Storage is handled by two Kingston KC3000 PCIe Gen 4 NVME SSDs at 1TB capacity each, as well as two Crucial MX500 2.5” SSDs, also in 1TB capacities, for extra storage for my games. I also have 32GB of GSkill Ripjaws S5 RAM running at 6000 Mhz, and an Intel Arc A770 Limited Edition graphics card, with 16GB of VRAM. The CPU I chose was an Intel Core i7 13700 running Intel’s hybrid CPU architecture, involving performance and efficiency cores, with an Asus ROG Strix B670i Gaming WiFi motherboard. The build process itself was fairly straightforward, as was choosing the hardware that went in it. After weeks of saving and researching parts, I was ready to build a new system utilizing this new architecture. As a heavy multitasker, this hybrid CPU architecture seemed to be the way to go for my newest build. Tasks are assigned to the cores via a thread director. The new Intel CPUs run performance cores, which are akin to more traditional CPU cores, and efficiency cores, which are designed to run smaller background tasks separate from the performance cores, and can be called upon to run alongside the performance cores to allow for greater multi-core capabilities. The reason I went with a hybrid CPU architecture for my newest build was because of the potential performance uplift at a lower cost per core compared to other newer CPUs. Unfortunately, getting some parts of the PC set up were a bit of a hassle, but overall I’m very happy with how it turned out.

I’m super excited to be giving this new hybrid CPU architecture a try – especially coming from my previous desktop PC, which was running an Intel Core i7 9700k, which is about 5 years old at this point, I’m curious at how big the performance improvements are going to be, and I’m hoping that the capabilities with the performance and efficiency cores will be high. Well after about an afternoon’s worth of work, my new PC is up and running.

Intel i7 9700k drivers