Turbo

Hail to the chief.

Before we get into the nitty-gritty of this: At the time of writing, Death Stranding on PC is free with both of the EVGA 2080 Supers we’re using in these two builds (the KO Gaming in the AMD build, and the Black Gaming in the Intel build). Snap that up! Anyway… high-end power supplies seem to be stabilising somewhat in the price department, so we’d recommend grabbing a Corsair RM850x at just $269 before the price rises again. You can see the same PSU in both turbo builds this issue.

In the AMD machine, we’ve upgraded our motherboard to the excellent MSI MEG X570 Unify. Some dedicated readers among you may remember this as one of the first X570 boards we got our hands on, and it’s still a great choice for any 3rd-gen Ryzen build. We’ve also swapped out our memory, sticking with G. Skill’s TridentZ range but now opting for the newer, flashier TridentZ Neo.

As we mentioned earlier, we’re using EVGA’s RTX 2080 Super KO Gaming in this machine now. Lastly, the 1TB model of the Corsair Force MP600 SSD is no longer the most affordable option for a 1TB PCIe 4.0 drive; Patriot has come in strong with the Viper Gaming VP4100, providing up to 5GB/s transfer speeds.

The Intel system is getting a far more concrete improvement this month: A shiny new CPU, with the Intel Core i9-10900K. This is selling fast, but hopefully will be restocked by the time you read this. With 20 threads across 10 cores clocked up to 5.3GHz, this should show a solid performance boost when combined with the new Asus ROG Strix Z490-E Gaming motherboard. Fortunately, the LGA-1200 socket is compatible with LGA115X coolers meaning we have plenty of choice for coolers. That said we’ve gone for Fractal Design’s Celsius+ S28 Dynamic X2 AIO cooler, which sports an omnicompatible CPU bracket.

“With 20 threads across 10 cores clocked up to 5.3GHz, this should show a solid performance boost.”