 In my hands right now are the best gaming CPUs that money can buy. Representing Intel, we've got the brand new 8-core Core i9-11900K, and representing AMD, we've got the... Well, it's not brand new, but based on how hard these things are to get, it is a hot commodity. 16-core Ryzen 9 5950X. These are, on paper, the most powerful chips from either manufacturer. And for our head-to-head battle today, we're gonna build a system around each of these with zero compromises. We are talking RTX 3090s, super fast and low latency memory, ball and motherboards, and all, in an effort to answer the age-old question of who really is the fastest for gaming? Speaking of fast, my transitions to our sponsors. Fio specializes in high-fidelity portable audio gear, including amps, DACs, and earphones. Their FH3 triple-driver earphones provide high-resolution audio for your digital life. Check them out at the link below. As speedy as I might be, and as much as I love building computers, I'm not gonna build both of these, so I've brought in my lovely assistant, the one and only Jack Kuh. But the question remains, who will be building AMD, and who will be building Intel, and also, how did you manage to get these screwed up? Everyone knows Intel's the dark side. I see, okay. Winner takes AMD. Oh, sure, okay. Best two out of three, right? Of course. Rock, paper, scissors. Rock, paper, scissors. Rock, paper, scissors. Rock, paper, scissors. Oh, I got you on that one. Yeah, that's only one. You're not done yet. Rock, paper, scissors. Rock, paper, scissors. Damn it! Man, you suck at rock, paper, scissors. Oh, you gotta swap the cases then, too. Oh, right, okay. There you go. Traditionally, the motherboard's role is just to provide I.O. and features, so things like how many slots you can plug into, or what kind of Wi-Fi or high-speed networking is built into your computer. But in recent years, CPUs have gotten to the point where they draw so much power, and in some cases, so much more power than they are supposed to, that the motherboard can inadvertently play a role in how they perform, because if the power delivery is A, not beefy enough, or B, not cooled well enough, it can actually cause your CPU to throttle. So we have gone basically top of the line on both sides with the Maximus XIII Hero for our Intel system, and the Meg X570 Godlike for our AMD system. Now, the Intel fans out there are probably wondering, why are you so into this whole line-up? You're going up against AMD's best, a 16-core Ryzen processor. I mean, why are you handicapping yourself with an 11th gen, which maxes out at just eight cores, when Intel's own previous 10th gen processor had 10 cores? And the answer is, I'm sorry, that's what they made. This is what we got. Hey, at least it's got PCI Express Gen 4. Finally. You were not kidding about the dough compromises here. This is 3,600 megahertz memory from G.Skill, but not just that, it runs at a cast latency of 14. That is extremely low latency. We're going to take this four-stick kit, we're going to grab two of them and put them in each system. I'm hoping that both of them are going to manage to run this at full speed, but I guess if they can't, that's kind of on them, isn't it? And these are super baller motherboards, so it's not like that's a concern. Moving on to storage, we have gone absolutely zero compromises with a Rocket NVMe 4.0 2TB drive from Sabrent. Now, strictly speaking for gaming, hyper-fast storage isn't necessary today, but in the future, it could be with Microsoft Direct Storage, enabling similar functionality to what we see on the PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X and Series S, with greatly accelerated game loading times compared to traditional approaches. So this is an area where Intel has finally caught up, because Rocket Lake, compared to their 10th gen, does have support for PCI Express Gen 4 storage. But we've got to be careful to use the correct slot that has those Gen 4 lanes coming directly off the CPU to ensure that we don't run into a system bottleneck. When it comes to cooling, I already hear what a lot of you are going to say, Linus, come on, Rocket Lake can spit like 250 plus watts of heat into your cooler. Why are you using an air cooler instead of a water cooler? Well, the answer is that this is not just any air cooler, okay? This is the Noctua NHD 15, and it will perform on par or even better than almost any AIO on the market. And I only say almost because maybe there's one that I've never heard of. This is a flippin' awesome cooler, and it's going to give both Intel and AMD their best chance to shine. Now it's time to have a look at our case. Just like how our cooler can affect performance, so can our case. And there's been, thankfully, a trend towards higher airflow designs that give better cooling not just to the CPU, but also to the graphics card. Because we're going to be using RTX 3090s, it's extremely important for the validity of our test that we are not thermally constrained. So that is why this is absolutely freakin' perfect. Let's pop this off. There we go. Look at that. Straight mesh, front to back to top. For our power supply, we've gone with an 80-plus titanium 1000-watt from Seasonic. It's fully modular, so you can plug in pretty much whatever the flip you want into it. And it's got adequate current delivery for the RTX 3090, so we're not going to have our system just shut off when we're trying to play some Vidya games up in here. Remember recommending people like, oh, 500-watt, 600-watt power supplies? Anything more than that is a waste. Well, it used to be true. The people that bought the big Donger power supplies back in the day are, are you like reeling it in now? Yeah, they're laughing, especially because you can't get one today. Oh, whoa. Wow, it got kicked in. Well, that's going to dock you some FPS. But they use such nice foam. I like how nice this foam is. Figured out how to get my power supply in. Just got to take off these two thumb screws, slide out the hard drive mount, because like, come on, hard drives, really? I'm just grabbing a hammer. Nobody pay attention to me. Now you're laying the hammer down. Get it? I grabbed the wrong hammer. Now he's laying the hammer down again. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In terms of modular cables, all I need is my 24-pin for the motherboard, a SATA for the built-in fan controller up there. Actually, I can just plug that in right now. I need three 6 Plus 2 PCI Express connectors. One, two, three. And then finally, two 4 Plus 4 pins for the CPU. All right, it's time for the big Chungus update now. I'm putting in the RTX 3090 Black Edition. It's not actually called Black Edition. The other one's called White Edition, but it's Asus' ROG Strix RTX 39, 24 gigs of memory, the fastest GPU on the market. And there are so many peels on this thing. It is going to take me 10 minutes to install it in the flippin' computer. No, I'm not leaving it, Andy. Oh my God, there's like nine peels on this thing. Now I just got to put my not one, not two, but three 8-pin PCI Express power connectors in. Meanwhile, on the AMD build, crap, that's not even close. Yeah. I mean, realistically, you know, there's not much of a problem with plugging into an 8X slot, which all three of these are. But we're going for apples to apples comparison here, and this ain't going to be it. We could put it on a riser. No. No. It's not the same. No, we're not doing that. All right, new motherboard it is. See you later. So we did some digging, and we actually found a Crosshair 8 Hero, which is like actually even better, because it's on the same tier as that motherboard. It's from the same manufacturer, so a little bit less variables there. And it is equally as bad ass, so this should be perfect for our test. That is one sexy. Wait, we didn't even peel the stickers off of here. Oh no. How many peels did Linus end up finding there was? A million. A million. That's too bad. Now I can put it in. Oh. Wow, that is tight. It's so pretty, though. Oh crap. Man, these are struggling. These are some heavy numbers, Jake. Come on, Team Blue. No, I'm doing good, man. I like it over here. Rocket League to the moon. Hold on. Hold on. I just got to elevate my game. Get it? Wait, you're changing the parameters. Hold on. Let me lift mine too at the same time. OK, all right, all right. Three, two, one. Elevate. Elevate the game. Oh, we don't want to unplug anything. What are we doing right now? Now, in terms of the performance parameters that we're running on these machines, we have kind of overclocked them, but we've done so in both cases. So on our Intel CPU, we have multi-core enhancement enabled, which basically means that it's allowed to turbo as high as it wants for as long as it frickin' wants. As for our AMD system. PBO is on as well. So it's basically the same deal. You're removing the stock AMD or Intel limitations and letting the motherboard do as much as it can. So what's your core temps like? It looks like for me, 70-ish. I didn't make it that high. But what we know for sure is that neither of them thermal throttled in any way. I've got nose across the board for any kind of throttling. So hey, NHD 15. Love it. What about power usage? I capped out around, well, remember, this is according to what they report. But I capped out at around 90 watts in game. So that's like 90 to 100 for me. OK. Video mode, we're at 4K, 143 Hertz. V-sync is off. All these settings look the same. Perfect. Benchmark mode, I like to do camera mode, cockpit. OK. And then turn the FPS scanner on, probably, just so we can see. And then go. Let's see if I load faster again. Maybe. Not that it's a d*** measuring contest. Oh, dang it. Good thing I said it wasn't a d*** measuring contest. Can I just take a moment again, though, to appreciate the quality of the spectators in this game? And the god rays and stuff, it looks very good. It looks so good. I haven't played F1 2020. I usually only play Assetto Corsa, because you can put basically any cars you want into the game. And a lot of other games, the modding support's not great. But yeah, this looks really good. It looks really good. That's pretty close again. Yeah, but I lost. Yeah. Thanks for being charitable about it. Pretty close, but not quite. Oh, jeez. Should we look at temps? Oh, yeah, for sure. I peaked at 62. 60-ish or 70-ish for me. Power usage was around 60 to 80 watts. Yeah, 100. So that's higher. But the moral of the story is, in gaming, your Intel CPU probably still not that much of a furnace. It's just if you do anything else. Then, yeah, not only is it hotter, but it will also not perform nearly as well, because we've got literally half as many quarters. Yeah, but with that said, remember, guys, this is not an apples-to-apples comparison in terms of pricing either, because Intel, for the first time in many years, is in a position where they launch new CPUs and then immediately slash the pricing the week after the reviews come out. Whereas with AMD, the 5950X, unless you manage to preorder one three months ago, you can't even buy one at the $750 US dollar MSRP. Yeah. Oh, shoot. Yeah, you're winning this. I'm going based off of our review numbers that this is gonna sh-t all over that. Remember, we've got Resizable Bar enabled now, though. Oh, interesting. Which is new on Nvidia. And actually, Anthony found that in CSGO, Resizable Bar can hurt performance. So it's gonna come down to whether AMD or Intel's implementation hurts less. Oh, yeah, you're touching like 900 over there, and I'm going 7878. At 4K? Woo! Okay. You ready? CSV's up. How'd we do? I think you won. My 99th percentile is 110,314. 123. Woo! That's not as big of a difference as I was thinking. No, but the thing is, there's multiple ways to do the math on the price difference and the performance difference. If you look at the CPUs, you go, oh, well, AMD costs twice as much and is only 10% faster. Bad deal. Yeah. But if you look at the difference in cost of the entire system, is it worth spending the extra? Well, ladies and gentlemen, right now, this is like a $3,000 graphics card. So should you spend an extra $300 to $400 to get a 10% performance uplift? I would think so. So there's different ways of kind of looking at that. And it's important to keep that in mind. Especially once it's in stock, hopefully, whenever that happens, maybe you go with a 5900X, which the performance in gaming is going to be very similar, or a 5800X, and you're still beating Intel at that? Yeah, it's pretty rough. So what that means is Intel and AMD are playing a fun little game of role reversal. It used to be that AMD was a perfectly reasonable option, but Intel had the best performance in gaming if you were willing to pay the premium. Now, it's pretty much the opposite of that. It's not like you're getting a bad gaming experience going Intel, but if you want the best of the best, AMD's got it on offer. I mean, and if you have the wallet to stomach it. Speaking of what's on offer, this message from our sponsor. This video is brought to you by Ting Mobile. Ting Mobile has new rates that make it easier than ever to see how much you can save by switching. They've got unlimited talk and text for $10 a month, data plans starting at just $15 a month, and unlimited data for $45 a month. And if you liked their previous pay for only what you use plans, guess what? They're still there. They're called Ting Mobile Flex plans now, and they charge just $5 per gig. 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