Help, I’ve Been Assimilated!

A lot has happened in the last five years

LIKE MOORE’S LAW, all good things must come to an end. I came to Maximum PC nearly five years ago, when most desktops were still limited to four-core/eightthread processors, and the top enthusiast chip was the eight-core/16-thread Core i7-5960X. I arrived just in time for the GTX 980 Ti launch—my first GPU review for the magazine. It’s been a wild ride, testing the latest and greatest hardware, and it’s amazing to see how far we’ve come.

2015 was the year we got Intel’s late-tothe-party Broadwell desktop CPUs, which became effectively obsolete just two months later with the arrival of Skylake. Dream Machine took us to the moon with four Titan X (Maxwell) GPUs, the i7-5960X, 64GB RAM, and a RAID 0 set of Samsung 850 Pro 1TB SSDs. That would still be a good PC, but 2020’s kit not only performs better, but prices have plummeted.

Today, you could buy a Core i9-9900K for half the price of the old 5960X and get about 50 percent higher clock speeds. Alternately, for the same thousand-dollar asking price, Intel’s Core i9-10980XE Cascade Lake-X CPUs are available with 18 cores, or you’ll soon be able to go nuts with the Threadripper 3990X, packing a whopping 64 cores. For the GPU, the old Titan X is about as fast as today’s GTX 1660 Super, and SLI is basically dead. Oh, how the mighty have fallen. The SSDs are still plenty fast, but instead of $640 for a 1TB SATA SSD, today you can get a much faster 1TB M.2 drive for about $150. 64GB of RAM is still more than you’ll find inside most PCs, at least….

I’m not totally gone from MaximumPC— you’ll still see me in “Tech Talk.” I’ll be joining our sister website Tom’s Hardware, covering—yep—GPUs and graphics. 2020 should be an exciting year for that market.