We Are Witnessing The Renaissance Of The High Performance PC

The overall PC market has taken a drubbing in recent years, thanks in no small part to ultra-mobile devices that put email and the web in our pockets, longer upgrade cycles, and a couple of missteps by Microsoft, among a number of other things.

Amongst the turmoil, however, there have been some glimmers of hope – the 2-in-1 convertible PC market has shown steady growth and gaming systems are increasing in popularity as well. At this particular moment though, due to some strong product releases and highly-anticipated upcoming launches, there is more excitement around high-performance desktop PCs than I’ve seen in close to a decade.

Although there are a myriad of players that manufacture enthusiast-class PC components and accessories, the big three – namely, Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA – steer much of the industry. And all three companies either have new products that just arrived or are on the immediate horizon that are significant leaps forward versus the previous generation. And these products have people buzzing.

Let’s start with NVIDIA. One needs only to look at NVIDIA’s stock price as of late to see that the company is firing on all cylinders. In the enthusiast PC space, NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 1080 Ti currently reigns supreme, but every other card in the GeForce GTX line-up as you work your way down the stack offers strong performance as well. And cards like the GeForce GTX 1060 and GTX 1070 represent excellent values in their particular segments. Those cards, however, are based on NVIDIA’s Pascal microarchitecture, which is over a year old at this point.

At its GPU Technology Conference, NVIDIA unveiled its first GPU featuring the next-generation Volta architecture, the Tesla V100, that is literally the biggest chip the company’s foundry partner TSMC could make. Now, the V100 GPU targets the HPC and enterprise space, and is geared for bleeding edge fields like AI and deep learning, so that particular chip is not likely to ever appear on a consumer graphics card. But, it does foreshadow NVIDIA’s thoughts on upcoming Volta-based cards, which will probably push the envelope as well.

After years of dominating AMD in the desktop processor market, Intel seemed to be going through the motions with incremental product updates. Due to some newfound pressure from AMD’s recently-released Ryzen processors, however, Intel has gotten much more aggressive. Intel’s just launched Core X series of processors will be capped off by a beastly 18-core chip – the Core i9-7980XE that packs 18 Skylake-X cores. Clocks and other particulars for that chip haven’t been released, but it has 8 more cores than Intel’s previous-gen flagship desktop CPU, the 10-core Core i7-6950X. And The Core i9-7980XE will likely be clocked higher too. Even if we ignore the Core i9-7980XE for a moment, the 10-core Core i9-7900X – which starts shipping on Monday – is a big step forward in terms of performance versus the 6950X as well, but it arrives at half the price of its predecessor. It’s still pricey at $999, but in comparison to the Core i7-6950X’s $1,899 introduction, the Core i9-7900X is a steal -- relatively speaking.

Intel also launched Kaby Lake X-based quad-core Core i7 processors that offer two key benefits for users that lack the budget for a top-of-the-line Core i9. Except for a new package to accommodate the latest socket and platform, the Core i7-7740X is mostly unchanged versus the Core i7-7700K. The beefier power delivery on Intel’s new platform, coupled with the maturity of Intel’s 14nm manufacturing process, however, allow the $339 Core i7-7740X to easily overclock to some impressive speeds. The chip we took a look at for HotHardware’s launch coverage hit over 5.2GHz with a mainstream AIO liquid cooler from Corsair.  And because these new chips work in the same sockets / motherboards as Core i9 processors, users that adopt the platform with a Core i7 could eventually upgrade to a Core i9 by just swapping a chip. With previous generations, Intel’s mainstream and high-performance desktop platforms used different sockets.

Which brings us to AMD. The scrappy underdog has lit a fire under Intel with Ryzen. The Ryzen 7 series of processors offers high core counts (8 cores to be exact) and competitive performance, at very aggressive price points. The Ryzen 7 1800X, for example, which is available for roughly $600 offers performance that’s on-par with Intel’s previous-gen $1000 chip. Of course, the dynamics will change as the rest of Intel’s Core X line-up arrives, but AMD’s aggressiveness and strong product offerings are responsible for this newfound competition.

AMD’s Ryzen 5 processors are also quite strong in their particular product segment. The 6-core Ryzen 5 1600X in particular, which can be found for only $229, offers multi-threaded performance that was unheard of at this price point only a few short months ago.

Over and above Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 5, AMD’s upcoming 16-core ThreadRipper processors are looming. We have yet to see what ThreadRipper can do in independent tests, but rest assured it’s going to be a multi-threading monster and is likely responsible for Intel re-jigging its high-end processors line-up to include an 18-core chip. AMD’s next-generation Vega GPU architecture is set to debut on the desktop as well, which could shake up the graphics card market in a big way. We’ll know more about Vega soon enough.

A plethora of other products are bringing excitement back to the high-performance PC as well, like Intel’s Optane technology, feature-packed motherboards, speedy NVMe solid state drives, and beautiful enclosures featuring customizable lighting and tempered glass, to name just a few.

All things considered, this is a great time to be a PC enthusiast and many people that were largely indifferent in recent years have taken notice.