THE END FOR 10TH GEN?
EVEN WITH INTEL’S LATEST launch right around the corner, we can’t write off the Core i5-10600K. Although Rocket Lake is still based on the 14nm manufacturing process, availability is going to be rough early on. It’s inevitable. The last year has seen an influx of people looking to get into the world of bespoke high-end computing, and with everything else going on—the crypto-boom, new consoles, new smartphones, new cars, and everything in between—newer products are going to be scarce. And here’s the kicker: Right now, from a performance perspective, AMD has the advantage in the CPU market. If you want the best performance, you have to go AMD. Core counts, IPC, clock speeds, PCIe generations, even mobo designs—all of it is better on AMD and its 5000 series chips.
That said, there’s very little stock out there for those parts. So, you might be the king of processors, but if you can’t supply the parts, it’s all for nothing. Intel on the other hand— perhaps because 14nm is easier to massproduce, perhaps because it has a lot of stock due to everyone flooding to Ryzen—has 10thgen parts available. And with Rocket Lake about to launch, including PCIe 4.0 support as well, the likelihood is after a week or so, stock’s not going to be there either. Certainly not by the time you read this.
The thing is, though, as consumers, we’re not necessarily in too tough a position on this one. At least, not on the processor front. Because we’re still stuck in the middle of this processor war, we’ve seen significant leaps made by both camps in terms of real-world performance over the last four generations. And the Core i5-10600K in this build is still incredibly good. It has six cores, 12 threads, and seriously impressive singlecore performance that will last you a good four to five years without issue. You’re not going to see any throttling. It’s the same on the GPU front. If you can get a card, even running it on PCIe 3.0 instead of 4.0 sees almost no difference in frame rate. We’re not at a point graphically where any of these components are going to be a bottleneck. We’re rendering games on Ultra at 4K, at near enough a consistent 80fps, and that’s quite close to twice the resolution that our best VR headset can muster (4.9 million pixels in the Cosmos Elite versus 8.3 million pixels at 4K).
It is frustrating that these parts don’t exist, but as you can see, if you can source a GPU, even with last-gen components (whether Intel or AMD), you can still put together an incredible machine that hammers frame rates all day long (we’ll let the benchmark table do the talking here). OK, it might not have the fastest storage transfer times, or be the quickest at rendering 4K content in After Effects, but for the vast majority of folk, it packs more than enough punch to keep you sated for the next four or five years.