After seemingly five years playing catch-up to AMD, Intel finally leapfrogged them with their 12th generation processors. While AMD is about to leapfrog them right back with the Zen 5 series later this year, at this moment Intel is providing the best bang-for-your-buck CPU for the gaming market. And they can actually be quite efficient to boot.

While the i7-12700F isn't the most top-of-the-line processor in this generation, it does boast rather high single-core clock speeds of nearly 5GHz while also supporting DDR5 RAM and PCI 5.0. While I doubt I'll be making the Gen 5 leap with this build, it's nice to have the option. It also has new efficiency cores which allow it to significantly lower its TDP when its not running demanding tasks, further cutting down on the energy, heat, and noise generated.

My only complaint is that I can't overclock it, and that the i7-12700k costs an additional $80 to unlock the privilege. That said, I suspect my CPU won't be the thing that bottlenecks me for the next few years, and I'll have likely migrated to a new build by then.

It was a tight fit, but I was able to squeeze this into my tiny Meshlicious case with a couple millimeters to spare. The performance so far is solid and my CPU has generally stayed at 70°C or lower under heavy load. It's fairly quiet too, though the pump hum is somewhat audible less than a meter from where I'm sitting. As soon as there's any other sound in the room or if I'm over 3m away, it's practically inaudible.

I'm overall happy with it, except Lian Li's RGB control softer L-Connect 3 is pretty bad. It's more CPU-hungry than it ought to be, and it repeatedly asks you for permission to launch its software monitoring sub-processes every time your computer launches. I got around this by disabling it's startup privileges and just relying on the hardware lighting option.

No complaints so far. Relatively easy to use and spread, and my temperatures are great. While I wish the smaller 1g tube weren't so disproportionately expensive, I'll likely be able to make use of this big tube over the next several years. Sealed properly, the stuff keeps for a very long time.

I'd heard a lot of good things about ASRock over the past seven years I was using my last rig, andthis black-and-white one matches my white Meshlicious case well. It's got decent I/O, and the two Gen. 4 M.2 slots underneath the aluminum heat sink is a nice perk for my eventual RAID 0 setup. The BIOS isn't too bad, and even lets you connect directly to the Internet to download the latest version.

However, two major things frustrate me about the board:

1. There's a bright green LED behind the aluminum I/O block in the top-left corner which never turns off, even when the computer is sleeping or fully shut down. There is no BIOS setting to disable it. I messaged ASRock to see if there was anything I could do, but all they said was they'd pass along the request to the engineering team.

2. The built-in SSD cleaning tool is awful. I used it once to clean an old M.2 drive from my last build, and it fully corrupted the boot partition of the other M.2 drive in the process. I had to spend several hours researching and trying to decrypt and repair my boot partition that I'd rather not have done. (Word to the wise: Disable BitLocker on all your drives on this motherboard until you are absolutely sure you've got all your partitions and disks set up like you need them. If not, hope you saved those recovery keys.)

Decently made and decently priced. Plenty fast for nearly all my use-cases, and I've still got a bit of room to overclock. As with most RGB products, their Achilles' heel is their RGB software. iCUE is not as god-awful as it used to be, but it's not something I like to keep running in the background sucking CPU cycles even for simple RGB effects.

I just set this one to use hardware lighting that match my AIO and call it a day.

This is a Gen4 M.2 drive and it's pretty damn fast. Benchmarks match the 7,000MB/s read and 5,300 MB/s write speeds it says on the box. And I'm eventually gonna get a second one of these and RAID 0 them together for nearly double the speed. I know there's really not many use cases that benefit from almost 14,000MB/s and 10,600MB/s, but at this point, why not?

Took me some weeks chasing stock notifications, but I eventually locked in an order for one of these at MSRP because **** scalpers.

Upgrading from a 980Ti after seven years, this thing feels like a monster. Easily runs 4K content at 120Hz+ with DLSS, and the ray-tracing looks real nice in many of the games I can finally enable it in. Its gun-metal black doesn't look quite as good as some of the full black/white third-party cards, but for me its sleek and geometric design blows the others out of the water. Besides, it's not like you can really tell from behind a mesh case.

Performance is great and generally exceeds most my use cases at the moment. I expect this will last me quite nicely over the next few years.

Sleek, sexy, small, and silent. I'd never done an ITX build before, but after this I'm not sure I'll do anything larger again. While it's a bit pricier than other larger cases, it's solidly built and offers a surprising amount of customization options even for today's increasingly large GPUs. While it was a tight fit, I eventually got it all in.

I personally think it's got a fantastic look to it. It's relatively subtle sitting on my black desk during the day, but as soon as it get dark, it glows from within, revealing much of its internal components through the mesh window.

That said, I have a few minor complaints:

1. Like I mentioned above, the little foot pads are too short for the HDMI and DisplayPort cables to bend into the downward-facing GPU slots. I purchased some new 20mm ones to fix it, but I would have rather had such feet included or, better, the problem to not exist at all.

2. In addition, the support bar actually blocks the left-most DisplayPort slot just enough that you can't fit a cable into it. Fortunately I only need two DisplayPort cables, but this is a somewhat regrettable oversight by SSUPD.

3. There's only one USB-C port on the top despite the header cable supporting two. It wouldn't be hard to put two of them close together given how narrow they are, and it'd have been nice to get both on top without having to reach around to the back.

A little pricier than I'd like, but you've got to pay the ITX tax one way or another. It's platinum-rated at least so it stays over 90% efficient even at very low loads. In fact, its fan doesn't even spin up until it's above 30% draw, which helps makes the build even quieter while idling. I'd heard the RTX 30 series were power-hungry GPUs, but so it has easily handled the heaviest workloads I've given it so far at 750W.

I wish Corsair sold a white option with white cabling to match, but black still looks quite nice behind the mesh anyway.

Migrated this from my last Windows 10 build (the "last version of Windows forever", remember?). Unfortunately you've still got to deal with this operating system if you want to play most games, but at least Microsoft has put a focus on gaming in this one and they didn't make me pay for it again.

Let's just hope more devs continue to support Linux and other open-source graphics libraries in the future. May Valve succeed in their quest to finally liberate us from Microsoft for good.