Editors’ Picks: Digital Discoveries
Bo Moore, hardware lead, and Jarred Walton, senior editor, reveal the tech that gets them most excited
INTO THE BREACH
I can’t stop playing Into the Breach. This turn-based strategy from the makers of FTL launched in February for PC, but I didn’t pick it up until it came to Switch in late August. (I know this is Maximum PC, but it is on PC, so bear with me.) Either way, now I can’t put it down.
The game distills turn-based strategy to a simple formula: You control three mechs on a eight-by-eight grid, defending a handful of structures from an overwhelming alien assault. You’re typically outnumbered and outgunned, but the scales tip back in your favor for one simple reason: You can see every action the enemies will take on the next turn, and exactly how it’ll play out. Using that knowledge, you must plan your actions carefully—I often spend 5 or 10 minutes just staring at the map, calculating every possible outcome.
Sometimes the best outcome means throwing your mech in front of enemy fire, or sacrificing a house so that an apartment building might not crumble. But finding that perfect solution—the one that keeps all your mechs healthy, every building standing, and every alien blasted into dust—is one of the greatest satisfactions I’ve experienced lately.
INTEL CORE I7-9700K
For many tasks, I love using a processor that provides more cores and threads. But for gaming, especially if overclocking to 5GHz or beyond, Hyper-Threading and SMT aren’t always beneficial. Intel’s 9th Gen Core i7-9700K makes the interesting move of disabling Hyper-Threading but adding two cores, resulting in an eight-core/eight-thread processor. It’s a net win for performance, especially once you factor in clock speeds.
The price is about the same as the previous-gen i7-8700K, and it even works in the same mobos. The Core i9-9900K is faster in heavily-threaded workloads, but for gamers, I think the i7-9700K is the better buy. One thread per core means more L2 and L1 cache for that thread, and I still haven’t seen any games that consistently use more than eight threads.
I’m also stoked about Intel’s return to a solder TIM, which boosts clocks by around 400MHz compared to 8th Gen CPUs. If you want to build the fastest dedicated gaming PC possible, the i7-9700K wins every gaming benchmark I’ve run, and it beats the i7-8700K in every test. Overclocking sweetens the deal; it looks like 5.3–5.4GHz with a good liquid cooler will be typical. $374, www.intel.com