The MVP gaming PC review

Our list of questions also had a secret list of the latest PC components from Intel and Gigabyte. We didn’t spare theMVP Santa and nabbed the Intel 12th Generation 12900K Alder Lake processor sitting on Gigabyte’s Z690 Aorus Pro motherboard with 32GB of DDR5 RAM. 

This nameless PC that was put together has all the ingredients for a proper gaming appetite. Heck, it will even make your neighbourhood video editor envious. But all that aside, we removed the Nvidia RTX 2060 and replaced it with our own test bench Nvidia RTX 3080.

The performance gains over the Intel 11th Gen are quite significant. Enough to ditch the previous generation power-hungry i9 for a more powerful and power-hungry i9. Intel has an all-new socket with the Alder Lake which means it needs a new motherboard and all. 

All the games we tested were on 2K and 4K resolution with 144Hz and 165Hz monitors. For competitive shooters like Valorant, the build was easily pumping 450+ frames on the lowest settings. That’s roughly 150 frames more than our Intel 11th Gen build. Yes, we know Valorant won’t break any sweat and the true nature of this build comes when you’re pushing the graphical limits with Halo Infinite, Forza Horizon 5 and God of War (2018). 

Halo Infinite on 4K with all the settings turned up got us around 70 to 80 frames with Ray Tracing enabled. We got 60 to 75 frames on the Intel i9 11th Gen. Forza Horizon 5 gets around 90 frames with the settings turned all the way up. If the thermals are handled well, the game can hit around 100 frames.

Obviously, the sweet spot for enjoying this is on 2K resolution with a fast refresh rate monitor. We got around 110 FPS on 2K on Forza Horizon 5 and a whopping 150 frames on Halo Infinite on 2K with all the settings pushed to their absolute limits. That’s roughly 10 to 15 frames more than our Intel 11th Gen build. 

Much of the 11th Gen issues were with thermals and power consumption. The 12th Gen is also a power guzzler but that allocation of processing power is spread between 8 performance cores and 8 efficiency cores. Rest assured the fans won’t need to kick in when you’re doing mundane tasks. The 12th Gen can manage its power consumption and the subsequent heat that comes based on priority, something that was needed in the 11th Gen. It’s pretty much like your smartphone processors. Pushing out the mundane tasks to efficiency cores and only pulling weight when needed.

Although the beefy Gigabyte Aorus Waterforce X 360 liquid cooler is cut out for the task at hand when the going gets tough. Bear in mind that we tested the PC in a climate-controlled environment (fancy for AC was on). As is with any high-performance desktops, the performance starts to throttle once the temps start to reach around 90 degrees, but it’s best you blast the AC around this rig before it starts to show dips in performance. The Aorus Waterforce X 360 comes with a fancy LED display as well. It lets you display temperature metrics in fancy Aorus visuals or you can put your own custom GIFs and photos. It’s really fun to play around but the Gigabyte RGB Fusion software needs a serious overhaul. It looks dated and not really fun to use.

The same can be said for the cabinet. The Cougar Dark Blader is neither the most attractive nor has a purpose in terms of design. It’s as typical as Cougar cabinets get which is to say it’s barely functional and you’ll need to put a lot of effort into just cleaning the front grill. It also doesn’t have a Type-C port on the front which makes the whole package feel a bit dated by modern standards. There is, however, good space inside for cables to run and be tucked behind those orange plates. 

There’s also plenty of space for more internal drives. The PCIe 5.0 connectivity means operations that require heavy data transfers will open up with double the throughput rate over PCIe 4.0. Storage devices will also benefit from this when the supported SSDs become available.

The whole desktop can be overclocked to replace your toaster if you’re brave enough but the 32GB is probably the easiest thing to overclock with Intel’s XMP profiles. You can switch between the three presets from the bios to find a fast and stable profile and shoot the DDR5 RAM into sweet heavens.

The MVP desktop is cut out for professional work. If you’re dabbling Adobe suite like us for magazine and video work, the whole package sings in perfect harmony. InDesign and Photoshop work is not enough to even make this thing sweat. Throw in heavy Premiere Pro and After Effects and the fans might whirl a bit. It outperformed the Intel 11th Gen with fast video render and even faster 4K video buffering speeds in Adobe Premiere Pro by a slight margin. Although the leap in performance is not night and day, it is worth noting.

The MVP pre-built is an absolute gaming machine. Starting at a cool ₹2,71,216 (with the RTX 3060 GPU), the machine is capable of delivering the best performance the Intel 12th Gen i9-12900K has to offer. If you have a more specific build in mind, the folks at theMVP can tune the thing to your liking and budget. 

And when it comes to sheer gaming performance, the Intel 12th Gen i9 CPU is an absolute belter. Topping the previous generation by a good margin. It rightfully claims the best gaming CPU crown. Just make sure to cool the thing correctly.

The Intel Z690 chipset motherboard also brings Wi-Fi 6E, which may be overlooked due to the sheer list of features that the build has but in our use the Wi-Fi connection is as good as LAN for gaming. No, we’re not joking. If you have a Wi-Fi 6E compatible router, the connection is solid and reliable enough to ditch the good ol’ LAN cable for this.