F E A T U R E // T H E I N T E L 9 T H G E N E R A T I O N C O R E E X P E R I E N C E
the many PCIe lanes on the PCH.
The storage drives which fit these
sockets are also faster than before,
courtesy of many improvements
including, but not limited to the wider
adoption of the NVMe HCI, faster
controllers and more. A t ted
e lie DRAM frequencies have
increased (See CORSAIR SPECIAL
EDITON CONTRAST SE Review),
motherboard support for such DRAM
has done the same and perhaps CPU
IMCs have undergone some sort of
change for the better (May not be true,
but no way of knowing for certain from
here). So once again, it’s become more
common place to see 3600MT/s and
higher DRAM frequencies in mid to
high-end gaming machines.
ide
ell t t most if not all
the USB ports on today’s high end
desktop boards are of the
Superspeed/Superspeed+ variety, and
so too are the en drives in use today
(Once again I’m talking about this PC
DIY enthusiast crowd perhaps a
person such as yourself). Our
smartphones are also making use of
high speed interfaces via
de lt
e eed
e ti ity
14 The OverClocker Issue 45 | 2018
So the general computing experience
is getting faster/better and I do believe
a lot of that has to do with the
improvements in the general Intel
platform and ecosystem.
Admittedly, the last three or two,
Core generation CPUs have not had
the opportunity to contribute to an
overall improved gaming experience in
any perceivable manner. It could very
well be part of the unreliable nature of
subjective comparisons, but for the
most part the benchmark numbers
confirm this. ite lite lly t t e
d t e
e e t le t
im
e my e ei ed mi
e e ie e e t e
e i
those CPUs were and remain
quite potent in delivering a premium
or unrestricted gaming experience.
Despite the extraordinary way in
which graphics processors have
advanced, the requirements for what
we perceive as a premium gaming
experience has matched that
increased in power as well.
4K 60FPS has become the target, a
healthy number of pixel data to push
around and despite the fact that we
literally have graphics cards capable of
this today – the host CPU is still
without any means by which more of
its capabilities can contribute to the
computational requirements for such