CPU
Intel Core i9-14900K $549
Time and time again, we keep coming back to the Intel Core i9-14900K, and with good reason. At its core, this build is the very heart of the Maximum PC testbed. It’s our go-to chip for GPU, RAM, and SSD testing, and delivers incredible performance for the price. It’s effectively the pinnacle of what Intel has managed to achieve with its Rocket Lake architecture.
It’s not perfect, and if you’ve kept your ear to the ground on this one, you’ve likely seen news articles regarding motherboards producing pretty aggressive overvolts and clock-speed boosts. However, you can now pick up an Intel default performance profile in most mobo BIOSes, and even with that slight drop in overall potency, the 14900K still delivers supreme CPU performance, circumnavigating any potential bottlenecks you can imagine for any other component in your build. You’re still likely to see those 100 C running temperatures and high clock speeds, but it’ll at least be a touch more stable.
Fun news cycle data aside, the 14900K has some serious hardware at its core (ha, puns), including eight performance cores, with hyperthreading, plus 16 efficient-cores, for all of those low-priority application processes that need managing. Combine that with 36MB of mixed smart-cache, and the 14900K quite happily dominates any task you throw at it.
Motherboard
Asus ROG Maximus Z790 Dark Hero $595
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