The Verge doesn’t review processors in the traditional sense, so we don’t own dedicated hardware testing rigs or multiple CPUs and systems to offer all of the benchmarks and comparisons you’d typically find in CPU reviews. We’re now at the stage where just using M.2 for your storage needs is viable, even if it’s still not very affordable. I’ve been testing MSI’s MAG Z690 Carbon Wi-Fi, which has five M.2 slots in total, with four at PCIe 4.0 speeds and one at PCIe 3.0. Still, you’re going to find a lot of Z690 motherboards with multiple M.2 slots.

Storage: Western Digital SN850 1TB / Samsung 980 Pro 1TB.

GPU: Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti Founders Edition.

I’ve spent the past week with the Core i9-12900K running on both Windows 10 and Windows 11, and there’s barely a difference between the two for gaming. Intel promises better performance with Windows 11, but what does that actually mean in reality? Not much. Microsoft has optimized its new OS for Intel’s Thread Director, supposedly allowing it to better manage tasks across these new CPU cores. This new generation of Alder Lake chips also relies heavily on Windows 11. Intel is promising the usual “world’s best gaming processor” and a 19 percent performance improvement over its widely panned 11th Gen chips. This allows Windows to offload background tasks and keep the performance cores for the more demanding workloads. It’s a new era of x86 processors that are designed similar to Apple’s ARM silicon in offering both performance and efficiency cores. Intel’s 12th Gen arrives today and with it the flagship Core i9-12900K. Some reviewers even labeled it “pathetic” and a “waste of sand.” Ouch. While it bumped some game performance, overall, it wasn’t enough to close the gap with AMD’s Ryzen 9 5950X in both performance and power consumption. AMD’s Ryzen Zen 3 CPUs took the performance crown from Intel in gaming a year ago, and Intel’s response with its 11th Gen Core i9-11900K earlier this year was lackluster, to say the least. Intel’s had a hard time competing with AMD lately.

Need for speed