A GREAT ALL INTEL STARTING POINT?

TO RECAP QUICKLY, this build had two mission objectives: to avoid breaking the $1000 mark and feature a current-gen Intel CPU & GPU combo. Considering that we almost always opt for an Nvidia RTX or an AMD Radeon RX card, it should be interesting to see how it performed and whether you should opt for a newer Intel card over an older card from Nvidia or AMD at the same price.

In short, both objectives were met. We even had $58 spare, so if we were to do this again, we could have added this to the motherboard budget to get an ATX board and a heatsink for the SSD. Regardless, the build went successfully, with only a few minor issues. For example, the lack of fan headers had us routing around for a spare daisy chain adapter. The case also had individual pin connectors for the power, which aren’t always the most fun to install. These were located behind the GPU, which we initially installed first and then released afterward.

It’s not the most eye-catching of machines, but that’s the point in a way. This build was designed to have scope for component upgrades in future, while delivering a great value rig in the here and now. Sure, we’d have loved a more powerful motherboard with DDR5 support. But we were happy with the components, and our results from the benchmarking prove that 1080p gaming is certainly possible when using the Intel Core i5-13400F alongside the Intel ARC A750 GPU. Overall then, our system was running smoothly! Let’s take a deeper look into our results.

BENCHMARKS

When pitted against a similar machine consisting of the same motherboard, the previous Intel i5-12400 CPU and a Zotac RTX 3050 with 8GB of GDDR6, this machine with the i5-13400F and the Intel Arc A750 very much impressed. Straight away, the Cinebench R23 scores show the advances over just one generation of upgrades for the processor. On the multi-core, we had an improvement of eight percent and on the single-core score we saw an improvement of two percent. Where our results took a hit was down to our PCIe 3.0 SSD, the Samsung 970 EVO plus. Although a very dependable drive, compared to the PCIe 4.0 Adata XPG GAMMIX S70 found in the other build, it was 50 percent slower. Saying that, the GAMMIX is a lightning-fast SSD.

Thankfully, our machine shone in the gaming department, where our Intel ARC A750 8GB took on the Zotac GeForce RTX 3050 Twin Edge 8GB. Similarly priced and both with 8GB of GDDR6 memory, there were improvements of up to 88 percent over the zero-point machine. Also, the 3DMark Fire Strike beat the previous machine by 73 percent. For the most part, this budget Arc A750 GPU has proved a good purchase for this price. Moving forward, a motherboard upgrade is due to improve compatibility and bring in DDR5 support. The same can be said for our SSD— although it’s not a bad drive, it’d make a better secondary SSD and we could bring in a PCIe 4.0 SSD as our primary storage solution.

Our 1080p zero-point consists of an Intel Core i5-12400, an Zotac GeForce RTX 3050 Twin Edge 8GB, an ASRock B660M-ITX/ac, 16GB of Corsair Vengeance RGB RS DDR4-3200, and a 1TB ADATA XPG GAMMIX S70. All games tested at 1080p ‘Ultra’ graphics presets with DLSS/FSR and V-sync turned off. XMP/AMP for RAM speed turned on in all tests. No manual CPU overclocking.

Our single PCIe cable for the 1 ARC A750 isn’t very pretty. With a neater custom cable here, it would look much better. Moving forward, it would be a 2 good idea to add another Corsair 120mm fan to the mix to increase airflow and complete the front end of this case. The main thing to point out here 3 is the sheer amount of space. Upgrades further down the line, such as a larger Z790 ATX motherboard, could fill this space up. As we mentioned, our SSD had 4 no heatsink at the time of building. We managed to add one after, though we’d rather play it safe and use one from the get-go.