grade CPUs. Little is known about the secretive Ryzen 7000 series of processors, AMD’s next CPU lineup, but a few morsels of information have been released so far that give us a general idea of what to expect from Zen 4, and boy are they juicy.
Let’s get right into them!
Virtual Reality is an amazing thing. It lets you temporarily escape whatever mortal problems you grapple with in life: politics, expensive GPUs, your in-laws… the list is endless! But in order to power an entire virtual universe for you to freely explore and withdraw into, you’ll need quite a beefy computer to handle it.
That’s why, in this article, we’ll be taking a look at building a PC with Intel’s new flagship CPU—the powerful i9-12900K. Building around that new chip, we’re aiming to put together a computer that will crank out VR performance with incredibly high fidelity.
Before we start looking at all the bits and pieces, though, let’s closely examine the heart of this beastly PC: the i9-12900K!
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!
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!
2021 Black Friday is upon us, with deals from Amazon, Newegg, and more! These are Logical Increments’ picks for the best 2021 Black Friday deals on computer hardware, from Amazon, Newegg, and B&H Photo Video.
Black Friday is a weird ‘holiday’ where a large number of retailers all around the world have their biggest sales of the year. Newegg has been one of the most consistent sources for Black Friday sales on PC hardware, but there are a few good offers to be found on Amazon and B&H as well.
This list includes 2021 Black Friday sales from Amazon, Newegg, and B&H mixed in together. Basically, we’ve taken a look at what all three sites have available, narrowed them down to the best 2021 Black Friday deals on computer parts overall, and listed them all right here on a single convenient page.
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!
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!
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.
Credit: Logical Increments
When buying and picking your CPU, you want to get the best you can get for your money, as well as the CPU that best fits your needs. When sifting through the available CPUs to satisfy those goals, you are bombarded with numerous technical terms and specifications.
In this article, I aim to clear up what those terms mean, and (roughly speaking) how their specs translate into performance.
How have you been? Better, I hope. Things have not been well for the last 1.5 years, due to… the circumstances being what they are.
But at long last, we can see a ray of hope!
Let’s be fair: it would be more than a little presumptuous if we expected or even demanded improvements to the current hardware shortages. Even after a monumental vaccine rollout procedure in many countries, the pandemic is still having a huge global effect, and we as builders need to have patience.
At this point, we are now deep into the knock-on impact of slowdowns at the lowest and earliest stages of manufacturing affecting every aspect of the assembly and distribution pipeline.
But even after all these caveats and disclaimers, people remain curious: which parts are being affected the most, what are the ongoing problems, and when might things get back to normal? Well, those are the exact topics we intend to cover in this post, part by part!
