CPU
INTEL CORE I9-14900K
This pivotal piece of the puzzle packs some potent performance buried deep within its refreshed Raptor Lake architecture. There are eight performance cores with hyper-threading, and 16 efficiency cores without. A 3.2 GHz base has a 6 GHz boost clock, and 68MB of L2 and L3 cache across the board.
Couple that with an overly impressive memory controller and an incredibly aggressive price, and you’re left with a versatile processor that is more than capable of handling any game or heavily threaded workload task without breaking a sweat.
$598, www.intel.com
Motherboard
ASUS ROG MAXIMUS Z790 DARK HERO
With a great processor comes great responsibility—and