SUPER HERO FATIGUE
THIS ISSUE, we wrap up the RTX 40-series Super voyage we’ve been on for the last few months, as we’ve now built machines featuring the enhanced versions of the RTX 4070, 4070 Ti, and now 4080 cards. Each card has something interesting, whether it’s a price cut or a performance boost, but the 4080 Super is the least easy to pigeonhole in terms of appeal. On paper, it should be an easy recommendation— the Super has all the power of the standard 4080, but with a $200 price cut, making it the $999 card it should have been from the start. In reality, it’s difficult to find it in stock, and those who have it are charging $1,300. Meanwhile, the original 4080 is equally hard to find.
It’s a shame, because as you can read in Zak’s review on page 74, and his build on page 16, a $999 4080 Super would make sense for the dedicated gamer who isn’t quite ready to spend $1,599 on an RTX 4090. Given the GPU price situation, Zak has decided to go all out on his other components in this issue’s build—or “balls to the wall”, as he calls it in his feature. We’re talking dual PCIe 5.0 SSDs, overclockable DDR5 RAM and premium RGB fans, as well as the powerful Intel Core i9-14900K. It’s a system that both looks and acts the part, and pushes that 4080 Super as far as it can go. You can find Zak’s verdict in our cover build feature, and what’s next from Nvidia now they’ve unveiled their new Blackwell architecture. Given the success the company is having in the AI market, I just hope they continue to make consumer graphics cards, to be quite honest.
Speaking of AI, we have a great feature on page 42 looking at how best to take advantage of Microsoft’s Copilot features across Windows and Office, whether you’re a free, 365, or professional user. Personally, I’d been putting off going near the Copilot button, which has been making itself more prominent in Windows, just because it felt like a ‘beta’ product at first. As we find out in the feature, it still has its quirks, but there are some seriously impressive things that you can do with it, particularly in Word and Teams.
We have so much other great stuff this issue, including how to play retro games on your PC, and whether you should still be liquid-cooling your computer in 2024. There are a ton of great tutorials as well, including how to remove the bloatware preinstalled on your PC, how to optimize Windows for gaming, and even how to get into gamemaking using Nvidia RTX Remix.
I don’t usually highlight our Blueprints section, but it definitely deserves looking over for anyone in the market for a new PC. That’s because Zak has updated the builds with some pretty interesting changes, including two Intel Arc-based graphics cards, plus Intel 14th gen and AMD Ryzen 7000 series CPUs across the board.
Next month, we aim to bring things down considerably on our build budget to answer the question: do you still need a dedicated GPU in 2024? With AMD’s 8700G promising 1080p gaming in Valorant and RocketLeague, should you ditch the discrete graphics card? Or are you better off going with a cheaper CPU, and pairing it with a low-end GPU? I can’t wait to see this answered by Zak, so look out for that next month.
Enjoy the issue!