Intel Core i9-12900K

CPU

If you want to go all out, this 16-core CPU is one of the best around. Yeah, it's pricey and power-hungry but so is a Nascar-and like the latter, this is one lightning-fast piece of machinery. This Intel offering is more efficient than a roaring V8, featuring a hybrid architecture consisting of eight performance cores for foreground tasks and eight efficient cores for background tasks. This keeps it running at optimum speeds focusing on set cores to tackle different types of tasks at once.

This 12th generation Alder Lake chip is almost certainly overkill for our build right now, but technology progresses rapidly these days and we are sure it won't be long until this chip gets knocked off its pedestal.

And yet it still has plenty of shelf life left. It has a fast single-thread performance with a max turbo frequency of 5.2GHz. The bottom line is that even without overclocking, it is an awesome chip for the build.